#441
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The Littlest Eichmann of them All

#442
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To be fair to ourselves, I don't think of any of are actually in a position to provide logistical support for mass genocide. So there is no reason to self-criticize on that point, at least.

Edited by RedMaistre ()

#443
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

RedMaistre posted:

I don't think of any of are actually in a position to provide logistical support for mass genocide.

there are several American posters including myself.

#444
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +

RedMaistre posted:

I don't think of any of are actually in a position to provide logistical support for mass genocide.

Speak for yourself!

#445
Poronto
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why do we call them little eichmanns when eichmann was supposed to be very little in his own right
#446
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More and more I like the Tupamaros slogan "words divide us, actions unite us"
#447
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Anyway, wasn't eichmann himself not a "little eichmann", since its been established that he was a sincere and committed Nazi during the war, not "merely " the morally myopic bureaucrat that Arendt represented him as being?
#448
hi
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uhhhhhhhhhhh idk tell ward churchill.
#449
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Yeah, you know, Eichmann takes a whole lot of undeserved shit. Imo.
#450
Kurdt
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🎵everyone's a little bit eichmann🎵
#451
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Belief in the banality of evil is the twelfth form of liberalism.
#452
Mike Nelson here.
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RedMaistre posted:

Belief in the banality of evil is the twelfth form of liberalism.

I believe in the banality of evil, but only because I believe in the banality of all existence.

#453
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the main annoying aspect to corey robin is his arendt infatuation
#454
political car tune
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Flappo posted:

Was user Faux Shoah one of the LF gang? That was the best username ever and I want to know who it was.



That username came from the LFest username thread iirc and a regular picked it up. that was middle-term LF, though, before LFest became a hated meme

#455
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On the controversy about Israel that came up when Arendt published Eichman In Jerusalem, Arendt mused about how she was being not only attacked for things she never said, but defended for them as well.








Cue commentary about how this post is an endorsement of liberalism implying support of a, b, and c and opposition to x, y, and z

Edited by laika ()

#456
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that post is an endorsement of liberalism implying support of a, b, and c and opposition to x, y, and z
#457
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I could go into detail about how the concept is about Heidegger's Das Man and could actually be about uncritically accepting (neo)liberalism but that would be effort and nobody cares and that automatically means I accept everything she said about Marx and/or the Soviet Union
#458
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

laika posted:

I could go into detail about how the concept is about Heidegger's Das Man and could actually be about uncritically accepting (neo)liberalism but that would be effort and nobody cares and that automatically means I accept everything she said about Marx and/or the Soviet Union

I'm sure somebody cares so you should probably go into detail... people like you when you go into detail

#459
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Ok, well in Being and Time, Heidegger has some things to say about the public sphere and the "They" (Das Man). It is doing or thinking something because They do, which is inauthentic.

Under the Nazis, a lot of people just kind of went along with it without questioning and her point about Eichman isn't that he was uniquely evil, it's that he wasn't out of the ordinary. It's about when horrible injustice is the normal way of things. While not the same as Nazi Germany, that can be interpreted as how neoliberalism is now. It has horrible social consequences that people realize to some extent but just accept and feel like it's simply the way things are and nothing could be different.

This doesn't mean that working in a bank makes you a mass murderer or evil, it's the part of the social conditions we find ourselves thrown into. Just simply taking a step back and thinking about it and not accepting it as inevitable is a step in the right direction even if not enough to fix it.
#460
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Thank you for summerizing the philosophical background for Arendt's position. It clarifies the subtle anti-democratic twist of her argument. which alleges that Eichmann was bad because he sheepishly followed the masses, not because he, like Heidegger, was a convinced fascist.

Edited by RedMaistre ()

#461
Kurdt
Post rating: +++++
#462
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Sigh
#463
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Like it's not even the hermeneutics of suspicion, which has a definite place, it's something beyond that entirely
#464
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Where do disagree specifically ?
#465
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I am not opposed tout court to sympathetic readings of liberal intellectuals, for the record.

https://twitter.com/RedMaistre/status/690356919719063552
#466
Online
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le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

Tpaine is cool

he's funny and i care about him tbh but his unending hateful misanthropy is so tired and wrong and is clearly stemming from severe severe depression

#467
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It's not that he followed the masses, it's that he followed the Nazi power and authority
#468
UNUSUALY COOL
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eichmann in jerusalem is an interesting book that was written by the author of the origins of totalitarianism which explained that stalin and hitler might not be so different after all, if you think about it
#469
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I have not said and do not mean to imply that everything she said was right and everyone should put everything down and go read her, I just think that she isn't entirely without merit. She did write about Rosa Luxemborg and edit Walter Benjamin's Illuminations as well as quote Bertolt Brecht not infrequently.

In terms of like what my actual political opinions are, I agree with David Harvey a lot though not all the time and am interested by Marcuse and stuff. I read other people too.
#470
UNUSUALY COOL
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i agree
#471
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laika posted:

It's not that he followed the masses, it's that he followed the Nazi power and authority



Nazi power and authority which associated, as you just explained, with the Heidiggerian concept of the inauthentic Das Man.

#472
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just think that she isn't entirely without merit.

I agree with this.
#473
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It's a theme in her other writings that ti get a sense of from reading her. It's kind of like "The Man"
#474
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And if the issue is Eichmann specifically, she supported the death sentence

E: also, From David Harvey's The New Imperialism


Arendt, interestingly, advances an argument along similar ilar lines. The depressions of the 1860s and 1870s in Britain, she argues, initiated the push into a new form of imperialism:

"Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence gence of `superfluous' money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within the national borders. For the first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money, but export of power followed meekly in the train of exported money, since uncontrolled investments in distant countries threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production into a system of financial speculation, and to replace the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals and gambling bling in the stock market."

This scenario sounds all too familiar given the experience of the 1980s and 1990s. But Arendt's description of the bourgeois response is even more arresting. They realized, she argues, `for the first time that the original sin of simple ple robbery, which centuries ago had made possible "the original accumulation of capital" (Marx) and had started all further accumulation, had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of accumulation suddenly die down'. The processes that Marx, following Adam Smith, referred to as `primitive' or `original' accumulation constitute, stitute, in Arendt's view, an important and continuing force in the historical geography of capital accumulation through imperialism. As in the case of labour supply, capitalism italism always requires a fund of assets outside of itself if it is to confront and circumvent pressures of overaccumulation. lation. If those assets, such as empty land or new raw material sources, do not lie to hand, then capitalism must somehow produce them. Marx, however, does not consider sider this possibility except in the case of the creation of an industrial reserve army through technologically induced unemployment. It is interesting to consider why.

Edited by laika ()

#475
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Some ideas I do like about Arednt is her linking of 19th century colonialism with 20th century fascism and her awareness of connection between racial antisemtism and the development of modern nationalism, though their definitely is a "problematic" angle in the last narrative, since she partially blames the jews for hatred they were subject to (too clannish, too chummy with the ancien regime, etc).
#476
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"My first impression: On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic ... And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country."

-From Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
#477
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By "best' she means the leaders that she alleges helped the Nazis, not all the Jews. That's still one of the things about her that I'm definitely not going to defend.

The way I interpret the book is in the context of all of the "how did this (fascism) happen?" type questions after the was over. There's no doubt that the Nazis were evil and bore the vast majority of the responsibility, but there were also questions about an obligation to resist. This was around the same time as the Milgram experiments, which demonstrated that people were more willing to inflict serious harm if an authority figure told them to do it.

I'm not against all authority by any means, but it's not an unconditionally good thing either.
#478
"Jpg." - Hank Hill
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~My Little Eichmann, My Little Eichmann...~
#479
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The Origins of Totalitarianism only uses "Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same coin" as a gimmick to sell the book IMO. Aren't maybe talks about Stalin for about 10 pages or so and the rest of the book is devoted the origins of Nazism.

All of her points on the "Totalitarian" states are ultimately used to indict all of modern society as being unfavorably close to Nazism, as opposed to Arendt's conception of what a good state should be. And what would Hannah Arendt consider to be a good state? Some idealized version of Ancient Greece that's built on her arbitrary philosophical categories of Human Freedom.

The book is less Cold War propaganda than it is some masturbatory philosophical treatise about how The Greeks Got It Right.
#480
mt.real
Post rating: ~

RedMaistre posted:

"My first impression: On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic ... And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country."

-From Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

I'm half Galician, I guess - but until a year or two ago I didn't know Galicia was a place or that it was the cultural/ethnic commonality between my grandparents who came from either side of the Polish-Ukrainian border.

I definitely don't know what Galician signifies here in context, were they notorious for certain things in Germany/Austria?

I'd ask my grandparents but one is dead (rip, my grandmother) and the other doesn't really want to get into most of it, usually. I think he's (I'm?) secretly Jewish. But I am completely estranged from that half of my family background because... Hitler, I guess.