Thread by @justinpodur

So, after reading Losurdo's book on nonviolence, a thread on why Hannah Arendt is no guide for leftists (probably most of you know this, so skip if you already knew).

Arendt is famous for a phrase, "the banality of evil", and for the analysis of "totalitarianism". The phrase is of course clever but by now confuses more than it helps, since there are obviously evils that aren't banal and banalities that aren't evil, so whatever.

Totalitarianism is an analysis that has enabled the enemies of equality and the defenders of hierarchy to conflate any attempt at making society more equal with Nazism, because equality and utopias are communism, and communism is totalitarianism, which is Nazism.

... which is ahistorical, stupid, and... well, banal. Also in our current moment, is emboldening fascists, neo-nazis, and ultra-right wingers generally who claim (as they always have) to be fighting communists and totalitarians.

Arendt's style is also based on this mass psychological explanation, favoring it over historical and material facts.

So, useless stuff there. Now let's get into the worse than useless.

Arendt can't tell the difference between the colonizer and the colonized.

"As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it, just as we couldn’t agree with the terror of the National Liberation Army in Algeria...

"People who did agree with this terror and were only against the French counter-terror, of course, were applying a double standard…"

chomsky.info/19671215/

Arendt took a bold stand... against busing during the civil rights struggle.

Arendt said that the “Colonialism and imperialism of European nations” was “the one great crime in which America was never involved.”

During the US war on Vietnam, Arendt in the US wrote “there has been no torture here, nor do concentration camps exist, nor terror.”

Don't know if she never heard of Haiti's Revolution: “The rarity of slave rebellions and uprisings among the disinherited and downtrodden is notorious; on the few occasions when they occurred it was precisely ‘mad fury’ that turned dreams into nightmares for everybody.”

Arendt generally has a low opinion of the oppressed: “it was never the oppressed and degraded themselves who led the way, but those who were not oppressed and not degraded but who could not bear it that others were.”

But my favorite is the bold stance Arendt took against the Third World and these words that really ring out.

"I am truly of the opinion that the third world is exactly what I said, an ideology or an illusion...

Arendt continues: "Try telling a Chinese sometime that he belongs to exactly the same world as an African Bantu tribesman and, believe me, you'll get the surprise of your life."

Quite a way to dismiss the entire history of South-South solidarity.

The ignorance across these issues is so spectacular that it can't really be ignorance. Instead, to use a *psychological* analysis, it's a eurocentric animus against the oppressed in the rest of the world.

Finally, do an index search in Stonor Saunders's book The Cultural Cold War.

Arendt's in there. And lots of Orwell too.

Thinking through a political problem? Skip Arendt.