Hannah Arendt, in her essay “Ideology and Terror” (1953), spends the last few pages talking about loneliness, isolation, and solitude. I knew what lay ahead as I read, as it was not my first time through, and I still don’t quite comprehend it. I expected her to say clearly that totalitarian states rely on isolated individuals, as the only power that individuals have is to band together with others. And she does say that, to wit:

It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together, “acting in concert” (Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition.

Here is what I brought into the essay regarding isolation: I was listening to David Sirota’s local talk show one morning, and the subject of 9/11 “Truthers” came up, and Sirota got very agitated and stated bluntly that such subject matter would never be debated on his show, that Truthers bring no evidence to the table, and that he does not discuss whether the sky is blue or water wet. And my immediate reaction was to sympathize with him, as he and I both harbor doubts about the official story. Some of that stuff is just too bizarre to believe (cell phone calls from 35,000 feet, a driver’s license that falls several hundred stories from an incinerated airliner and lands on a New York sidewalk, free-falling buildings whose ashes are laden with thermite and a 16 foot hole that consumed a Boeing 767.
Continue reading “Arendt, Part 3: There will be blood” →

If only the Nazis could have embraced contradiction. After they accepted the premise of Master Race and inferior peoples, it followed that for one to extinguish the other was the right thing to do. It was logically consistent. In the same vein, if Americans could simply accept the idea that Muslims, even though being violent people following a false religion, were nonetheless rather harmless, we could let them live too, maybe even self-govern. It’s not logical, but it would sure makes our lives (and theirs) better if only because we are not running around massacring people.

I’m still digging into Hannah Arendt’s essay, Ideology and Terror, 1953. This is unusual for me in that I am trying to understand her premise and follow through on it to see if it is useful in understanding of how the world really works. I should admit that I am smitten by her. She witnessed first-hand the Nazi regime and its effects on the military and intellectual classes. She fled, while those who did not either gave in and participated or perished. She tried, and without use of bad humans, to explain what had happened there. Continue reading “The ice cold logic of totalitarianism” →

Hannah Arendt was a product of a highly developed Jewish intellectual culture that existed in Europe prior to the rise of Hitler’s Reich. She was able to flee and come to the United States in 1941. Her former lover, Martin Heidegger, succumbed and was one of the intellectual class that supported Hitler. (Such a class also flourished in the US, but was forced underground by events. It is still with us. Current Bush family scions stem from ardent Hitler supporters.) She later rekindled that affair in secret, as love overcomes all.

Arendt was a disciplined thinker who wrote in hard prose that requires concentration and patience. She will carry on about an idea, develop it and then, in one sentence finish its expose’ with startling clarity. So it is that she tells us after several pages of her essay called “Ideology and Terror” (1953)* that terror in a totalitarian society serves the same purpose as “honor in a monarchy, [and] virtue in a republic.” What is needed is what Montesquieu called a “principle of action”, or a reason to move forward.

Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for nor against men. It is supposed to provide the forces of Nature or History with an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement. This movement, proceeding according to its own law, cannot in the long run be hindered; eventually its force will always prove more powerful than the most powerful forces engendered by the actions and the will of men.** But it can be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably by the freedom of man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot deny, for this freedom – irrelevant and arbitrary as they may deem it – is identical with the fact that men are being born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense, the world anew. From the totalitarian point of view, the fact that men are born and die can only be regarded as an annoying interference with higher forces. Terror, therefore, as the obedient servant of natural or historical movement has to eliminate from the process not only freedom in any specific sense, but the very source of freedom which is given with the fact of the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new beginning.

Continue reading “Old tryanny, new names” →

Naomi Klein crossed a line in her book “Shock Doctrine.” In it she identified terror as the primary weapon of totalitarianism. She would be fine doing that if she only stuck to American principles and identified terrorists as non-American actors. But she didn’t and is therefore, like Chomsky, a non-existent person in our society. She has power and influence, but we have to seek her out. She will not appear to us unless by accident, as she is not allowed in mainstream media.

The idea that Americans can be totalitarians and terrorists at once is abhorrent to our intellectual class because we are thought to represent noble ideas like “capitalism” and “free enterprise.” Embedded in both labels is the idea that our way of life represents the apex of human freedom. Therefore the idea that we would torture or enslave other humans is the very antithesis of our being.
Continue reading ““Americanism” and terror” →

Anyone paying close attention to international events over the decades implicitly understands that the United States is not interested in either democratic rule or human rights. Quite the opposite. In addition, the US media only directs our attention to places where the US military industrial complex wants that attention directed.

So when we learn that the US supports the protest movement in Syria, a concerned citizen has to ask the question “Why?” Obviously there are strategic reasons, as generally the US seeks to surround the oil fields of the Mideast. Pervasive anti-US sympathy throughout the region eliminates the possibility of self-rule. Democracy and human rights are not in the best interest of the US. Ergo, dictators like Mubarak, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the House of Saud are installed, supported, and replaced as necessary.

I merrily went along assuming that the answer is that the US doesn’t tolerate independent governments anywhere in the region for any reason, but the following words from Paul Craig Roberts do offer some illumination:

“The United States is bold in stirring up the opposition and in arming it. They used the cover of the Arab Spring and Arab protests as they did in Libya,” he said. “These are not spontaneous protests, and certainly in an authoritarian state like Syria you wouldn’t find people in opposition able to readily supply themselves with arms, with military weapons.”

What’s involved here is that the Russians have a naval base in Syria, and the Americans don’t want a Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean. And, just as in Libya, the problem was the Chinese oil investments. If Syria goes, Iran is in the target sites, and Lebanon.

I started running at age forty, and after working myself up to a five-mile habit, began to notice knee pain. I kept at it, and ended up with sore knees. So I moved indoors, and ran on a treadmill, five miles still my benchmark. That ended in knee surgery and sound advice from a doctor: Stop doing that.

All the while my weight was increasing. It was almost as if there were no correlation between exercise and body fat, because I was surely in the upper percentiles in terms of physical exertion.
Continue reading “Getting off the treadmill” →