Repeat some of Hannah Arendt mentions - dropdeadfred, Five myths about the refugee crisis
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But it is vital that we pay attention, not just for humanitarian reasons but because displacement points to a dangerous weakness in liberal democratic societies. Although we have come to regard certain rights as fundamental and universal, these are often only guaranteed through membership of a nation-state. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that the inability of states to guarantee rights to displaced people in Europe between the world wars helped create the conditions for dictatorship. Statelessness reduced people to the condition of outlaws: they had to break laws in order to live and they were subject to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. Being a refugee means not doing what you are told – if you did, you would probably have stayed at home to be killed. And you continue bending the rules, telling untruths, concealing yourself, even after you have left immediate danger, because that is the way you negotiate a hostile system.
But the presence of millions of displaced people also became a powerful tool for those regimes that wanted to undermine the idea of universal human rights. “Look,” they could say, “there’s no such thing; you only get rights by being part of the nation”. Instead of resolving this problem, governments cracked down on unwanted migrants, giving police forces extensive powers that were eventually also wielded over their own citizens. This happened in the western European democracies, argued Arendt, and not just in the totalitarian states.
This has a disturbing parallel with the new powers and security infrastructure – from Britain’s “hostile environment” and laws criminalising European citizens who help migrants to the “temporary-stay facilities” that Italy’s new, far-right interior minister has proposed as part of a plan to increase deportations – that European governments are creating. Far from being the barbarians they are often portrayed as – a mass of “illegals” threatening European security and identity – rightless people appear “as the first signs of a possible regression from civilisation”, Arendt warned.
"Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Part 2 of Interview with Robert Paxton, Father of Fascism Studies [... to bottom] ROBERT PAXTON: He did attack the pope. The content of what he says is utterly irrelevant.It’s the style. It’s the sort of image he projects of being an outsider, a nonpolitician, who’s going to use force and fix it for us. And that seems to be unshakable. And that’s something new. That’s a surprise."
A Yale philosopher on fascism, truth, and Donald Trump.
By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Sep 19, 2018, 8:10am EDT
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder – review
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Bloodlands won Snyder the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought, and this book makes Arendt’s analysis of fascism a touchstone. Snyder reminds you, for example, that the definition of totalitarianism that Arendt offered was not the creation of an all-powerful state, but “the erasure of the difference between public and private life”. We are free, Snyder notes, “only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us and how they come to know it”.
-- Snyder offers reminders of just how quickly unacceptable behaviour became normalised on Trump's campaign trail --
The manner in which western populations have broadly accepted the fact of surveillance, and willingly surrendered their identities to social media, has already gone a long way to removing that dividing line between public and private. Snyder counsels extreme caution in rubbing out that distinction further. He calls for a “corporeal politics”, voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; face-to-face interaction rather than email, marching not online petitioning: “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”
"Trump CIA Pick Leaves Door Open to Waterboarding, More Spying on Americans"
How Trump Has Normalized the Unspeakable
He has legitimized bigotry and given the imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence
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In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers like Cesare Beccaria and Voltaire sought to discredit torture as a legitimate tool of the state. It was, they argued, a relic of barbarism, both unjust and ineffective. In the democratic age that was then dawning by fits and starts, torture would have no official place. It could not be a formal part of the legal system, nor could it be publicly defended by those claiming their right to govern from the people and, as their reason for governing, to serve the people.
This didn’t mean that torture disappeared; far from it. But the Enlightenment critique did lead to a public rejection of the practice. When it did continue, it was either in dictatorships or, in democracies, hidden deep in the shadows, used in extreme situations but never publicly acknowledged. The legal and linguistic wiggle room that democracies created to insulate themselves from charges of torture speaks to the grave moral opprobrium that was directed toward the practice.
Which is why Donald Trump and his supporters’ extraordinary embrace not just of acts of torture but of the word itself was a watershed moment. Here was a man vying for the highest office in the United States, as a candidate of one of the two major political parties, who wanted to turn into a moral good, to romanticize, acts of savage violence that for hundreds of years had been regarded as beyond the democratic pale. In speech after speech, Trump’s rhetoric normalized the extraordinary, making torture simply one more part of the state’s standard tool kit, as run-of-the-mill as fingerprinting or booking. This truly was the banality of evil described by the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
In front of his adoring crowds, Trump played the tough guy well. They wanted theater, and he provided it. They wanted cathartic violence, and he offered it up to them in spades. He was like the Mafia figure in cinema who intimidates and thrills his audiences by talking about his enemies “sleeping with the fishes.” But for all the bravado, the reality-TV star turned presidential candidate never actually got down and dirty and explained to his audiences—especially those people in the military—exactly what he would be asking them to do when, as president and commander in chief, he authorized “the torture” and a “hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
The Seth Rich lie, and how the corrosion of reality should worry every American
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We know now that it’s far worse than that. Given tacit or explicit approval by the administration, this anti-truth movement — championed by Alex Jones, a Trump shill — erodes reason and reality. And those are the basis for a functioning democracy.
The growing absence of truth should worry every American citizen.
“If everybody always lies to you .?.?. nobody believes anything any longer,” said Hannah Arendt, the German American political theorist. “And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
So if you’re wondering why bottom-dwelling conspiracy theorists are allowed in the briefing room, or why Trump insiders promote lies about a young man’s death, you have your answer.
Get Used to This Phrase During the Trump Years: American Authoritarianism
"Authoritarianism: The political science that explains Trump"
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If it wasn't clear already, it's clear by now that we all ought to be re-reading a lot of Hannah Arendt before Inauguration Day. In The Origins of Authoritarianism, she famously warned:
-- Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. --
The only true resistance to whatever comes next is sadly confined to a civic and political imagination that has grown stunted and crippled, and a commitment to truth and to political involvement that long ago surrendered to distraction, flash, and meaningless intellectual junk food. The democratic muscles needed for pushback have atrophied almost to the point of uselessness, and that's alright because the institutions through which those muscles could be used are shells of themselves. Get ready for four (or eight) years of empty spectacle in the service of destructive policies that the president-elect doesn't care enough to understand.
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According to Arendt, the “chief disability” of authoritarian propaganda is that “it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”
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