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| Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) |
Hannah Arendt
Interview with the French writer Roger Errera, 1974
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The
second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how, Anything is
better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass
sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the
people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they
didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s
very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior.
They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the
much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated
not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor—coordinated with the
majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him.
And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous
emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one
another.
Lies
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.
Contingency and History
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| Roger Errera |
The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been
foreseen. We don’t know the future but
everybody acts into the future. Nobody
knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done
by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell
the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely
contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all
history.
Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends
on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you
look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can
tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its
ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all
people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false.
But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all
of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages—had no other alm than
Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it
possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened
otherwise?
Facts and Theories
A good example of the kind of scientific mentality that
overwhelms all other insights is the “domino theory.” The fact is that very few
of the sophisticated intellectuals who wrote the Pentagon Papers believed in
this theory. Yet everything they did was based on this assumption—not because
they were liars, or because they wanted to please their superiors, but because
it gave them a framework within which they could work. They took this framework
even though they knew—and though every intelligence report and every factual
analysis proved to them every morning—that these assumptions were simply
factually wrong. They took it because they didn’t have any other framework.
People find such theories in order to get rid of contingency and
unexpectedness. Good old Hegel once said that all philosophical contemplation
serves only to eliminate the accidental. A fact has to be witnessed by
eyewitnesses who are not the best of witnesses; no fact is beyond doubt. But
that two and two are four is somehow beyond doubt. And the theories produced in
the Pentagon were all much more plausible than the facts of what actually
happened.
Jews
The “giftedness”—so to speak—of a certain part at least of
the Jewish people is a historical problem, a problem of the first order for the
historians. I can risk a speculative explanation: we are the only people, the
only European people, who have survived from antiquity pretty much intact. That
means we have kept our identity, and it means we are the only people who have
never known analphabetism. We were always literate because you cannot be a Jew
without being literate. The women were less literate than the men but even they
were much more literate than their counterparts elsewhere. Not only the elite
knew how to read but every Jew had to read—the whole people, in all its classes
and on all levels of giftedness and intelligence.
Evil
When I wrote my Eichmann in Jerusalem one of my main
intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic
force, to take away from people the admiration they have for the great
evildoers like Richard III.
I found in Brecht the following remark:
The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed
especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who
permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The
failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot.
Now, that Hitler was an idiot was of course a prejudice of
the whole opposition to Hitler prior to his seizure of power and therefore a
great many books tried then to justify him and to make him a great man. So,
Brecht says, “The fact that he failed did not indicate that Hitler was an idiot
and the extent of his enterprises does not make him a great man.” It is neither
the one nor the other: this whole category of greatness has no application.
“If the ruling classes,” he goes on, “permit a small crook
to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our
view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook and that what
he does has great consequences does not add to his stature.” And generally
speaking, he then says in these very abrupt remarks: “One may say that tragedy
deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.” This
of course is a shocking statement; I think that at the same time it is entirely
true. What is really necessary is, if you want to keep your integrity under
these circumstances, then you can do it only if you remember your old way of
looking at such things and say: “No matter what he does and if he killed ten
million people, he is still a clown.”
Progress
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better
than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and
better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being
measured.
