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For an elegant "Cliffs Notes" version of Origins, I recommend this recent book by Grasso published in 2020:
Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism in 2020: A Short Guide to Mass Movements and Ideology - Daniel Grasso
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Origins-Totalitarianism-2020-...
From an Amazon review, which I agree with: "Grasso has clearly and effectively translated the twentieth-century’s totalitarian crisis into the modern day.
As someone who struggles to grasp Arendt’s philosophy, I appreciate Grasso’s synthesis of her thoughts and how he relates them to our modern political climate. He does this in a very objective/unbiased way—exposing growth areas in both conservative and liberal thought. Overall, this is a fair, helpful, thoughtful, and necessary work."
A fantastic book by Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards discussing the rise of the fascist groups currently active in the US.
Arendt is a vice of mine, where if I could be considered ideological, it would be the logic of her ideas that I have iterated as a framework for interpreting political experiences. When you challenge at the level she did, you make very powerful enemies. What people really go after her for was not Origins but her assessment of Eichmann at his trial, where by recognizing him as merely contemptible, she simultaneously deprived Israel of a super anti-human monster as an easy foil (edit: to have overcome something huge and evil) for their founding story, and made us each individually responsible for moral complicity in evil, and I think many people (mainly secular, I suspect) treated it as an unforgivable betrayal. They found allies among the marxists in academia she had burned pretty hard with Origins, and her work has been pushed into the backwaters of contrarianism since.
Over the last couple of decades, there have been a few posthumous hit pieces on her, mainly by post-marxists who are among the architects of our current wave of the totalitarian strategy, and whenever I read attacks on Arendt I always ask, "why, what are you planning?"
Perfect? No. But between Arendt and Solzhenitsyn, however this wave today plays out, we can't say we weren't warned.
My God yes, we have been warned. But have we listened? And have we told everyone? Is Arendt, specifically Origins, required reading at a majority of public and private universities in the US and Europe? Let alone government high schools, and community colleges? I didn't discover her until recently. Solzhenitsyn also. I still think it's not too late to popularize their work, and explain it's high degree of relevance to contemporary life.
In Europe, as far as I know Arendt is well-known and always popular, particularly on the left.
The "problem" I have with her writings is that, in their precise rationality, they feel utterly bleak. Yes, there are all these terrible dynamics at play, generating totalitarianism from loneliness and monsters from banal people - so what should we do? Is there hope? That doesn't seem to come up. So the reader is left somewhat depressed. (Or at least this is what I remember feeling when I read them, 10-15 years ago.)
> In Europe, as far as I know Arendt is well-known and always popular, particularly on the left.
It's the same in the U.S. Google "banality of evil" to see how well-known her Eichmann article is. I've heard Chomsky refer to it in a significant percentage of the talks he's given.
It's worth looking at who Arendt is not depressing for, but rather, enlightening, and who she provides a pragmatic set of analytical tools for.
For a great (if that's a word for it) documentary about the banality of evil, The Act of Killing features actual government-sanctioned mass murderers feeling proud about what they did. A review: http://archive.pov.org/theactofkilling/film-description/
Great documentary. I can't remember if this was made clear in the film, but everything makes infinitely more sense if you s/Communist/Chinese/. Like with the Holocaust, it wasn't only Chinese who were targeted[1], but fundamentally that was the principle social dynamic that ungirded the unfathomable dehumanization of the victims.
My mom is a senior care provider and one of her clients is an elderly Indonesian immigrant. He immigrated to the U.S. either during or shortly after the genocide. She was telling me stories about how he's always railing against the "communists" in the city, the city being San Francisco. She couldn't quite make sense of his complaints and opinions until I "translated" things for her.
Later, when I learned about that film, I sat down with her to watch it. Countless times through the film she was like, "OMG, that sounds exactly like what [her client] says".
[1] Ethnic Chinese were victimized in Indonesia long before those events, which is why Indonesia has never had as distinct an ethnic Chinese community as most other SE Asian countries--conversion to Islam and assimilation into the local culture was much more common. I suspect that many non-ethnic Chinese victims during the "Communist purge" were believed to have had Chinese ancestry, and perhaps did indeed. Again, similar to the Holocaust.
I think the killers used anything they could grasp, or invent, to justify the murders, at one point they said communists were atheists, so surely they (the killers) were helping the communists to heaven, because... logic.
It lead to this scene they shot for the movie-in-a-movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ta9To14yw, during it an actor gives Anwar (the killer) a medal and thanks him for executing him, because that sent him to heaven.
The "communists" were "atheists" is another way of saying the "Chinese" weren't "Muslim". Except it's all far more banal than that because most people aren't religious zealots; religion is just one of the principle stand-ins for social and ethnic affiliation that also gives their animus a moralistic color.
It helps to understand something about the Chinese diaspora elsewhere in SE Asia. They generally didn't assimilate culturally and didn't adopt native religions like Christianity or Islam. Adoption of Buddhism (e.g. Thailand and Myanmar) was more common, but Buddhism doesn't preclude ancestor worship or other common quasi-religious practices and thus doesn't require rejecting Chinese culture. Similarly, Straits Chinese (Peranakan), from a much older wave of immigration, did adopt Islam but nonetheless fashioned an entirely distinct culture of their own. Such partial assimilation made it easier to cast doubt on the sincerity of their faith. Again, proving the rule, in Vietnam most Catholic conversions were ethnic Chinese, thus much about French Indochina and the Vietnam War doesn't make sense without understanding the ethnic components. Over 80% of post-war Vietnamese refugees were actually ethnic Han Chinese. This also goes a long way toward explaining why both Malaysia and Indonesia refused to give refugees safe harbor, often towing their boats back out to sea where they were pillaged and sunk by pirates.
I was thinking about Arendt and Eichmann recently, in the context of personal responsibility. I think we place less emphasis on personal responsibility as before (and may be wrong), and I wondered if it was partially a consequence of the Eichmann trial.
In German law, the Eichmann lesson was the opposite: it created (or, more accurately : recognized) a moral duty to refuse to follow unlawful orders. They didn’t let Eichmann get away with his just-following-orders excuse. And subsequently, this principle was explicitly added to the law. German soldiers, for example, are specifically instructed by law, and swear to it as part of their oath, that they will refuse to participate in genocide etc.
Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to German police.
Because the german police was recently involved in genocide?
Come on, surely there are some dark (right wing extremism) patterns in german police too, especially eastern germany - but I really doubt you would find many police men, who would murder on order. Eager to shoot certain population in case of doubt maybe, but not plain murder. That is unnecessary exageration.
There are warnings everywhere but maybe these works are somehow too dense or abstract or inaccessible for people to spend the time on and map to patterns around them in real life. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is after all, a long read in its unabridged form. But warnings can also be found in more accessible places. For example various TV shows or movies or books (like The Three Body Problem). I wonder if those are a more effective historical education.
Solzhenitsyn also wrote “An Incident at Krechetovka Station”, “Matryona's Home”, and “Live Not by Lies”.
I like the piece. Samantha Rose Hill is a good interpreter of Arendt.
If you're interested in reading Arendt, I reccommend Between Past and Future. The chapter called "What is Authority?" is where my political views come from when I'm thinking clearly.
For some background and discussion the In Our Time podcast did an episode on her
The first half feels quite like a glimpse on a forbidden text given the circumstances most of “civilized world” currently lives in.
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem a while back and it was a good read, but I was surprised to find the basic thesis disproven by ten minutes of research. Arendt wants to argue that Eichmann's evil is banal in origin, not malicious or ideological. But in interviews with Eichmann while he was in Argentina, he openly confesses to being a fanatical and long-standing anti-Semite, and to seeing the Holocaust as the eradication of an inferior people.
More recently, I read what is supposed to be Arendt's magnus opus and one of the greatest works of political philosophy of the last century, The Human Condition. I was surprised to find, given the reputation, that it was a conceptual mess. Arendt builds much of the book around a distinction between 'work' and 'labour', but they are neither mutually exclusive nor clearly specified. Her attempt to argue otherwise just leads to compounding error.
That aside, I do like Arendt's short book 'On Violence', which is simple but powerful.
Eichmann was a poor example for Arendt's main idea of evil's banality in certain people and groups, but the idea is far from being invalidated. One book I strongly recommend that reinforces the idea in the modern age is "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" by Christopher Browning. His thoroughly researched book describes the basic nature of most of the members of Nazi death squads in the eastern occupied territories, and yes, he strongly underscores just how ordinary and otherwise banal so many of them were or would have been had they not been guided into the German order police battalions (ordnung polizei)
That book is disturbing as hell as it shows just how nonchalant many were to the mass killings. Most of the excerpts are taken from letters or diaries of perpetrators so you can read exactly how they described the events themselves.
The stories of the dozens of children locked up (parents already killed) and starving and how the authorities had to tell the guards how this is upsetting the population and to not let it happen again - that is, let the population see the conditions the children are in.
Or the mass shootings of groups of kids all the way down to toddlers.
Extremely disturbing, and as you mention, especially the nonchalance with which the "ordinary men" describe their revolting atrocities to their own families back home... Browning really did his research well and for anyone with children of their own, the descriptions of killing them are extremely hard to stomach.
Also, being an anti-semite does not make one an unusual person, especially if we're talking about the central European culture of the mid 20th century, where this idea was extremely common even among many otherwise ordinary people. Eichmann may have been fanatically hateful towards jews, but this was for one thing far from uncommon and secondly, far from something that would have probably led him to participating in their systematic extermination had the Nazi regime not come into existence with all that it did.
I didn't know much about her but color me intrigued. She sounds like an antidote to the zeitgeist and a voice that is sorely needed.
She wrote about things everyone writes about, but she put them in contexts that other people ignored.
That's why she's still relevant. It's not just that a thing happened and what the author thinks about the prevailing opinion of why that thing happened, but what was the historical, social, cultural context that led to it? That sort of thing she had a talent for explaining, without worrying about who she offended the ideology of in the process, as the article states.
Her ideas are over half a century old but are frighteningly applicable to current events. As a species we seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes again and again.
We do make the same mistakes, probably the same our ancestors made millions of years ago. Just happens to look a bit different each century thanks to technology.
How does her work compare with that of Rebecca West, who also wrote on some of the same themes.