Sixty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Covering the trial Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", a phrase that has since become something of an intellectual cliche. But what did she really mean?
That boring bureaucrats can do evil shit. The problem was that Eichmann wasn't a boring bureaucrat. He was too stupid to get a Civil Service job. He had joined the Nazi Party- because he was an evil cunt- and was put in charge of robbing the Jews because he was an evil cunt who didn't know or care about the Law. What he was good at was gangsterism with a specialization in extortion. True, he was outshone by Heydrich but he was still evil enough to serve as his henchman.
One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime.
What she meant was that she thought Eichmann was 'neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. I suppose she believed the Nazi Party was like the British Labor Party. A smart and hard-working graduate is hired as a researcher. His diligence enables the drafting of important legislation. Thus, he is offered the chance to contest a safe Tory seat. His persistence in door step canvassing and focusing on 'Parish Pump' issues, pays off. He secures the seat for Labor. After serving as a junior Minister, he is promoted to the Cabinet purely because of his 'wonkish' ability to sweat the small stuff. His brilliance as Chancellor leads to his becoming the successor of the gravely ill Prime Minister. Yet, everybody agrees, he has little personality and, quite frankly, is as boring as shit.
The problem with viewing Eichmann or Reinhard as meritocrats of this description is that the Nazi party, from first to last, was a party where the best element was the bar-room brawler. The worst element- and it was the scum which rose to the top- was evil beyond description.
I suppose, what enabled Eichmann to rise was his ability, contra Arendt, 'to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. This is valuable when you are in the extortion business. You need to figure out how much the other guy will pay to get his family out of Germany. Later, Eichmann was able to figure out whom to blackmail or otherwise influence to get him to Argentina.
Indeed, she thought the crime was exceptional, if not unprecedented, and that as a result it demanded a new approach to legal judgment itself.
In which case, the Israelis were right to kidnap him, put him on trial, and execute him. But they wouldn't have done so had Eichmann been living in America or Australia or even Germany (which refused to issue an extradition request). They would have been obliged to observe all due processes of law.
What Arendt says in her postscript is quite startlingly naive- ' "If we look more closely into the matter, we will observe without much difficulty that the judges (at Nuremberg and other such tribunals) in all these trials really passed judgment solely on the basis of the monstrous deeds.
Judges in every sort of court case pass judgments on the basis of deeds. On the other hand, judges in Beauty Competitions pass judgments on the basis of physical appearance unless, obviously, they are given beejays by contestants in which case 'deeds' come into the picture.
In other words, they judged freely,
No. The judged according to the law. The defense- headed by a German lawyer who, unusually, was granted right of audience and was paid by the State of Israel because Eichmann's family claimed to have no funds- were free to bring forward any exculpatory facts. There were none.
as it were, and did not really lean on the standards and legal precedents with which they more or less convincingly sought to justify their decisions"
If that were the case than the German lawyer for the defense would have had grounds for appeal. But, the decision was sound in law and followed legal precedents save in so far as exceptions were made favorable to the defense (e.g. two of the judges questioning Eichmann in German).
There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored,
There were none. That is why the German lawyer didn't raise them. Like two of the three judges, he had a German Doctorate in Law. Arendt had no knowledge whatsoever of German or British or Israeli law.
and then another to moral philosophy more generally. The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime?
Yes. If the guy thought he was sending people to a nice holiday camp, he was innocent.
Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing.
She was incapable of thinking. The fact is, the guy was a fucking Nazi! Hitler had said Jews in Europe would be exterminated and there were plenty of Nazis who wanted to enrich themselves- or avoid going to the Eastern Front- by implementing the Fuhrer's will. Eichmann was one of them. The prosecution proved its case beyond reasonable doubt.
Arendt, however, was not reasonable. She seized upon Lord Chief Justice Hewart's dictum that Justice must be seen to be done to argue that some special sort of spectacle was required in cases of this sort. But Hewart was merely talking about bias or corruption on the part of clerks or other such officers of the court which might give the appearance that Justice had miscarried even if this was not the case. He wasn't saying that some special choreography or stagecraft or species of rhetoric was required in cases involving the most heinous of crimes.
Suppose Arendt were right. Then Judges would need to say 'This criminal is so vile that Fire from Heaven must strike him down!' If Heaven does not immediately oblige, perhaps some suitable legerdemain should be employed so that this appears to verily come to pass.
She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.
In which case neither she nor Heidegger were thinkers. Anyway, at Nuremberg, Sauckel- a low IQ working class guy whose lawyer (later Eichmann's lawyer) argued that Speer bore greater responsibility because he was smart and had created the plans which Sauckel implemented- was executed. Speer was spared and after completing his prison term (that too on Soviet insistence) managed to make himself a celebrity.
Arendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism, one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had "intentions" in any usual sense.
Coz guys who joined the Nazi party of their own free will didn't have the 'intention' of fucking over Jews and Freemasons and Slavs and anybody else they could extort money from.
The point about opportunists like Speer, is that they have always existed. There really is nothing new under the Sun.
To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others.
So gangsters don't have 'intentions'. A homicidal rapist is innocent if he saw his victim as a piece of meat. Only if it was his intention to make the life of his victim better and happier should we convict him of a crime.
So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself.
Eichmann wasn't a brain box but he had cunning enough to avoid detection after the War. The Church helped get him to Argentina where he was able to rise within the Mercedes Benz organization. Was this because of lingering sympathy for the Nazi ideology? Perhaps. What is equally likely is that people like Eichmann and Speer might have incriminating information about what various people had done during the War.
This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.
It wasn't a fact. It was a fantasy in the brain of a cretin. One might as well say 'authentic thinking is sweet and nice and is linked to authentic being. Anything else isn't thinking at all. It may well be an imaginary giraffe sodomizing a porpoise on the planet Neptune. This is why it isn't Trump but Kamala Harris who is the true White Supremacist.'
By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide
it started because, once America came into the War, it was pointless to pretend that the genocide could be postponed till after Germany won. Also, which would you rather do- kill Jews or get killed by the Red Army on the Eastern Front?
– not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel,
or an independent Armenia
but in order to understand a crime against humanity,
like the ones on which America is founded?
one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill.
Butler thinks acknowledging stuff matters. It doesn't at all more particular because nutters like her acknowledge all sorts of shit which never existed.
Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible,
Very true. My shoe is failing to think because it fails to take into account the necessity and value that would make it possible to think about the necessity and value of acknowledging its own failure to think. Fuck you, shoe! Fuck you very much!
so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself.
Just as if you destroy or displace the whole population of cockroaches in your kitchen, all cockroaches are attacked.
As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population.
Why not also object to the US conducting a trial of homicidal American rapist whose victims were American? Is it not the case that if one person is raped and killed, all people are raped and killed? Since India has a much bigger population than America, should it not be an Indian, not an American, Court which tries the rapist?
It is a separate matter that Germany (and Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia) should have made an extradition request to Argentina.
At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law.
That crazy bint didn't know any type of law. The plain fact is, Israel acted illegally and, after a UN Security Council resolution against Israel was passed, it offered an apology to Argentina for violating its sovereignty. This was seen as adequate 'reparation' and closed the matter.
The UN had created an International Law Commission in 1947 and it did draft a couple of statutes to deal with genocide etc. in the early Fifties. But nothing came of it, as the Cold War became more acrimonious. In 2002, the International Criminal Court was established but many countries, e.g. US, reject its jurisdiction.
So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal"
it hasn't.
it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way,
which is how organized crime works
systematically, without being adequately named and opposed.
It was named and opposed.
In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to
attract attention. She succeeded. Good for her. Dollars are very nice and it is nice to have more of them more particularly if you have shit for brains.
point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.
This silly bint doesn't get that Organized Crime works in that manner. But so do some gangster regimes. Saddam employed a 'defiler of Kurdish women' whose extremely boring job it was to rape God fearing Muslim women thus earning Hell fire for himself.
If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was
because she was wholly ignorant of the law. I suppose, the Israelis may have thought twice about abducting Eichmann if the Military had been in power in Argentina. I think Frondizi was seen as a Left-Liberal like Yrigoyen.
also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking.
Heidi's shite had destroyed her own ability to think. Still, she fucked him which must have given her Mummy naches.
Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction.
Thinking doesn't need stupid safeguards. Rights are useless without incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. Still, if you are strong enough, you can yourself supply the remedy. That's what Israel did. That's what genocide's victims are unable to do. There is a collective action problem here whose solution is economic and ideographic. Talking bollocks doesn't help.
What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think.
on the part of people like Arendt and Butler and the cretins they teach.
Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits.
Nope. He wasn't prosecuted for unthinkingly trying to fit his left foot into his right shoe.
We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime,
No. We think it deeply silly.
but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be.
But only in the sense that not sodomizing a porpoise when you are an invisible giraffe can cause the Universe to move to a better School District.
Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.
No. We get that when some charlatan or Scientologist says 'You are not using your brain! You are a robot being controlled by sinister vested interests. For $9.99, you can buy my book- Think yourself Rich!- which teaches you how to unlock your brain's full potential. Did you know that Bill Gates was an illiterate hobo till some kind soul read out my book to him?
Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable".
She was part of that historical world- i.e. she was a stupid, ignorant, charlatan. Grete Harmann wasn't. Don't study non-STEM subjects at Uni. Your brains will turn to shit.
The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations.
No. Systematic destruction of populations- e.g. at Nagasaki and Hiroshima- required really smart peeps to think really really hard. Sadly, the unthinking Ukrainians gave up nukes in return for worthless guarantees. Nobody will make that mistake again.
Although Arendt focuses on Eichmann's failure to think as one way of naming his ultimate crime,
one we commit any time we leave home without our keys or our mobile phone
it is clear that she thinks the Israeli courts did not think well enough,
Judges are smarter than journalists.
and sought to offer a set of corrections to their way of proceeding.
They were hilarious.
Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself. She thought the trial needed to focus on the acts that he committed, acts which included the making of a genocidal policy.
It did. But it also had to establish 'all the elements' of the offence. It was a court of law. The Israelis had retained the British judicial system. Arendt had zero knowledge of it.
Like the legal philosopher Yosal Rogat
whose pamphlet supplied Arendt with much of her material. Rogat said "Israel has explicitly assimilated the Eichmann trial to a compelling tradition which goes back at least to Antigone: that which holds that higher purposes must sometimes be paramount if they conflict with the formal rules of law." Needless to say, Rogat was talking rot. Still, Israel's judiciary did develop a doctrine of 'derech eretz' ('reasonableness'- e.g. changing rules of evidence to promote a fairer outcome) higher even than Torah which appears to limit, or do away, with executive privilege or 'political question'. But there were similar developments in Indian constitutional law.
I suppose what Rogat was talking about was a sort of judicial theater which may capture something of the motivation of the Nuremberg Tribunals from an American perspective. But America, like the Soviet Union, was soon happy enough to recruit ex-Nazi Dr. Strangeloves for their own Military laboratories.
The plain fact is that America had done and was planning to do genocide on a far vaster scale than Hitler or Stalin- indeed it had plans in place to blow up the entire Earth!- and thus the Law had to tread carefully in this arena. Eichmann could be killed because he didn't matter. What about the guys who created the H bomb or those working on its yet more horrific successor? The answer was that they must continue to enjoy qualified immunity. Suppose the Eichmann trial was used as a precedent to go after Nazi Scientists- like Von Braun- who had been inducted into the American military-industrial complex under 'Operation Paperclip. The Attorney General would have authorized a declination of prosecution to protect the ex-Nazi asset.
before her, Arendt did not think that the history of anti-semitism or even the specificity of anti-semitism in Germany could be tried.
But both could be incriminating or exculpatory evidence in a criminal trial. One reason Speer got off lightly was because he pretended he had never been anti-semitic.
She objected to Eichmann's treatment as a scapegoat;
He was a criminal. He was tried. He was executed. Israel apologized for violating Argentine sovereignty but that country didn't want him back. In fact, nobody wanted him.
she criticised some of the ways that Israel used the trial to establish and legitimate its own legal authority and national aspirations.
It had used its Army to establish both. The trial changed nothing.
She thought the trials failed to understand the man and his deeds.
She failed to understand shit. That's how charlatans make money.
The man was either made to stand for all of nazism and for every Nazi,
only in her own mind. It wasn't the case that Israelis said 'now we have killed Eichmann we have no further grievance against his fellow criminals.'
or he was considered the ultimately pathological individual.
He wasn't. Hitler still gets the prize.
It seemed not to matter to the prosecutors that these two interpretations were basically in conflict.
Only in the mind of a stupid charlatan.
She thought that the trial necessitated a critique of the idea of collective guilt,
because she had shit for brains. British law has long had a doctrine of 'joint enterprise'. Leo Amery's son was hanged though he never killed anybody and may actually have had Spanish nationality.
but also a broader reflection on the historically specific challenges of moral responsibility under dictatorship.
She ran away to Jim Crow America. This showed her 'moral responsibility' to get her hands on as many nice nice dollars as she could.
Indeed, that for which she faulted Eichmann was his failure to be critical of positive law,
He lurved Hitler and hated Jews. He never demanded to see a written authorization from the Fuhrer for 'the final solution'. Admittedly, that would be like asking Mother Theresa to sign a document affirming she was Catholic.
that is, a failure to take distance from the requirements that law and policy imposed upon him; in other words, she faults him for his obedience, his lack of critical distance, or his failure to think.
He thought he'd do well if he joined a particular bunch of gangsters. He was proven right but only because he was good at extortion and doing evil shit.
Why not fault Mother Theresa for not being a Lesbian exponent of Wicca?
But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims.
This stupid lady lived in the land of Dr. Strangelove. She must have known that Kennedy was elected on a promise to bridge a mythical 'missile gap' between the US and the Soviets. America's nuclear doctrine was based on 'Mutually Assured Destruction'- i.e. nobody on Earth would survive an all out nuclear War. Fuck genocide. What Arendt's tax dollars were going towards was a plan to exterminate all life if the Soviets started any rough stuff.
In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide.
Whereas unthinking beings- e.g. my left shoe- can easily invent weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view.
Because her view is stupid. It is represents the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. I may say 'no thinking person would fail to turn into an invisible giraffe sodomizing a porpoise on the Serengeti plain'. You may reply 'Terence Tao is a powerful thinker. Yet he refuses to have sexual relations with any type of aquatic mammal.' I reply 'Terence isn't truly a thinker. Indeed, he is a fucking moron. I emailed him my proof of the Reimann hypothesis, based on the fact that it is an invisible giraffe which has been proved to anally rape porpoises, but the guy just ignored me!'
How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we"
the answer has to do with sodomizing porpoises as an invisible giraffe on the Serengeti plains.
such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.
Arendt's tax dollars were being used to kill lots of little brown peeps. So were Butler's tax dollars. But that wasn't the reason 'the very condition of thinking' was destroyed for both of them. The fact is, had they not studied and taught stupid shit, they could have thought well enough.
Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process
No.
or, indeed, something that can be properly described,
Yes.
or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice.
No. Judgements are one type of thinking.
If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we"
e.g. Siamese twins
and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we",
that changes nothing. I may be committed to sustaining the Andromeda galaxy but unless I am actually doing something necessary for that galaxy's survival I'm not in fact sustaining it at all.
how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we"
by reference to collective action problems
and what specific implications does thinking imply
None. This because a tautology like 'implications imply' have zero informational content.
for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?
Norms don't govern politics. Politics is about government and may or may not involve norms or commands- i.e. positive law.
Arendt's book on Eichmann is highly quarrelsome.
She was playing the Holocaust card and wanted to attract attention. She succeeded.
But it is probably worth remarking that she is not only taking issue with the Israeli courts and with the way in which they arrived at the decision to punish Eichmann to death.
She is also saying Eichmann should have thought to himself 'maybe, us Nazis are nasty dudes. Perhaps, I should become an invisible giraffe and make sweet, sweet, anal love to a porpoise on the Serengeti plain.'
She is also critical of Eichmann himself for formulating and obeying a noxious set of laws.
Eichmann didn't formulate any laws. Lots of innocent people 'obey' noxious laws.
One rhetorical feature of her book on Eichmann is that she is, time and again, breaking out into a quarrel with the man himself.
How strange! Why would a German Jew have a bone to pick with a Nazi mass-murderer?
For the most part, she reports on the trial and the man in the third person, but there are moments in which she addresses him directly, not on the trial, but in her text.
Because she was a hysterical charlatan. Also, she had hung out with a bad crowd in Paris and this affected her literary style.
One such moment occurred when Eichmann claimed that in implementing the final solution, he was acting from obedience, and that he had derived this particular moral precept from his reading of Kant.
The German sense of humor can be quite deadly. Sadly, the categorical imperative can endorse genocide. If God hates Jews and Gays and Trade Unionists and guys who listen to Jazz, then- if they are smart- they might want to queue up outside the gas chamber. Better yet, they could just top themselves like Otto Weininger.
We can imagine how doubly scandalous such a moment was for Arendt.
Why scandalous? Did her dildo fall out of her vagina in open court. Did she fart noisily as she bent over to pick it up? Did Eichmann pointedly hold his nose and say 'Oy gevalt! Such a smell! And you talk of gas chambers!'? I suppose so.
It was surely bad enough that he formulated and executed orders for the final solution, but to say, as he did, that his whole life was lived according to Kantian precepts, including his obedience to Nazi authority, was too much.
Sadly, the categorical imperative is 'anything goes'. So is Rawlsian rubbish.
He invoked "duty" in an effort to explain his own version of Kantianism. Arendt writes: "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience."
But Eichmann was an 'active' citizen and thus 'civilly self-sufficient' in Kant's terminology. Any way, the legal question had to do whether he had qualified immunity. He didn't. It could also have been argued that his abduction was illegal and that he must be sent back to Argentina pending an extradition request. The problem here was that Argentina hadn't demanded his return. Arguably, his entry and stay in that country had been ab ovo illegal.
Eichmann contradicts himself as he explains his Kantian commitments. On the one hand, he clarifies: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws."
If God, or Nature, has decided that being a Jew or a homosexual or a Jazz lover is fucking horrible then the final solution was actually a type of euthanasia for which its victims were touchingly grateful.
And yet, he also acknowledges that once he was charged with the task of carrying out the final solution, he ceased to live by Kantian principles.
He was wrong. Kantian principles can justify anything at all.
Arendt relays his self-description: "he no longer 'was master of his own deeds,'
like Seinfeld being unable to remain the 'master of his own domain'
and … he 'was unable to change anything'."
like Hitler getting defeated.
When in the midst of his muddled explanation, Eichmann reformulates the categorical imperative such that one ought to act in such a way that the Führer would approve, or would himself so act, Arendt offers a swift rejoinder, as if she were delivering a direct vocal challenge to him: "Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the sort;
to be fair, Kant didn't intend to write stupid shit. Even I don't- save when I wax poetical. But that's what might make portions of this blog quite funny.
on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment he started to act; by using his 'practical reason' man found the principles that could and should be the principles of law."
This is only the case with duties performed willingly. It does not apply to duties which are neglected or which are only carried out at the point of a bayonet.
Arendt makes this distinction between practical reason and obedience in Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963
Obedience requires you to do things which are repugnant to 'practical reason'. Arendt didn't understand this.
and seven years later she began her influential set of lectures on Kant's political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
By then, her students were all drooling hippies strung out on various drugs.
In a way, we can understand much of Arendt's later work, including her work on willing, judgment and responsibility, as an extended debate with Eichmann on the proper reading of Kant,
This is like reading John Stuart Mill's later, more Feminist, work as an extended debate with Jack the Ripper on the proper reading of Mary Wollstonecraft.
an avid effort to reclaim Kant from its Nazi interpretation
which is like reclaiming John Rawls from his interpretation by Saddam Hussein.
and to mobilise the resources of his text precisely against the conceptions of obedience that uncritically supported a criminal legal code and fascist regime.
Churchill & Roosevelt were silly billies. They mobilized lots of money and manpower against Hitler and Tojo. Why didn't they just mobilize Bentham and Mill?
In many ways, Arendt's approach is itself quite astonishing,
It is mad. Still, what we have to understand is that her book came out after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody knew that lots of smart peeps were, very obediently, building bigger and better nukes so that pressing a button would cause the World to blow up.
since she is, among other things, trying to defend the relation between Jews and German philosophy against those who would find in German culture and thought the seeds of national socialism.
In other words, she wanted to keep getting paid for spouting stupid shite.
In this way, her view recalls that of Hermann Cohen, who argued tragically in the early part of the 20th century that Jews would find greater protections and cultural belonging in Germany than in any Zionist project that would take them to Palestine.
Cohen died in 1918. It should be remembered that Jews in Tzarist Poland found life improved greatly under German occupation. Kristallnacht itself was triggered by a Polish Jew's assassination of a German diplomat in Paris. The crazy fellow was protesting the deportation of Jewish refugees back to Poland. At that time, few thought Germany would become even more murderous towards Jews than some of its Eastern neighbors.
Cohen thought universality belonged to German philosophy, rather than considering internationalist
like what? The fucking Bolsheviks? Plenty of Russian Jews fled Russia for Germany back then.
or global models
none ever existed
that might provide an alternative to both nation-states.
both nation-states and...what?
Arendt lacks Cohen's naivete,
because she didn't die in 1918.
and sustained an important critique of the nation-state.
So important that it was utterly useless.
She reformulates Cohen's project in a new social and political philosophy: truly staying with Kant or, rather, reformulating him for a contemporary social and political philosophy in a true sense would have stopped Eichmann and his cohorts,
also it would have caused the Mafia to disband and alcoholic husbands to stop beating their wives if they failed to hand over enough beer money.
would have produced another kind of trial than the one she saw in Jerusalem, and would have redeemed the German-Jewish philosophical vocation
this was done through converting to Christianity. Also, if possible, get your daughter married to a dude with 'Von' in his name.
– one that she tried to bring with her to New York.
Where German Jews had shown a great vocation for merchant banking.
What had become banal was the attack on thinking,
Arendt lived to teach drug addled imbeciles at the New School.
and this itself, for her, was devastating and consequential.
She was happy enough to get paid. Dollars are really really nice.
Remarkable for us, no doubt, is Arendt's conviction that only philosophy could have saved those millions of lives.
It is not remarkable that a charlatan claims that if only everybody had adopted their own particular nostrum- for the low low price of $9.99- then there would have been no war, or poverty or death or disease. We would all live peacefully as invisible giraffes making tender anal love to porpoises on the Serengeti plain.
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