Israel, Palestine, Forgiveness, Compassion, Peace, Freedom, Democracy, Politicians, Totalitarianism, Propaganda and Evil: What would Hannah Arendt say?
Greg Krasovsky
October 16, 2023
"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."
"No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been."
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
These quotes of Hannah Arendt, as well as many other quotes that you'll find below, are very relevant today, as we watch and analyze
1. Hamas' "military incursion" into Israel on 10/7/23 and its actions afterwards:
- horrific and unjustifiable crimes against humanity and terrorist acts against ordinary Israeli civilians (including the elderly, women & children), including cold-blood murder by execution;
- war crimes against Israeli soldiers and police who should have been taken prisoner and treated humanely instead of being tortured and executed when no longer armed or a credible threat to Hamas militants;
- indiscriminate launch of unguided (imprecise, albeit deadly) missiles into Israel's civilian population centers, causing unjustified and criminal deaths of civilians (non-combatants);
- Hamas' iron grip over the Gaza Strip since 2005 and continuous indoctrination of its population and especially Palestinian children to hate Zionists, Israelis and all Jews to such an extent that
-- the expulsion of all Jews from greater Palestine is warranted,
-- the Existence of Israel as a legitimate state must be terminated and
-- the murder of women, children and the elderly becomes acceptable, desirable and almost mandatory
to ensure the freedom and prosperity of the Palestinian People and their future independent country-state.
2. Israel's current war crimes from 10/8/23 to present in the Gaza Strip:
- massive bombing, missile attacks and artillery strikes in Gaza that have killed innocent Palestinian civilians,
- failure to organize and ensure the evacuation of civilians (non-combatants),
- using the deprivation of electricity and water as collective punishment and part of a "siege"
And I'm not even going to touch human right violations in the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli government, its armed forces, the police, state security and intelligence agencies from 1948 to the present.
P.S. On 10/7/23 Hamas confirmed that it is a terrorist organization which constitutes a clear and present danger to Israeli national security and must be dealt with accordingly -- ruthlessly, thoroughly but legally.
Whether you like it or not, countries, their governments, law enforcement and security agencies and armed forces are always held to higher standards (rule of law) than terrorist organizations (even those with any degree of government support & control, which means all terrorist organizations).
As such, Palestinian civilians (non-combatants) in Gaza and the West Bank, even those who voted for & support Hamas, including relatives of Hamas terrorists and war criminals, are entitled to legal protections afforded them by all applicable domestic and international law, including binding U.N. resolutions, Geneva Conventions and other conventions & treaties outlawing the use of certain weaponry, munitions and war tactics.
What do you think?
***
Hannah Arendt Quotes:
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
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.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/hannah-arendt-quotes
***
“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.
... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
tags: communism, nazism, post-factual, totalitarianism
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. ”
― Hannah Arendt
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
― Hannah Arendt
“And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.”
― Hannah Arendt
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/12806.Hannah_Arendt
***
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
- Hannah Arendt
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
- Hannah Arendt
This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.
- Hannah Arendt
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Hannah Arendt
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.
- Hannah Arendt
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
- Hannah Arendt
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others.
It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
- Hannah Arendt
Violence is an expression of impotence.
- Hannah Arendt
The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted.
Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
- Hannah Arendt
Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
- Hannah Arendt
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
- Hannah Arendt
https://www.azquotes.com/author/511-Hannah_Arendt
***
"No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed.
Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers.
Only the development of robot soldiers, which, as previously mentioned, would eliminate the human factor completely and, conceivably, permit one man with a push button to destroy whomever he pleased, could change this fundamental ascendancy of power over violence."
—Hannah Arendt, “On Violence.”
“And even if Jews were to win the war...[t]he ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.”
-Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, New York: Schocken Books, 2007, p.396
"Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."
-Hannah Arendt, On Violence
"The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom."
-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
"If this practice [of totalitarianism] is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms."
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed.
Yet, in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive.
When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice;
and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive.
Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer "human" in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness."
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"Whatever the source of moral knowledge might be—divine commandments or moral reason—every sane man, it was assumed, carried within himself a voice that tells him what is right and what is wrong, and this regardless of the law of the land and regardless of the voices of his fellowmen."
-Hannah Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, in Responsibility and Judgment, p. 61.
"The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly.
It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable."
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
“The highest laws of the land (America) are not only the constitution and constitutional laws, but also contracts.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 131
"It can be dangerous to tell the truth: “There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Book XXIV, No. 21
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/quote-of-the-week-2011-11-14
***
"In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt.
Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."
- On the subject violence and power. Source: On Violence, published in 1970. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen.
What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.
On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.
And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.
And with such a people you can then do what you please."
On the subject freedom of press. Source: Interview with French writer Roger Errera, 1974. New York Review of Books. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it."
On the subject “alternate facts”. Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951):
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it"
On the subject “alternate facts”. Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.
"A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses.
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true.
The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynism the vice of superior and refined minds.
Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Part 3, Ch. 2 The Totalitarian Movement, page 80
On the subject lies and mass propaganda. Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
***
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.
... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism;
instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7662360-in-an-ever-changing-incomprehensible-world-the-masses-had-reached-the
***
This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before.
The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly.
And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.
- Hannah Arendt
https://www.azquotes.com/author/511-Hannah_Arendt
***
Hannah Arendt
By Wikipedia
Hannah Arendt (/ˈɛərənt, ˈɑːr-/,[12][13] US also /əˈrɛnt/,[14] German: [ˌhana ˈaːʁənt] ⓘ;[15] born Johanna Arendt; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born American historian and political philosopher.
She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.[16][17][18]
Her
works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those
dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct
democracy, authority, and totalitarianism.
In the popular mind
she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of
Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors
in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and
for the phrase "the banality of evil."
She is commemorated by
institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt
Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names and schools,
amongst other things.
Arendt was born to a Jewish family in Linden (now a district of Hanover) in 1906.
When she was three, her family moved to the East Prussian capital of Königsberg for her father's health care.
Paul Arendt had contracted syphilis in his youth, but was thought to be in remission when Arendt was born. He died when she was seven.
Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, her mother being an ardent Social Democrat.
After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair.[19]
She obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929.
Her dissertation was entitled Love and Saint Augustine and her supervisor was the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.
Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism.
On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine.
She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Divorcing Stern that year, she then married Heinrich Blücher in 1940.
When Germany invaded France that year she was detained by the French as an alien.
She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life.
She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950.
With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established and a series of works followed.
These included the books The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963.
She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments.
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She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.
Please read the rest at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
***
[Google Translation]
The Granite of Science
Facebook
October 14, 2023 at 12:57 PM
One of the few female philosophers of the 20th century whose works are recognized as classics of political thought, the founder of the theory of totalitarianism and the author of the expression “banality of evil”
👤Hannah Arendt is a German-American philosopher and journalist of Jewish origin, political theorist, historian and public figure.
She was educated at the Universities of Marburg, Freiburg and Heidelberg, and studied with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.
▪️She was one of the first to talk about the true nature of evil and comprehensively studied this phenomenon, which, in her opinion, is not always hidden in a person’s desire to do something terrible, but is much more often associated with the refusal of thought and one’s own responsibility for one’s choice.
Arendt's legacy includes more than 450 works, diverse in issues, but united by the idea of comprehension of modernity (“thinking about what we are doing”).
▪️She introduced the concept of “banality of evil,” by which she meant thoughtless submission to laws that were not just inhumane, but directed against the very foundations of life.
Her theses, formulated in reports from Jerusalem from the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, and then in a separately published book, influenced the course of the entire post-war discussion about the Holocaust and the role of the individual in the most terrible crime committed against humanity.
▪️The essence of these theses is that evil is committed by ordinary people who accept the order established in society as the norm and conscientiously fulfill the obligations prescribed to them by the current law.
The term “banality of evil” has become one of the cornerstones in modern philosophy, and passions around Hannah Arendt’s controversial theses have not yet subsided.
Hannah Arendt believed that there is only one way to resist universal evil: we must learn to think critically.
🔻Today [October 14th] is the birthday of this extraordinary personality, a female philosopher.
👉 Granite Science
#personalitiesinscience #historyofscience
https://www.facebook.com/granit.nayki/posts/pfbid02b8zqVLKXG8vEaxKHeFqawHJk7qDFftRkQXi2vU8mMtgCraxo3bnNo3V8CaCyvYGzl
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