In 'On Violence' Hannah Arendt wrote-
The technical development of the implements of violence
(i.e. lots of H-bombs blowing up the world)
has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict.
The political goal was to prevent direct conflict as opposed to proxy conflicts. Nuclear powers gained a sufficient threat-point to ensure against invasion of their core territory. This worked well. Indeed, it still works.
Hence, warfare- from time immemorial the final merciless arbiter in international disputes-has lost much of its effectiveness and nearly all its glamour.
No. Proxy wars still mattered as did insurrections in resource rich or strategic parts of the world.
The "apocalyptic" chess game between the superpowers, that is, between those that move on the highest plane of our civilization, is being played according to the rule "if either 'wins' it is the end of both" ;
No. One side could win- this would be the US- for economic reasons. It's just that it would not be able to grab core territory from the other so long as it had an offensive nuclear doctrine.
it is a game that bears no resemblance to whatever war games preceded it.
The Cold War was a continuation of the Second World War which the atom bomb helped end. Thankfully, neither side faced an existential threat if they failed to secure additional territory. Germany had believed that it would starve if it didn't secure land to its East.
Its "rational" goal is deterrence, not victory,
No. Both sides wanted to win by providing a better standard of living to their people and rising more rapidly in Science and Technology.
and the arms race, no longer a preparation for war,
Getting more weapons means you are better prepared for war.
can now be justified only on the grounds that more and more deterrence is the best guarantee of peace.
A few years after this silly woman wrote this, the US and the Soviets began SALT talks.
To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer.
Nonsense! LBJ had mooted the idea in 1967, and strategic arms limitation talks were agreed on by the two superpowers in the summer of 1968. Full-scale negotiations began in November 1969. Arendt was as ignorant as she was stupid.
Since violence-as distinct from power, force, or strength -always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago),
Engels was wrong. You can kick or punch a guy to death.
the revolution of technology, a revolution in toolmaking, was especially marked in warfare.
It was even more marked in industry.
The very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it.
Arendt would get overpowered by her kitchen knife. She would repeatedly stab the postman.
Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted,
Arendt was always very surprised when she found that the 'end' of her sitting on the toilet was piss and shit rather than another stupid and ignorant book.
the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.
Not if those goals are achieved. Thus if the means used to achieve a political end is the passing of a relevant law, that law is not an end in itself. Indeed, further efforts are required to ensure a particular 'means' has the desired effect. True, a law may be passed just for the fun of it. But it will be ignored.
Moreover, while the results of men's actions are beyond the actors' control,
Not if they were sensible.
violence harbors within itself an additional element of arbitrariness; nowhere does Fortuna, good or ill luck, play a more fateful role in human affairs than on the battlefield,
this lady would go bonkers if she heard about Casinos. Luck makes less and less difference on the battlefield.
and this intrusion of the utterly unexpected does not disappear when people call it a "random event" and find it scientifically suspect; nor can it be eliminated by simulations, scenarios, game theories, and the like.
Rubbish! It isn't the case that, as in the film 'The mouse that roared' a small and poor country can declare war on the US and end up winning.
There is no certainty in these matters, not even an ultimate certainty of mutual destruction under certain calculated circumstances.
No. There is a very high degree of certainty.
The very fact that those engaged in the perfection of the means of destruction have finally reached a level of technical development where their aim, namely, warfare, is on the point of disappearing altogether by virtue of the means at its disposal is like an ironical reminder of this all-pervading unpredictability, which we encounter the moment we approach the realm of violence.
Warfare won't disappear even if we blow up this planet. There are other planets in the universe. In any case it is possible that some experiment made for a commercial purpose ends up wiping out our species. Equally, our nukes and ballistic missile may come in useful to blow up an asteroid which would otherwise collide with the Earth.
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
The same thing is true about commerce. Why can't people just give me stuff? Why do I have to earn money and pay for stuff?
Was not Hobbes right when he said: "Covenants, without the sword, are but words"?
He was wrong. Plenty of Covenants don't require an enforcement mechanism. If I don't come to work, the boss stops paying me. He doesn't come to my house and threaten me with a knife.
Nor is a substitute likely to appear so long as national independence, namely, freedom from foreign rule, and the sovereignty of the state, namely, the claim to unchecked and unlimited power in foreign affairs, are identified.
There can be Civil War or an insurrection.
(The United States of America is among the few countries where a proper separation of freedom and sovereignty is at least theoretically possible in sofar as the very foundations of the American republic would not be threatened by it.
Clearly, Washington and Lincoln didn't agree. But then they hadn't studied useless shite in Germany.
Foreign treaties, according to the Constitution, are part and parcel of the law of the land,
as is the case everywhere.
and-as Justice James Wilson remarked in 1793-"to the Constitution of the United States the term sovereignty is totally unknown."
Nonsense! The tenth amendment establishes dual sovereignty. Wilson was against the Bill of Rights because he thought people already had them and legislation in this matter might mean that some such rights might not get protected.
But the times of such clearheaded and proud separation from the traditional language and conceptual political frame of the European nation-state are long past;
People like Wilson thought British people had the same rights. But it was up to them to change their institutions.
the heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten,
whereas this stupid German remembers it very well!
and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony- unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.)
This lady was smart enough to get the fuck out of Europe and settle in Jim Crow America so as to get rich pretending to teach Americans their own history.
That war is still the ultima ratio, the old continuation of politics by means of violence, in the foreign affairs of the underdeveloped countries is no argument against its obsoleteness, and the fact that only small countries without nuclear and biological weapons can still afford it is no consolation.
This silly lady hadn't noticed that American troops were fighting in Vietnam as they had fought in Korea.
It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage "There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility.
Nonsense! Nobody thought wars in shithole countries would affect rich and powerful nations.
Under these circumstances, there are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades.
Hannah often thought of McNamara and shat herself.
The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to "think the unthinkable," but that they do not think.
Sure they do. Since the Soviets too had smart people, the two countries were able to conduct SALT talks.
Instead of indulging in such an old-fashioned, uncomputerizable activity, they reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences.
Whereas Hannah always tested her stupid-as-shit hypotheses against actual occurrences- right?
The logical flaw in these hypothetical constructions of future event& is always the same : what first appears as a hypothesis-with or without its implied alternatives, according to the level of sophistication-turns immediately, usually after a few paragraphs, into a "fact," which then gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculative character of the whole enterprise is forgotten.
Nonsense! People who computed mortality rates for nuclear exchanges weren't saying 'look out of your window. You will notice lots of dead people.'
Needless to say, this is not science but pseudo-science, "the desperate attempt of the social and behavioral sciences," in the words of Noam Chomsky,
whose 'research' was wholly worthless.
"to imitate the surface features of sciences that really have significant intellectual content."
That nutter thought his own useless shit had 'intellectual content'.
And the most obvious and "most profound objection to this kind of strategic theory is not its limited usefulness but its danger, for it can lead us to believe we have an understanding of events and control over their flow which we do not have," as Richard N. Goodwin
who worked for JKF who got elected by falsely claiming there was a 'missile gap' with respect to the Soviet Union.
recently pointed out in a review article that had the rare virtue of detecting the "unconscious humor" characteristic of many of these pompous pseudoscientific theories.
Dr. Strangelove was funny. I grant you that.
Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures;
Nope. Extraordinary events alone have that quality.
only in a world in which nothing of importance ever happens could the futurologists' dream come true.
No. There would be no life or other chemical or physical processes on that world.
Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures,
No. That is 'extrapolation'.
that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.
Not if processes are 'robust' or 'anti-fragile'.
(Proudhon's passing remark, "The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statesman's prudence,"
No. Wherever 'prudence' has failed, it is easy to see what sin of omission or commission was made.
is fortunately still true. It exceeds even more obviously the expert's calculations.)
I can think of no important event in the twentieth century of which this was true. In each and every case, there was an obvious oversight or miscalculation.
To call such unexpected, unpredicted, and unpredictable happenings "random events" ot "the last gasps of the past," condemning them to irrelevance or the famous "dustbin of history," is the oldest trick in the trade;
So is saying 'all these so called experts are foolish. Did you know they eat their own shit?'
the trick, no doubt, helps in clearing up the theory, but at the price of removing it further and further from reality.
Arendt never studied anything remotely connected to reality.
The danger is that these theories are not only plausible, because they take their evidence from actually discernible present trends, but that, because of their inner consistency, they have a hypnotic effect; they put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding, and dealing with reality and factuality.
Our common sense tells us that war is better understood by generals and politics is better understood by politicians. People who studied nonsense at University, can't understand shit.
No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special consideration.
Every type of violence has been thoroughly studied. Defence studies and Criminology are highly developed disciplines.
(In the last edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences "violence" does not even rate an entry.)
Nor does shitting. Yet there are branches of medicine which focus on such the organs involved.
This shows to what an extent violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore neglected; no one questions or examines what is obvious to all.
It is obvious that there are stars in the sky. Yet astronomy is a highly developed field.
Those who saw nothing but violence in human affairs, convinced that they were "always haphazard, not serious, not precise" (Renan) or that God was forever with the bigger battalions, had nothing more to say about either violence or history.
But, soldiers studied such matters with great thoroughness.
Anybody looking for some kind of sense in the records of the past was almost bound to see violence as a marginal phenomenon. Whether it is Clausewitz calling war "the continuation of politics by other means," or Engels defining violence as the accelerator of economic development, the emphasis is on political or economic continuity, on the continuity of a process that remains determined by what preceded violent action.
Did you know that a guy who joins the army and goes to fight the enemy used to be a civilian? Also, it is civilians back home who produce the goods and services which are needed to fund the war effort. How weird is that!
Hence, students of international relations have held until recently that "it was a maxim that a military resolution in discord with the deeper cultural sources of national power could not be stable," or that, in Engels' words, "wherever the power structure of a country contradicts its economic development" it is political power with its means of violence that will suffer defeat.
This was too obvious to be worth stating. War, like everything else is about Cost and Benefit. If the Cost is too high relative to the Benefit for one power, it will give up. Generally, this is the invader or occupier. We say there is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' whereby the native fights harder to defend his own soil than the invader. However, it is possible that the native prefers foreign rule- e.g. large parts of India preferring British rule in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Today all these old verities about the relation between war and politics or about violence and power have become inapplicable.
No. They have been reinforced.
The Second World War was not followed by peace but by a cold war and the establishment of the military-industrial-labor complex.
That already existed. However some countries- e.g. Japan and Germany ditched theirs.
To speak of "the priority of war-making potential as the principal structuring force in society," to maintain that "economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora juris serve and extend the war system, not vice versa," to conclude that "war itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire" -all this sounds much more plausible than Engels' or Clausewitz's nineteenth-century formulas.
Only if you have shit for brains. On the other hand it is true that Governments is putting something in the water to prevent us all from turning into pussy cats who will follow only Chairman Miaow.
Even more conclusive than this simple reversal proposed by the anonymous author of the Report from Iron Mountain
a satire which was re-purposed by White Supremacists in the Nineties.
-instead of war being "an extension of diplomacy (or of politics, or of the pursuit of economic objectives)," peace is the continuation of war by other means-is the actual development in the techniques of warfare.
this was just a joke. The fact is, LBJ had paved the way for SALT.
In the words of the Russian physicist Sakharov, "A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means.
Sure it can. A Death Cult may come to power.
It would be a means of universal suicide."
Or it may not.
Moreover, we know that "a few weapons could wipe out all other sources of national power in a few moments,"
but counter-measures could be devised.
that biological weapons have been devised which would enable "small groups of individuals . to upset the strategic balance"
this appears less and less likely. Quarantines can be enforced till vaccines are developed.
and would be cheap enough to be produced by "nations unable to develop nuclear striking forces,"
but they'd get nuked.
that "within a very few years" robot soldiers will have made "human soldiers completely obsolete,"
again, this looks unlikely. Anyway, robots can be hacked.
and that, finally, in conventional warfare the poor countries are much less vulnerable than the great powers precisely because they are "underdeveloped," and because technical superiority can "be much more of a liability than an asset" in guerrilla wars.
Not if the Benefit of killing the natives outweighs the cost.
What all these uncomfortable novelties add up to is
nothing at all.
a complete reversal in the relationship between power and violence,
cheap Kalashnikovs were a game changer.
foreshadowing another reversal in the future relationship between small and great powers.
Nothing of the sort occurred. The Brits couldn't hold Afghanistan. Neither could the Soviets or the Americans. But the Benefit was always small. Things may change if it is found to have very valuable resources.
The amount of violence at the disposal of any given country may soon not be a reliable indication of the country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction
Nobody knows how much violence is 'at the disposal' of any power.
by a substantially smaller and weaker power.
In the past, determined invaders- even if numerically insignificant- have been able to prevail thanks to superior morale and tactics. But, speaking generally, they prevailed against badly governed territories or were able to gain local allies.
And this bears an ominous similarity to one of political science's oldest insights, namely that power cannot be measured in terms of wealth,
it can be measured well enough in terms of resources available for military purposes or internal security.
that an abundance of wealth may erode power,
or it may enhance it. True, at one time guys who were fat and who were used to a luxurious life-style made poor soldiers. But, a fat guy can pilot a drone well enough. Anyway, wealthy countries can hire mercenaries from poor countries.
that riches are particularly dangerous to the power and well-being of republics-
two thousand years ago- maybe.
an insight that does not lose in validity because it has been forgotten,
It isn't valid.
especially at a time when its truth has acquired a new dimension of validity by becoming applicable to the arsenal of violence as well.
Arsenals are maintained by peaceful countries as well.
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.
America's revolution was two centuries old.
The strong Marxist rhetoric of the New Left coincides with the steady growth of the entirely non-Marxian conviction, proclaimed by Mao Tse-tung, that "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Guns cost money. Mao's mistake was to tank the Chinese economy.
To be sure, Marx was aware of the role of violence in history, but this role was to him secondary;
England had prevailed because it had the money to pay subsidies to Continental allies.
not violence but the contradictions inherent in the old society brought about its end.
Hegelian nonsense. If the 'old society' killed its enemies with vim and vigour, there were no 'contradictions'.
The emergence of a new society was preceded, but not caused, by violent outbreaks, which he likened to the labor pangs that precede, but of course do not cause, the event of organic birth.
There need be no 'violent outbreaks. What mattered was the Cost Benefit ratio of potential conflict. That's why the SALT process was able to address the underlying problem.
In the same vein he regarded the state as an instrument of violence in the command of the ruling class; but the actual power of the ruling class did not consist of or rely on violence.
It might do. It might not. In England, money mattered. But, the English spent money to make yet more money.
It was defined by the role the ruling class played in society, or, more exactly, by its role in the process of production.
If it was doing sensible stuff, the guys doing the producing were content to let it continue to rule. It wasn't the case that Lord Palmerston ran a button factory. On the other hand, the 14th Earl of Home was notorious for digging for coal at Cabinet Meetings.
It has often been noticed, and sometimes deplored, that the revolutionary Left under the influence of Marx's teachings ruled out the use of violent means;
which is why they weren't hanged
the "dictatorship of the proletariat"-openly repressive in Marx's writings- came after the revolution
or during it- e.g. the Paris Commune of 1871
and was meant, like the Roman dictatorship, to last a strictly limited period. Political assassination, except for a few acts of individual terror perpetrated by small groups of anarchists, was mostly the prerogative of the Right, while organized armed uprisings remained the specialty of the military.
Yet Trotsky's Red Army kept the Bolsheviks in power. China remains Communist because the Army is totally loyal to the Party.
The Left remained convinced "that all conspiracies are not only useless but harmful. They [knew] only too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that they were always and everywhere the necessary result of circumstances entirely independent of the will and guidance of particular parties and whole classes."
The Left didn't fancy being tortured and hanged. Also, Anarchists suck ass big time.
On the level of theory there were a few exceptions. Georges Sorel, who at the beginning of the century tried to combine Marxism with Bergson's philosophy of life the result, though on a much lower level of sophistication, is oddly similar to Sartre's current amalgamation of existentialism and Marxism- thought of class struggle in military terms; yet he ended by proposing nothing more violent than the famous myth of the general strike, a form of action which we today would think of as belonging rather to the arsenal of nonviolent politics.
The Brits did have a General Strike in 1926. It failed.
Fifty years ago even this modest proposal earned him the reputation of being a fascist, notwithstanding his enthusiastic approval of Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
Sorel was probably stroking himself off as he wrote about 'proletarian violence'- i.e. being ass-raped by coal miners
Sartre, who in his preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth goes much farther in his glorification of violence than Sorel in his famous Reflections on Violence- farther than Fanon himself, whose argument he wishes to bring to its conclusion still mentions "Sorel's fascist utterances."
Mussolini was a Socialist in good standing till the Great War. I suppose it was Sorel's association with Maurras which was held against him. I suppose if you are a nutter writing nonsense, you can't be too particular about where you publish your shite.
This shows to what extent Sartre is unaware of his basic disagreement with Marx on the question of violence, especially when he states that "irrepressible violence . . . is man recreating himself," that it is through "mad fury" that "the wretched of the earth" can "become men."
Sartre's people had been shit at fighting. English speakers liberated them. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys want to 'recreate' themselves as something less shite. Even De Gaulle initially ran away from Daniel Cohn Bendit.
These notions are all the more remarkable because the idea of man creating himself is strictly in the tradition of Hegelian and Marxian thinking;
But it is false. Our species evolved. There was no 'Creation' as opposed to adaptation.
it is the very basis of all leftist humanism.
Or magic.
But according to Hegel man "produces" himself through
masturbation?
thought, whereas for Marx, who turned Hegel's "idealism" upside down, it was labor, the human form of metabolism with nature, that fulfilled this function.
Neither did an honest day's work in their life. Their 'thoughts' were garbled nonsense.
And though one may argue that all notions of man creating himself have in common a rebellion against the very factuality of the human condition-
in other words they are a fantasy
nothing is more obvious than that man, whether as member of the species or as an individual, does not owe his existence to himself and that therefore what Sartre, Marx, and Hegel have in common is more relevant than the particular activities through which this non-fact should presumably have come about, still it cannot be denied that a gulf separates the essentially peaceful activities of thinking and laboring from all deeds of violence.
Not if that is what you are paid to do.
"To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone
and to come under the power of an indigenous vulture
. . . there remain a dead man and a free man," says Sartre in his preface.
Fanon's Martinique was smart enough to stay part of France. Lots of Muslim Algerians decided that they would be freer and more prosperous in France. Indeed, it was safer to bee an Islamist in Paris than in Algiers.
This is a sentence Marx could never have written.
Because it was stupid. Shoot an European and lots of Europeans and their native troops will show up and kill you and grab any cool, shiny, stuff you might have. Incidentally, the French won the Algerian War. It just wasn't worth holding on to it.
I quoted Sartre in order to show that this new shift toward violence in the thinking of revolutionaries can remain unnoticed even by one of their most representative and articulate spokesmen,
Sartre was a writer. He was neither a revolutionary nor did he represent any revolutionary movement.
and it is all the more noteworthy for evidently not being an abstract notion in the history of ideas.
This is the history of stupidity.
(If one turns the "idealistic" concept of thought upside down, one might arrive at the "materialistic" concept of labor; one will never arrive at the notion of violence.)
Why not? It is a type of work.
No doubt all this has a logic of its own, but it is one springing from experience, and this experience was utterly unknown to any generation before.
It was known to the cave-man.
The pathos and the elan of the New Left, their credibility, as it were, are closely connected with the weird suicidal development of modern weapons; this is the first generation to grow up under the shadow of the atom bomb.
Which is why it hasn't witnessed a World War.
They inherited from their parents' generation the experience of a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics:
Not if they lived in America or the British Commonwealth.
they learned in high school and in college about concentration and extermination camps,
which Hannah had the sense to run the fuck away from
about genocide and torture, about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in war without which modern military operations are no longer possible even if restricted to "conventional" weapons. Their first reaction was a revulsion against every form of violence,
Nonsense! Their reaction was to want lots of nukes and delivery systems- unless a Super-power could provide an umbrella of that sort.
an almost matter-of-course espousal of a politics of nonviolence.
Where? Not in America. Not in the Soviet Union. Not even in Gandhian India. West Germany and Japan- sure.
The very great successes of this movement, especially in the field of civil rights, were followed by the resistance movement against the war in Vietnam, which has remained an important factor in determining the climate of opinion in this country.
Some opinions. But this led to a backlash.
But it is no secret that things have changed since then, that the adherents of nonviolence are on the defensive, and it would be futile to say that only the "extremists" are yielding to a glorification of violence and have discovered-like Fanon's Algerian peasants-that "only violence pays."
Fanon was wrong. The Third World's peasantry was religious, not revolutionary though they would support any regime which gave them more land for less tax. In Indonesia, Hindus and Muslims united to slaughter Commies. Sadly, Chinese peasants weren't able to slaughter Mao's gangsters for grabbing their land and imposing a big famine upon them.
The new militants have been denounced as anarchists, nihilists, red fascists, Nazis, and, with considerably more justification, "Luddite machine smashers,"
Luddites actually smashed machines.
and the students have countered with the equally meaningless slogans of "police state" or "latent fascism of late capitalism," and, with considerably more justification, "consumer society."
Most students wanted to consume more. Still, maybe some nice Trotskyite chick will jump our bones.
Their behavior has been blamed on all kinds of social and psychological factors-on too much permissiveness in their upbringing in America and on an explosive reaction to too much authority in Germany and Japan, on the lack of freedom in Eastern Europe and too much freedom in the West, on the disastrous lack of jobs for sociology students in France and the superabundance of careers in nearly all fields in the United States-all of which appear locally plausible enough but are clearly contradicted by the fact that the student rebellion is a global phenomenon.
It was a fad. It passed save in such places as gangster-politicians recruited from, or took over campuses.
A social common denominator of the movement seems out of the question, but it is true that psychologically this generation seems everywhere characterized by sheer courage,
unless the authorities beat, tortured and killed them.
an astounding will to action, and by a no less astounding confidence in the possibility of change.
If students wanted sensible things- e.g. the right to fuck rather than go die in Vietnam- society supported them. This is because fucking produces babies- which are nice- whereas war means higher taxes- which sucks ass big time.
But these qualities are not causes, and if one asks what has actually brought about this wholly unexpected development in universities all over the world, it seems absurd to ignore the most obvious and perhaps the most potent factor,
shooting kids costs money. Let them fuck each other and act out. They'll have babies and thus have to get jobs soon enough. Student politics only became important when a larger percentage of kids went to Uni to feed a growing Knowledge Economy or to provide high Income elasticity services.
for which, moreover, no precedent and no analogy exist-
the precedent is as old as the Humanist Knights of the German reformation, or the University men in Cromwell's Model Army.
the simple fact that technological progress" is leading in so many instances straight into disaster;
but more technological progress solves these problems. Missiles can be shot down by anti-Missiles. Pollution can be reduced, perhaps reversed, by Science.
that the sciences, taught and learned by this generation, seem not merely unable to undo the disastrous consequences of their own technology but have reached a stage in their development where "there's no damn thing you can do that can't be turned into war."
Writing stupid shite can't be turned into war. On the other hand, the US military did weaponize rock music.
(To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities-
Nope. Universities don't need integrity. They need smart students and good laboratories.
which, in Senator Fulbright's words, have betrayed a public trust when they became dependent on government-sponsored research projects
They should have insisted on only taking money from paedophiles. Seriously, students are as thick as shit. They may believe that taking it up the ass from strangers is part and parcel of getting a Sociology degree
just as the universities cannot afford not to accept federal funds;
Nor, back then, they could afford not to hire Lefties because they tended to be smarter and more mathsy. Sadly, Chomsky turned out to be a waste of space.
but this means no more than that they "must learn how to sterilize financial support", a difficult but not impossible task in view of the enormous increase of the power of universities in modern societies.) In short, the seemingly irresistible proliferation of techniques and machines, far from only threatening certain classes with unemployment, menaces the existence of whole nations and conceivably of all mankind.
Steam engines will take over the world. One day soon, cars will drive people. That's Elon Musk's evil plan.
It is only natural that the new generation should live with greater awareness of the possibility of doomsday than those "over thirty," not because they are younger but because this was their first decisive experience in the world. (What are "problems" to us "are built into the flesh and blood of the young. ")
Hannah forgets that the A-bomb was invented and used during the Second World War. The guys who dreamt it up remembered the Great War. The Tzar Bomba, in 1961, was the highest yielding device ever. Sakharov, who designed it would have been about twenty-one when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: "How do you want the world to be in fifty years?" and "What do you want your life to be like five years from now?" the answers are quite often preceded by "Provided there is still a world," and "Provided I am still alive."
No. Young people wanted money, sex and not having to do boring shite for a living.
In George Wald's words, "what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future."
Wald was a good egg. It is said that he got Gorby to release Sakharov. As I said, lots of the smartest scientist were Leftists or Pacifists
For the future, as Spender puts it, is "like a time-bomb buried, but ticking away, in the present."
So, time is like a time-bomb. What an amazing discovery!
To the often-heard question Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking.
No. The new generation was listening to pop-music.
And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.
The reality was that there was a small market for shitty books by nutters like Arendt. There was a bigger market for Astrology.
The student rebellion is a global phenomenon, but its manifestations vary, of course, greatly from country to country, often from university to university. This is especially true of the practice of violence. Violence has remained mostly a matter of theory and rhetoric where the clash between generations did not coincide with a clash of tangible group interests.
American kids really didn't want to get shot in Vietnam.
This was notably so in Germany, where the tenured faculty had a vested interest in overcrowded lectures and seminars.
While the Stasi had a vested interest in recruiting terrorists and spies.
In America, the student movement has been seriously radicalized wherever police and police brutality intervened in essentially nonviolent demonstrations: occupations of administration buildings, sit-ins, et cetera.
The good news was that this provoked a backlash from the 'silent majority'. What 'intellectuals' forget is, everyone hates them.
Serious violence entered the scene only with the appearance of the Black Power movement on the campuses.
It wasn't that serious. But it was good theatre.
Negro students, the majority of them admitted without academic qualification, regarded and organized themselves as an interest group, the representatives of the black community.
Samuel L Jackson was one such 'Negro'. He's now as rich as fuck.
Their interest was to lower academic standards.
Once a German...
They were more cautious than the white rebels, but it was clear from the beginning (even before the incidents at Cornell University and City College in New York) that violence with them was not a matter of theory and rhetoric.
White students tried to forcibly eject the Black students occupying Willard Straight Hall at Cornell to protest the burning of a cross on their lawn. Some of the latter returned with guns.
Moreover, while the student rebellion in Western countries can nowhere count on popular support outside the universities and as a rule encounters open hostility the moment it uses violent means, there stands a large minority of the Negro community behind the verbal or actual violence of the black students.
Because 'the Negro community' knew all about cross burning.
Black violence can indeed be understood in analogy to the labor violence in America a generation ago; and although, as far as I know, only Staughton Lynd has drawn the analogy between labor riots and student rebellion explicitly, it seems that the academic establishment, in its curious tendency to yield more to Negro demands, even if they are clearly silly and outrageous, than to the disinterested and usually highly moral claims of the white rebels, also thinks in these terms and feels more comfortable when confronted with interests plus violence than when it is a matter of nonviolent "participatory democracy."
White academics don't mind cheating Black students by running bogus courses.
The yielding of university authorities to black demands has often been explained by the "guilt feelings" of the white community;
or their desire to teach worthless shite. But then non-STEM stuff tends to be shite or to quickly become so.
I think it is more likely that faculty as well as administrations and boards of trustees are half-consciously aware of the obvious truth of a conclusion of the official Report on Violence in America: "Force and violence are likely to be successful techniques of social control and persuasion when they have wide popular support."
Or when the whole thing is make-believe and involves getting paid to cheat people.
The new undeniable glorification of violence by the student movement has a curious peculiarity. While the rhetoric of the new militants is clearly inspired by Fanon, their theoretical arguments contain usually nothing but a hodgepodge of all kinds of Marxist leftovers.
By then, actual Marxism was mathematical. Kantorovich got a Nobel in Econ about this time.
This is indeed quite baffling for anybody who has ever read Marx or Engels.
Who had been superseded by guys who knew about actually running a Command Economy.
Who could possibly call an ideology Marxist that has put its faith in "classless idlers," believes that "in the lumpenproletariat the rebellion will find its urban spearhead," and trusts that "gangsters will light the way for the people"?
Tim Leary was a Harvard Professor. He thought everybody should take LSD.
Sartre
who wrote some good plays but who knew shit about Economics or Politics (which had become very mathsy thanks to people like Shapley)
with his great felicity with words has given expression to the new faith. "Violence," he now believes, on the strength of Fanon's book, "like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted."
No lance has that quality.
If this were true, revenge would be the cure-all for most of our ills.
It has its place. Tit for tat is eusocial.
This myth is more abstract, farther removed from reality, than Sorel's myth of a general strike ever was. It is on a par with Fanon's worst rhetorical excesses, such as, "hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery."
Nothing wrong with talking nonsense, just for shits and giggles. It is preferable to be a sex slave to Beyonce than to be a goat free to devour the collected works of Hannah's Aunt.
No history and no theory is needed to refute this statement; the most superficial observer of the processes that go on in the human body knows its untruth. But had he said that bread eaten with dignity is preferable to cake eaten in slavery the rhetorical point would have been lost.
Beyonce will feed me cake in between using me in unspeakable ways to sate her vile lust.
Reading these irresponsible grandiose statements-and those I quoted are fairly representative, except that Fanon still manages to stay closer to reality than most-and looking at them in the perspective of what we know about the history of rebellions and revolutions, one is tempted to deny their significance, to ascribe them to
the fact that the dude was a darkie. You know what I mean. Big dick. All the blood rushes to it. That's why he couldn't think gud.
a passing mood, or to the ignorance and nobility of sentiment of people exposed to unprecedented events and developments without any means of handling them mentally, and who therefore curiously revive thoughts and emotions from which Marx had hoped to liberate the revolution once and for all
Marx didn't care if the revolution was hysterical as fuck. He just didn't want some other fucker to lead it.
It is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as "power," "strength," "force," "authority," and, finally, "violence"-all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena and would hardly exist unless they did.
If natural language distinguishes between them, so does any 'political science' done in natural living.
(In the words of d'Entreves, "might, power, authority: these are all words to whose exact implications no great weight is attached in current speech; even the greatest thinkers sometimes use them at random. Yet it is fair to presume that they refer to different properties, and their meaning should therefore be carefully assessed and examined .... The correct use of these words is a question not only of logical grammar, but of historical perspective.")
No. Only the context in which such words were used mattered.
To use them as synonyms not only indicates a certain deafness to linguistic meanings,
No. It is have a ear for 'elegant variation'- i.e. the avoidance of repetition.
which would be serious enough, but it has also resulted in a kind of blindness to the realities they correspond to.
Nobody cared what these useless tossers were deaf or blind to.
In such a situation it is always tempting to introduce new definitions, but-though I shall briefly yield to temptation-what is involved is not simply a matter of careless speech.
It is simply a matter of writing ignorant bollocks.
Behind the apparent confusion is a firm conviction in whose light all distinctions would be, at best, of minor importance: the conviction that the most crucial political issue is, and always has been, the question of Who rules Whom?
No. Politics subsists even where nobody is 'ruling' anybody else. Persuasion and deal making and intrigue and treachery are part of politics.
Equally, there may be little politics in a country under occupation or in the grip of an efficient tyrant.
Power, strength, force, authority, violence- these are but words to indicate the means by which man rules over man;
No. A man may rule over others because he is loved or he has charisma or because he solves a coordination problem. Equally, there may be, de jure, an absolute ruler who doesn't rule shit. People may say 'tradition rules' or that decisions are taken collectively though in a manner none can say.
they are held to be synonyms because they have the same function. It is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion that the original data in the realm of human affairs will appear, or, rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity. These data, in our context, may be enumerated as follows: Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.
So power is what is displayed by a chorus-line or a bunch of square dancers.
Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.
No. A guy with a lot of money can hire mercenaries. Power and money are often interchangeable.
When we say of somebody that he is "in power" we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name.
Not necessarily. The guy paying the wages of the mercenaries is 'in power' but he is not empowered by them. A person can gain or keep power transactionally without any specific group 'empowering' that person or without that person representing anything but himself. Consider King Leopold as the legal owner of the Congo Free State. People of different nationalities worked for him, in return for money, and they extracted large profits for him. It wasn't the case that anybody thought Leopold represented the people of Congo or that his employees had put him in this very lucrative position.
The moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with (potestas in populo, without a people or group there is no power), disappears, "his power" also vanishes.
This only applied to the Roman Republic of which Cicero said- ' Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit." ("While power resides in the people, authority rests with the Senate.") Cicero was proved wrong. Power resided with guys who had a lot of soldiers at their command. Mark Anthony had Cicero killed. The Republic turned into an Empire. Neither the People's Tribunes nor Senators mattered. People who gas on about 'potestas' or 'auctoritas' are stupid. Money matters. Armies matter. Pedants don't matter.
In current usage, when we speak of a " powerful man" or a "powerful personality,"
we mean different things. A powerful man is a person who can alter significant outcomes. A powerful personality is one which makes a deep impression. The two are unrelated.
we already use the word "power" metaphorically; what we refer to without metaphor is "strength."
A person with a lot of power- e.g. Biden- may still be considered weak. Strength is different from power and may refer to nobility of character or ability to survive adversity.
Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular, an individual entity;
No. It is merely a word which can be used in different ways for different purposes.
it is the property inherent in an object or person and belongs to its character, which may prove itself in relation to other things or persons, but is essentially independent of them.
No. When we say 'my mother was a strong woman', we don't mean she could bench-press 300 pounds.
The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.
Nonsense! Not a single winner of the 'World's strongest man' title has even been 'overpowered' by the many. History records the names of many famous wrestlers, martial artists and weight-lifters. Not a single one was set upon by a mob of lesser men. On the other hand, I suppose it is true that Jewish women like Hannah, made a habit of ganging up and beating the shit out of any particularly muscular member of their sorority.
The almost instinctive hostility of the many toward the one has always, from Plato to Nietzsche, been ascribed to resentment, to the envy of the weak for the strong, but this psychological interpretation misses the point.
It is nonsense. Men like hanging out with the champion wrestler or weight-lifter or whatever.
It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
Among Jewish women of the period- maybe. Simone Weil and Edith Stein may have tried to beat the shit out of Hannah's Aunt because they resented her independence and bulging muscles. Men, sadly, were more pacifically inclined.
Force, which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence,
No. Force may be backed up by the threat of violence though those demonstrating it may have special training such that minimal harm is caused.
especially if violence serves as a means of coercion,
the threat of it may be enough
should be reserved, in terminological language, for the "forces of nature" or the "force of circumstances" (la force des choses), that is, to indicate the energy released by physical or social movements.
Germany ladies should get to tell us how to speak English.
Authority, relating to the most elusive of these phenomena and therefore, as a term, most frequently abused, can be vested in persons- there is such a thing as personal authority, as, for instance, in the relation between parent and child, between teacher and pupil-or it can be vested in offices, as, for instance, in the Roman senate (auctoritas in senatu) or in the hierarchical offices of the Church (a priest can grant valid absolution even though he is drunk).
Authority is a legal term of art.
Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed.
No. You can tell authority to go fuck itself. But, the thing may become justiciable- i.e. you end up in a court of law- civil, criminal or ecclesiastical.
(A father can lose his authority either by beating his child or by starting to argue with him, that is, either by behaving to him like a tyrant or by treating him as an equal.)
No. The father may lose the respect of his child in this way but he would not lose authority over him. That would require a court judgment.
To remain in authority requires respect for the person or the office.
No. Respect is a separate matter.
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
No. Contempt of court was punished. Holding up a person to hatred, ridicule or contempt could lead to both civil and criminal penalties.
There is such a thing as authoritarian government, but it certainly has nothing in common with tyranny, dictatorship, or totalitarian rule.
No. These terms may be used interchangeably.
For a discussion of the historical background and political significance of the term, see my "What is Authority?"
Arendt was completely wrong about authority. Unlike 'power' or 'might' or 'respect'
Wolin and Schaar, in op. cit., are entirely right: "The rules are being broken because University authorities, administrators and faculty alike, have lost the respect of many of the students."
No. The rules were broken because there was a political advantage in doing so. Moreover, there was also an incentive not to enforce them.
They then conclude, "When authority leaves, power enters."
It is nonsense. When authority refuses to use legal remedies available to it- power departs from it. But at a later point authority may reassert itself because the public mood has changed.
This too is true, but, I am afraid, not quite in the sense they meant it. What entered first at Berkeley was student power, obviously the strongest power on every campus simply because of the students' superior numbers.
Campuses don't matter. Voters hate students. Reagan got his start promising to 'clear up the mess at Berkeley'.
Violence, finally, as I have said, is distinguished by its instrumental character.
Nope. Violence is a learned skill and is considered worth pursuing in itself.
Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength until, in the last stage of their development, they can substitute for it.
Violence can't substitute for strength. This is why, when baby attacks Daddy, he isn't actually able to do very much harm.
It is perhaps not superfluous to add that these distinctions, though by no means arbitrary, hardly ever correspond to watertight compartments in the real world, from which nevertheless they are drawn.
Hannah's distinctions were stupid and based on absurd beliefs- e.g. that people get together to beat up weight-lifters.
Thus institutionalized power in organized communities often appears in the guise of authority, demanding instant, unquestioning recognition; no society could function without it. (A small, and still isolated, incident in New York shows what can happen if authentic authority in social relations has broken down to the point where it cannot work any longer even in its derivative, purely functional form. A minor mishap in the subway system-the doors on a train failed to operate-turned into a serious shutdown on the line lasting four hours and involving more than fifty thousand passengers, because when the transit authorities asked the passengers to leave the defective train, they simply refused.)
So what? Nothing changed. Nobody thinks guys who work for the subway represent any very sublime type of authority.
Moreover, nothing, as we shall see, is of respect, that it finds it so difficult to deal with power in nonviolent terms. The university today calls upon the police for protection exactly as the Catholic church used to do before the separation of state and church forced it to rely on authority alone.
The Church is welcome to call the police to eject ruffians who occupy its Churches or other properties. So are Universities or other public or private corporations.
It is perhaps more than an oddity that the severest crisis of the church as an institution should coincide with the severest crisis in the history of the university, the only secular institution still based on authority.
All enterprises are based on authority. If I am a sole trader, I have authority to make contracts on behalf of my enterprise. If I am the CEO of a public company that is still the case. The 'severest crisis of the church' had nothing to do with problems in universities. It had to do with people of a different religion or ideology killing priests, raping nuns, and taking over churches.
Both may indeed be ascribed to "the progressing explosion of the atom 'obedience' whose stability was allegedly eternal," as Heinrich Boll remarked of the crisis in the churches.
Boll had shit for brains. That was okay, because he was a German writer.
... it must be admitted that it is particularly tempting to think of power in terms of command and obedience,
for German people of that period- sure. In the Anglo-Saxon world, power is commercial when it doesn't involve working on committees or making speeches of great cogency in Parliament or the Courts.
and hence to equate power with violence,
In England, we associate violence with drunken hooligans, not with power.
in a discussion of what actually is only one of power's special cases namely, the power of government. Since in foreign relations as well as domestic affairs violence appears as a last resort to keep the power structure intact against individual challengers
In England and America, no one was trying 'to keep the power structure intact'. If a guy made a lot of money, he was welcome to buy himself political power and influence. But sensible Trade Unionists or even Feminists could be given power in return for doing boring but useful work.
-the foreign enemy, the native criminal -it looks indeed as though violence were the prerequisite of power and power nothing but a facade, the velvet glove which either conceals the iron hand or will turn out to belong to a paper tiger.
Why stop there? Why not say that Government is incessantly sodomizing everybody in between beating them black and blue? How else could it be maintaining its authority?
On closer inspection, though, this notion loses much of its plausibility. For our purpose, the gap between theory and reality is perhaps best illustrated by the phenomenon of revolution.
Which is very rare save in shithole countries.
Since the beginning of the century theoreticians of revolution have told us that the chances of revolution have significantly decreased in proportion to the increased destructive capacities of weapons at the unique disposition of governments.
Theoreticians of revolution have shit for brains. Shithole countries will have coups and counter-coups and may even have a revolution such that a new Army is created.
Thus Franz Borkenau, reflecting on the defeat of the Spanish revolution,
It was utter shit. Don't kill priests and rape nuns in a Catholic country. Portugal had its revolution before the Great War but anti-clericalism provoked a backlash. Also the Liberals were utterly shit at running things. Spain went down the same road as Portugal. What other outcome was possible?
states: "In this tremendous contrast with previous revolutions one fact is reflected.
The Spanish Army was shit. Franco had to use Moorish troops to systematically rape such territory as his Italian and German allies liberated for him. Still, it must be said, such extensive rape and beating did cow the leftists for the next four decades.
Before these latter years, counter-revolution usually depended upon the support of reactionary powers, which were technically and intellectually inferior to the forces of revolution.
Trotsky did beat the French/British/Japanese/White forces. They weren't 'technically inferior'.
This has changed with the advent of fascism. Now, every revolution is likely to meet the attack of the most modern, most efficient, most ruthless machinery yet in existence. It means that the age of revolutions free to evolve according to their own laws is over."
The Soviets could prevent their satellites reverting to Democracy. The Chinese Communist Party retains its hold over the country it systematically conquered. Corrupt regimes, it seems, fall when challenged sufficiently vigorously. The Generals are keener to escape with their loot than to stay and fight.
Were people mad who even tried against such overwhelming odds?
If the Army is demoralized, the police too grow cautious. De Gaulle did initially run away from the students in '68. The solution was simple. Let them fuck each other to their heart's content. Seriously, violence is all very well but its pleasures pale in comparison with sex, drugs & rock & roll.
And, leaving out instances of full success, how can even a temporary success be explained?
By the other side being shite- at least temporarily.
The fact is that the gap between state-owned means of violence and what people can muster by themselves-from beer bottles to Molotov cocktails and guns-has always been so enormous that technical improvements make hardly any difference.
But the Government may be shit. Sometimes this is because it isn't fiscally viable- i.e. does not have the money to pay its troops. At other times, it may have the money but does not have cadres capable of maintaining morale or formulating a workable strategy.
Arendt sought to find a relationship between violence and power. None exists save in the sense that farting is related to power. Violence, like farting, is something human beings do from time to time. Speaking generally, Society works better when limits are placed on where and when either occurs. Power, on the other hand, has to do with sustainably and materially altering outcomes. If my violence or my farting causes me to be implement states of the world favourable to myself, then they are a source of power for me. But such is not generally the case. It may be that I already possess authority and my use of farts or violence underlines the futility of arguing the toss with me. But, if I lack authority or have no other source of power, my farts or violence may be met by smellier farts or more effective violence. Where authority arises by democratic social choice- i.e. is uncoercive in its origins- it can be studied game-theoretically- e.g. with 'Shapley values' or the 'Banzhaf-Coleman index of power'. This is scalable- i.e. can be extended to very large groups.
Arendt thinks otherwise-
Whatever the administrative advantages and disadvantages of centralization may be, its political result is always the same: monopolization of power causes the drying up or oozing away of all authentic power sources in the country.
The reverse is the case. Centralization is what enables a small town lawyer to become a Senator and thus affect foreign and domestic policy. Indeed, such a person may become POTUS and the 'leader of the free world'.
In the United States, based on a great plurality of powers and their mutual checks and balances, we are confronted not merely with the disintegration of power structures, but with power, seemingly still intact and free to manifest itself, losing its grip and becoming ineffective.
The US did stupid shit in Vietnam. Irma Adelman suggested that the US finance land redistribution. This would have removed the incentive for the peasants to help the Vietcong (whose activities had caused the landlords to run away to the cities). There is a penalty for doing stupid shit as an individual, a family, an enterprise, of a great nation.
To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.
It is nonsense. It should always have been obvious that guys in America had no capability to 'win hearts and minds' in a country far far away. True, they could have bought influence there. But they could not sustain their influence with bayonets because American soldiers can be killed same as any other type of soldier.
Senator Eugene McCarthy's crusade in 1 968 "to test the system" brought popular resentment against imperialist adventures into the open, provided the link between the opposition in the Senate and that in the streets, enforced an at least temporary spectacular change in policy, and demonstrated how quickly the majority of the young rebels could become dealienated, jumping at this first opportunity not to abolish the system but to make it work again.
Smart students knew that anti-war credentials could jump-start their political or academic or media careers. 'Hanoi' Jane Fonda became an even bigger movie star thanks to her politics.
And still, all this power could be crushed by the party bureaucracy, which, contrary to all traditions, preferred to lose the presidential election with an unpopular candidate who happened to be an apparatchik. (Something similar happened when Rockefeller lost the nomination to Nixon during the Republican convention.)
LBJ had alienated Southern Whites. Wallace took votes from Humphrey who was the lead author of LBJ's Civil Rights bill. The Republican's now had a 'Southern Strategy'. Incidentally, the 'party bureaucracy' didn't want Humphrey. That's why he chose to concentrate on getting delegates from non-primary States.
There are other examples to demonstrate the curious contradictions inherent in impotence of power.
What is demonstrated in American elections is that only the voters matter. You may be as rich as Rockefeller but if you can't connect with ordinary people, you won't get the top job.
Because of the enormous effectiveness of teamwork in the sciences,
and the Arts. Motion pictures require a lot of 'teamwork'
which is perhaps the outstanding American contribution to modern science,
Only because America has a lot of money to pay big, big, teams.
we can control the most complicated processes with a precision that makes trips to the moon less dangerous than ordinary weekend excursions;
That is hyperbole.
but the allegedly "greatest power on earth" is helpless to end a war,
it could do so easily enough
clearly disastrous for all concerned, in one of the earth's smallest countries.
Vietnam isn't that small.
It is as though we have fallen under a fairyland spell which permits us to do the "impossible" on the condition that we lose the capacity of doing the possible, to achieve fantastically extraordinary feats on the condition of no longer being able to attend properly to our everyday needs.
Arendt could no longer take a shit. This was because of Neil Armstrong.
If power has anything to do with the we-will-and-we-can, as distinguished from the mere we-can, then we have to admit that our power has become impotent.
Only if we really can't take a shit because of rocket ships.
The progresses made by science have nothing to do with the 1-will;
Nope. Scientists have to have the will to do science rather than wank.
they follow their own inexorable laws, compelling us to do whatever we can, regardless of consequences. Have the 1-will and the l-ean parted company? Was Valery right when he said fifty years ago: "On peut dire que tout ce que nous savons, c'est-adire tout ce que nous pouvons, a fini par s'opposer a ce 86 que nous sommes "? ("One can say that all we know, that is, all we have the power to do, has finally turned against what we are. ")
Valery could no longer take a shit because of the Wright brothers.
Again, we do not know where these developments will lead us, but we know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence-
When Nixon lost office, hobos would beat and sodomize him.
if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands, be they the government or be they the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it.
Not in England or America. Still it is true that Willie Brandt was tempted to stab Walter Scheel rather than hand over office to him. Fortunately, Golda Meier persuaded him to just fart vociferously instead. In the age of Artificial Intelligence and Nano-technology, all authentic sources of power have oozed away. Violence is not the solution. Farting is. Mind it kindly.
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