Dilip Simeon's blog

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” “Loneliness is personal, and it is also political,”  Olivia Laing wrote in  The Lonely City , one of the  finest books of the year . Half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) examined those peculiar parallel dimensions of loneliness as a profoundly personal anguish and an indispensable currency of our political life in her intellectual debut, the incisive and astonishingly timely 1951 classic  The Origins of Totalitarianism  ( public library ). Arendt paints loneliness as “the common ground for terror” and explores its function as both the chief weapon and the chief damage of oppressive political regimes. Exactly twenty years before h...

Camps and pariahs are still with us. They have never been more numerous To be unwanted is never just about being rejected by those who throw you out. Hannah Arendt  was on her way to lunch with her mother Martha when a Berlin policeman arrested her and took her to the presidium at Alexanderplatz. It was 1933. Hitler had been in power for several months; Hermann Göring’s agents were rounding up suspicious activists. The young researcher for the German Zionist Organization spent eight days in jail while gendarmes scoured her apartment, examined her philosophical notes, and pored over her mysterious codes — a selection of Greek quotes. Upon her release, she packed her bags. Since the torching of the Reichstag in February, life had become hell for socialists, communists, and Jews. Like others before her, and more after, Arendt fled to Paris. She would spend the next 18 years as a refugee, a stateless person, a pariah. There are 60 million refugees in the world, the hig...

by Richard Young To be sure, German born Jewish American political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is by no stretch of the imagination a household name in 2013. Nor is it likely that director Margarethe von Trotta's fine biopic,  Hannah Arendt , now playing at London's Hyland Cinema is going to have patrons lined up in droves at the box office.  Especially at a time when the antics of the likes of pop star Miley Cyrus and her ilk and movies about comic book superheroes seem to have captivated so many North Americans for some unfathomable reason.  Pity, for von Trotta's film is a powerful reminder that ideas do matter and that evil ideas have the power to do great evil and have dire consequences for humankind. The film also flies in the face of the apparent anti-intellectualism which has seized North American society. How refreshing it is to enjoy a film in which the characters are depicted as intelligent, thinking individuals for whom conversation and witty repart...

For the new year, here are some prophetic excerpts from two essays of Hannah Arendt’s, collected in  The Jewish Writings  (2007). Please note her predictions of the Nakba, of unending conflict, of Zionist dependence on the American Jewish community, of ultimate conflict with that American Jewish community, and the contribution of political Zionism to world anti-semitism. Just what Howard Gutman  said recently. For  which he was denounced by– Zionists. Zionism Reconsidered, 1944: Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse. This is the threatened state of Jewish nationalism and of the proposed Jewish state, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab people. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine–nay even a transfer of all Palestine’s Arabs, which is openly demanded by the revisionists–would not substantially ...

Arendt shows us “how to think the world anew […] how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology,” Hill writes. “Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world.”    The peak of her pariahdom came when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial for  The New Yorker , which culminated in her 1963 book,  Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . Hill scarcely breaks a sweat defending Arendt on the Eichmann matter, which is still alive and kicking in parts of academe. Hannah Arendt : by Samantha Rose Hill Reviewed by Shaan Sachdev Hill has obviously heard it all, knows where most strictures fail to hold water, and gives Arendt the last word: 'To Arendt the most upsetting part of the literary show trial was that she was pronounced guilty for a book she had never written. Most of her critics had, she wrote, not even bothered to read it. They objected to her ironic tone, not its content...

What Arendt’s work tells us about the value of universities as places of thinking together Education was, for Arendt, an expression of that care – “the point at which”, as she wrote in her 1954 essay on The Crisis in Education , “we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it”. Education provides us with a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion: a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing, to understand what it means to “assume responsibility”. She had observed at first hand how such opinion can solidify into ideology. Universities are – if nothing else – places where people meet to think together. Hannah Arendt passed through many such places in the course of her life, but never defined herself as an academic. She was – first and last – a thinker. She thought about many things, but particularly abo...

NB:  Tony Judt was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize in 2007. For the first decades after 1945 the gas chambers were confined to the margin of our understanding of Hitler’s war. Today they sit at the very center: for today’s students, World War II is about the Holocaust. Inmoral terms that is as it should be: the central ethical issue of World War II is“Auschwitz.” But for historians this is misleading. For the sad truth is that during World War II itself, many people did not know about the fate of the Jews and if they did know they did not much care. There were only two groups for whom World War II was above all a project to destroy the Jews: the Nazis and the Jews themselves. For practically everyone else the war had quite different meanings: they had troubles of their own. ..And so, if we teach the history of World War II above all—and sometimes uniquely—through the prism of the Holocaust, we may not always be teaching good history. It is hard for us to accept that...

"I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.." Courtesy Aeon magazine Philosophy: Kwame Anthony Appiah - how to swing honour away from killing & towards peace Hannah Arendt died 40 years ago. Her legacy remains uncertain. Born in 1906 to a secular, assimilated German-Jewish family in what is today Hanover, she rejected the designation ‘political philosopher’, preferring instead to be called a ‘political theorist’. Theory, as she saw it, allowed her to expand from philosophy’s singular man to the experiences of plural men, and to say something enduring about the collective struggle of humanity as it confronted the unprecedented violence of the 20th century. Of course, what that something was remains elusive, perhaps even muddled. Mirror...