Mick Hartley

The NYRB has generally adopted an anti-war policy over Iraq which is fairly typical of that segment of left-liberal intelligentsia who are its intended readers. It features writers with strong anti-war agendas like Paul Krugman and William Pfaff. In the latest issue there’s an article by Samantha Powers (unfortunately not online) titled “The Lesson of Hannah Arendt”; a version of an introduction to a forthcoming re-issue of Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

Powers inevitably attempts to draw lessons from Arendt’s writings about our current situation, but it soon becomes clear that she’s only interested in doing so from the “official” liberal anti-war position whereby we are currently, with our intervention in Iraq and our war against terror, ignoring Arendt’s supposed lessons. That is, she makes the assumption familiar in this sort of academic writing that some dead thinker would, if they were alive now, hold pretty much the same views as the author happens to hold. In another familiar tactic, she also portrays her own view, and the putative Arendt view, as sitting happily between two extremes:

In the United States since September 11 2001, Americans have begun asking, “Why do they hate us?” The response tends to fall between two extremes. Bush administration officials say, in effect, they hate us for who we are. As President Bush has put it, “They hate progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews, and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.” Adherents of this view ignore the devastating impact of specific US policies on those who have learned to hate. At the opposite extreme stand those who insist that young men and women are flocking to martyr themselves exclusively because of what the US has done. They cite uncritical US support for Israel, its backing of corrupt and repressive Middle Eastern states, and its exploitation of the world’s natural resources. But adherents of this view often overlook the role played by a variety of other social, political, and economic factors in contributing to local misery.

The devastating impact of which specific US policies? Powers’ assumption – that leitmotif of all liberal anti-war opinion – is quite clearly that we are in some way responsible, that we deserve our fate. But which policies? It’s not the poor down-trodden you’d normally associate with US neo-imperialism who are turning to terrorism – say sub-Saharan Africans or Latin Americans. It’s specifically Muslims, who have (or their leaders have) in fact done very well indeed out of the American “exploitation of the world’s natural resources”. Support for corrupt and repressive Middle Eastern states? How much support does the US provide to the Iranian mullocracy? Or Assad in Syria? The most corrupt and repressive of the lot was overthrown a year ago by US and UK forces. Israel? Certainly it’s a source of conflict, but there have been a number of attempts to resolve that recently, leading many to the conclusion that the only solution acceptable to the Palestinians and their Arab supporters would be the total elimination of the state of Israel.

Here are Powers’ conclusions about what Arendt’s views would be now:

Arendt would likely […] summon us to do three things simultaneously: meet the threat abroad, preserve essential freedoms at home, and be unafraid to explore the motives and aims of the enemy. In meeting the threat, she would argue that lethal collective movements cannot be met with words alone, but must also be met with force. As one disgusted by the convenient patience and wishful thinking of European statesmen before and during the holocaust, Arendt would undoubtedly urge us to rid ourselves of our “common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous” and make all necessary sacrifices to guard against chemical attacks, dirty bombs, and other atrocities that our imagination can hardly dare to broach.

Well okay: isn’t that what Bush and Blair have been attempting? But Powers then goes on to ignore completely what she’s just written:

Origins shows that Arendt would not be satisfied with a policy that aimed to violently crush today’s threat without seeking to understand it. In the preface to Origins , she set out “to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved….”

So it goes, as she bemoans our stupid leaders aiming to “violently crush” the terrorists without understanding them. So she’s not serious then. All this talk about force doesn’t really mean force: it’s just words. Against the Nazis, against Stalinism, force was justified, but that was then. It’s stuff you read about in books. [Or is she saying that, according to Arendt, Churchill and Roosevelt should have waited till she’d written her book and had a better understanding of Nazism before they started fighting back?]

Arendt, then, seems fairly robust in her belief that totalitarianism must be countered with force. Powers however reaches this conclusion:

It simply has to be true, given the human costs and nuclear stakes of the contemporary showdown, that we can never know too much about terrorist movements, and that we can never try too hard to alleviate the indignities and inequalities that may help fuel the threat.

It has to be true that for Powers, Arendt is saying what she wants her to be saying, because she can’t countenance any other view, but it doesn’t seem to me that that’s what Arendt’s saying at all. Arendt is arguing that we need to understand why people support totalitarianism: what makes people do these awful things. She’s not arguing that in each case we need to understand why that particular totalitarianism has arisen, and try to ameliorate those particular root causes. How would you have done that in the case of the Nazis? Give them some of what they wanted? – Czechoslovakia say? You can’t deal with totalitarianisms; you oppose them. The attempt to understand the root causes in Powers’ sense is precisely the kind of wishful thinking that so disgusted Arendt about European statesmen in the Thirties.