I would like to share some of Hannah Arendts thoughts in her Origins of Totalitarianism, a very urgent reading for our times. To wit: Eminent European scholars and statesmenn had predicted, from the early ninteenth century onward, the rise of the mass man and the coming of a mass age ......the wisdom, so familiar to the ancients, of the affinity between democracy and dictatorship, between mob rule and tyranny. Further on, in the same chapter, The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. Much futher: Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. --> War, with its constant murderous arbitrariness, became the symbol for death, the great equalizer and therefore the true father of a new world order. Nechayev had preached the evangel of the doomed man with no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments, property not even a name of his own. To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playgroud of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Finally: Since the bourgeoisie (present day super-rich and business/banking class in general) claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest. --> They (businessmen) always believed that the public and visible organs of power were directed by their own secret, nonpublic interests and influence. In this sense, the bourgeoisies polictical philosophy WAS ALWAYS TOTALITARIAN. (caps mine) I hear echos and see shadows in our present day. I am frightened by the our subservient judicial systems and lack of independent critical journalism, in any media. The NYTimes is barely more than a U.S. government pamphlet. Im constantly remeinded of Arendts phrase; the banality of evil when referring to Eichman who was no more than a bureaucrat following orders as so many others, then and now.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:41:36 +0000
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