Hannah Arendt: Voice for the Stateless

Hannah Arendt: Voice for the Stateless

Abstract

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), known as a political theorist, was transfixed with the role of the state in protecting the rights of its citizens. She herself was a stateless person for eighteen years, after the German government in the Nuremberg Laws (1935), stripped citizenship from “superfluous peoples.” She also saw that in Europe during the Second World War, where the government remained in tact after the Nazis invaded, how governments responded — and the fate of the stateless. Only “stateless Jews” not

“French Jews” were deported from France. After Germany invaded Holland in May 1940, the Dutch government fled to England and this made “superfluous peoples” vulnerable. The Nazis deported one hundred four thousand, with only about five thousand surviving. Anne Frank (1929-1945), herself stateless, Holland’s most famous deportee, perished in Bergen-Belsen two weeks before the British liberated it. In Denmark the king not only remained in power but he refused to cooperate with the Nazi genocide machine and so it ground to a halt — all but eighty of Denmark’s seventy-five hundred Jews survived. The state protects its citizens, period. This inspired Hannah Arendt to articulate some of her fundamental ideas of human rights’ protections. Today, with estimates of twenty-six million refugees worldwide, who will ensure their rights? Many have returned to Hannah Arendt’s writing out of recognition the dispossessed require greater protection.

Key Words

United Nations, UN Peacekeeping, Genocide,

Human Rights, League of Nations, Polish Minority Treaty, Refugee, Minority, Stateless, Displaced Person.

Contents 1. Introduction

2. Hannah Arendt 3. The banality of evil 4. Origins of totalitarianism 5. The right to have rights 6. Conclusion

Mark N. Z

Recommender : Professor Brian HARRISON, Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University

1. Introduction

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is perhaps a surprising choice as a guide for addressing today’s gargantuan challenges of refugees. She did not invent the current humanitarian or legal framework, of course, and she may not have been up to the challenge of implementing policies on any practical level, but this is not to say she was merely an “armchair philosopher.” The League of Nations first articulated the ideals that the United Nations incorporated, outlined during the French Revolution in its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Arendt, however, gave brilliant expositions on these themes.

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), her Magnum Opus, is something of a touchstone today for inter- national studies, for it deals head-on with the world’s enervated and beleaguered international system of justice for the dispossessed, so many of whom are slipping through the system’s gapping cracks.

When Hannah Arendt died in 1975, she was known by only a relatively small group of intellectuals (mostly political radicals) and academics that specialized in international studies and political theories.

Unfortunately, she was best known for — even notorious for — a cliché she coined: “the banality of evil”.

She had come to regret using this phrase in connection with the Nazi bureaucratic machine and its operators that carried out the Holocaust. She was brutally demonized for this alone by people who had never read any of her books. Unlike today, Arendt was never considered a major thinker of political theory or of philosophy in general. The reason is that as she was working on her book the newly formed United Nations begin to address many of her own objectives for “rights for the rightless.”

The Universal Human Rights Declaration (1948), as just one example, greatly expanded the rights of refugees, especially Articles 13, 14, and 15: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and resi- dence within the borders of each state” (Article 13). “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including one’s own, and to return to his country” and “Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” (Article 14). More importantly it addressed Arendt’s huge concern, “Everyone has the right to a nationality, and no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nation- ality nor denied the right to change his nationality” (Article 15).

Further, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948) outlined the require- ments of the hundred and fifty-one countries that signed it to both stop and punish genocide (Benhabib 2018: 111-112).¹⁾ UN Peacekeepers, as real boots on the ground, guaranteed the UN could enforce the slogan Never Again regarding another Holocaust. UN Peacekeeping accomplishments have been impres- sive, with fifty-seven completed missions and thirteen current today. From about 1948 to roughly 1990, except for the wars in Korea and Vietnam and sporadic civil wars, the world became more peaceful than it had been at any time in the twentieth-century. These were heady days, fueled by idealism in the United Nations for international cooperation in dealing with the world’s grave humanitarian issues. The end of the Cold War (1946-1990) gave even more hope — the Cold War had hobbled the UN with proxy battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. The First Gulf War (1992) seemed at first a harbinger of this and it succeeded, with the international coalition, including the Soviet Union’s vote, forcing Saddam Hussein (1937-2006), the President of Iraq, to withdraw his invasion troops from Kuwait.

Then the genocide in Rwanda, coming just after the UN debacle in Somalia (1993), soured all opti-

mism. In April 1994, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), with twenty-five hundred troops, arrived to monitor a peace agreement between the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Hutu government. After Hutu extremists killed ten Belgium Peacekeepers, along with the moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agathe (1953-1994), the UN ordered the withdrawal of all but a skeleton crew, leaving the commander, the Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, a few hundred soldiers with strict orders not to fire their weapons. During the next one hundred days the UN and the world watched as Hutu extremists killed nearly one million Tutsi civilians, mostly with machetes (the UN Headquarters in New York was paralyzed after Somalia, when forty-three Peacekeepers were killed and believed another failure in Africa could end all future Peacekeeping).²⁾

The Serbian massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia was another demoralizing blow to hope for a better world. Three hundred-thirty thousand refugees fled the country (1992-1995), following widespread and systematic rape and torture, with close to one hundred thousand murdered, some of them civilians picked off by snipers as they went to work or school in Sarajevo. This culmi- nated in Srebrenica, where, in 1995, Bosnian Serbs executed eight thousand Bosnian Muslim elderly men and boys. All this was frighteningly similar to the Nazi era. NATO intervened militarily to stop the killing of civilians in Kosovo, where the war had spread, by bombing Belgrade in 1999. Yet, interna- tional justice prevailed, though all too late, both for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, thanks to the Tribunal for the Crime of Genocide.³⁾

The Second Iraq War (2003), launched by the United States to uncover Saddam Hussein’s WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), created 4.4 million “internal” refugees, with roughly two-hundred seventy thousand fleeing the horror of a failed state, according to the United Nations High Commis- sioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Iraq spiraled into chaos and has yet to come out of it, providing fertile ground for Iraqi Sunni Muslim fundamentalists to form ISIS. America’s Coalition of the Willing may have been responsible, both directly and indirectly, for the deaths of six hundred thousand Iraqis. More recent is the political turmoil in Venezuela. The Brookings Institute has estimated that by 2020, 4.7 million Venezuelans, or sixteen-percent of its population, are refugees in foreign countries.

Other grim events have shaken the international justice to its core, especially attacks against reli- gious and ethnic groups. In 2017 the Myanmar’s security forces drove over a million stateless Rohingya Muslims out of the country, most to neighboring Bangladesh, where today they live in squalid and dangerous conditions.⁴⁾ In August 2019 news emerged that one million Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Province had been confined in internment camps for “re-education,”⁵⁾ with 1.5 million subjected to forced sterilization, birth control, and abortion — both Myanmar and China today stand accused of violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide⁶⁾ In January 2020 the World Court ordered the government of Myanmar to protect the Rohingya, yet it is not possible for the World Court to order the People’s Republic of China to change its genocidal policies. China, with the United States, never signed on to World Court jurisdiction.

Nations and international agencies have spent $7.4 billion in the first four years of the Syrian refugee crisis; 6.7 million Syrians have fled, scattered around the world in one hundred and twenty-six coun- tries, according to Amnesty International.⁷⁾ This, in addition to a worldwide refugee crisis. Not unsur- prisingly, poorer countries have carried these immense refugee burdens: Turkey with 3.6 million, Jordan

2.9 million, Colombia 1.7 million, Pakistan 1.4 million, Lebanon 1.4 million, Uganda 1.4 million, Sudan 1 million, and Bangladesh with 854,000. Only Germany, among the wealthy, has offered asylum to a proportional number, 1.4 million (Hirsch and Bell 2017). Intense right-wing backlashes, including in Germany, have undermined many of the wealthier democratic countries’ attempts to do more. The 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro featured a Refugee Olympic Team, among the few bright spots in a decades- long barrage of grim and heartrending news, that at least these unfortunate people have gained recog- nition somewhere.⁸⁾

Internationally, people have had a deepening sense that structural changes in the international order were necessary and that there remains a dire need for more effective enforcement of the world’s humane declarations. During the past thirty years, then, people the world over have returned to Arendt’s work for a steady voice of reason pointing out the grave dangers of so many without homes and rights. Arendt wrote that the greatest challenge of these “dark times” (refugee crises) is ignorance and indifference (Arendt 1968:viii). She also spoke of the “illumination” that comes through actions and deeds.

“Refugees,” “Minorities,” “Stateless,” and “Displaced” are rather specialized terms that require some unraveling: A refugee is one who has been driven away from his or her homeland; a minority comes from the political majority declaring a religious or ethnic group as unacceptable to its homogenous nation; a stateless person is one whose native country has revoked his or her citizenship and is no longer protected by its laws; a displaced person is one who has fled his or her country as a refugee, a minority, or a stateless person but who is unable to return or to gain citizenship anywhere (Benhabib 2004: 54-55).

Below I will highlight a little of Hannah Arendt’s life, in a thumbnail overview, and will review key ideas in her most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which offer a window into her soul and some of her fundamental ideas, before commenting on her relevance today. Human rights, though artificial creations, are realized only in communities, Arendt declared, the reason those without commu- nities are in such desperate straights:

Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people.

Man, it turns out, can lose the so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity (Arendt 1951: 297).

2. Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt had been trained as a philosopher and she studied under towering figures of philosophy and theology of her day: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Rudolf Bultmann (1884- 1976), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (Bernstein 2018: 3). Jaspers was her second academic advisor for her dissertation, The Concept of Love in the Work of Saint Augustine, at the University of Heidel- berg, where she received a doctorate in 1928 (Linfield 2019: 19).

Heidegger, her first advisor at the University of Marburg, joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and vocally

supported Nazi policies, even its genocidal intentions toward assimilated Jews, in his addresses as rector of University of Freiburg and in class lectures. This is at least part of the reason for her deep skepti- cism of, even her alienation from, the “group think” of international intellectual and academic life.⁹⁾ Arendt did not want to be tied to any category, even to such simple labels as the Left or the Right, or to any philosophical school, but when one refers to universal rights, or the loss of those rights, automati- cally one is grouped with “the Left.” Further, she could be called “Kantian,” for Immanuel Kant (1724- 1804) is the original formulator of many of her ideas. Arendt, who saw herself as a political theorist, became masterful in taking complicated topics and framing them in a way a more mainstream audience could understand, especially in presenting European philosophy to a non-European audience. It is all the more extraordinary that she wrote her most famous works in English, a language she did not learn until she immigrated to the United States at the age of thirty-five.

Arendt matured between the two world wars, when the numbers of refugees and stateless people rose frightfully to heights never seen before, with roughly twenty-five to thirty million “minority peoples” by 1929, from the collapse of the Hapsburg, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires (Arendt 1951: 272). Many of them would eventually become victims of the Nazi Holocaust, too, and in fact were the Nazis’ first target. She knew this searing experience first-hand: first as a refugee fleeing Nazi Germany and later as a stateless person, even the terror of being a hunted criminal guilty only of a

“thought-crime” (Bernstein 1996: 71-73).

The Nazi government, after the burning of the Reichstag on February 27 1933, began decreeing laws aimed at restricting its Jewish population socially and economically. As a German Jew who participated in Zionist activities, Arendt had come under the suspicion of the Gestapo and, hoping to inform the world of what was happening, began researching anti-Semitism at the Prussian State Library (now the Berlin State Library). A librarian there reported her to the Gestapo, which arrested and imprisoned both her and her mother — her mother had been a socialist activist. An official at the prison, who may have been sympathetic to what Arendt was researching, released them after eight days for lack of evidence (Arendt had also used code language in her notebooks that the investigators could not deci- pher).

They knew they had to leave Germany and fled first to Prague, where Arendt worked for the Jewish Agency for Palestine under the League of Nations, and later that year to Paris (her mother returned to Germany shortly after), where she was defenseless, as a rightless person, to the vicissitudes of govern- ment policy. Germany stripped German Jews of their citizenship in the Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935. Arendt worked in Paris with Youth Aliyah, a Jewish humanitarian organization that assisted young refugees with essentials and with immigration to Palestine (Bernstein 1996: 72). She even visited Palestine in 1935.

Early in 1940, as its war with Germany darkened, France requested all stateless Jews to enter intern- ment camps “willingly.” Arendt found herself with thirty-two hundred “stateless” and one thousand

“French” Jewish women. After France fell to Germany in June 1940, Arendt escaped from the Gurs Internment Camp (Linfield 2019: 20) with about two hundred other women (Owens 2007: 4). The French Vichy government, following orders from the French Gestapo under Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), set up a system to identify all Jews in France. The deportations of the “stateless” Jews began in 1942. About

seventy-two thousand of the stateless would be deported — with only twenty-five hundred surviving the war.

As a stateless person, Arendt knew it was only a matter of time before she, too, would be deported.

She intended to leave France on a risky route to Spain her friend, the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), had tried a few months earlier. After his arrest in Spain, however, Benjamin committed suicide by taking morphine, for he knew what fate awaited him — the fate his brother met in 1942 at Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.

An official at the Emergency Rescue Committee of the American Consulate in Marseilles, Varian Fry (1907-1967), issued exit visas from France and entry visas for America to about three thousand refu- gees. Arendt, her second husband Heinrich Blücher (1899-1970), who as a German Communist activist was also in flight from the Gestapo, and her mother, after her miraculous escape from Germany, all received these precious documents that saved their lives. They left France for Lisbon and, after waiting three months, took a ship to New York City, arriving in May 1941. Arendt’s mother joined them a month later (Bernstein 2018: 6). In New York City they were aided by charitable refugee organizations.

Arendt began writing articles for several obscure Jewish publications and later took a job as senior editor of Schocken Books, America’s most famous Jewish publisher.

Arendt was twenty-seven in 1933 when her ordeal began. For the next nine years she was constantly on the verge of arrest; she became an American citizen in 1951 — a stateless person, then, for eighteen years, the reason the plight of refugees was her life-long obsession. In the United States Arendt saw qualities she felt were antidotes to totalitarianism: pluralism, diversity, mixed nationalities, freedom for spontaneous thought — the very foundations of human freedom (Arendt 1968: 7-8). Granted, Arendt lived in New York City where these characteristics were on full display in a way they were not in the racially segregated Southern United States. Yet for her these pockets of pluralism were the remedy for America’s deep-seated racism.¹⁰⁾

Few thinkers have derived so many of their ideas from their personal experience, but Arendt believed that everyone has the capacity to draw deeply from their experience for higher awareness:

I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which at least for ourselves, contain in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say. Thought itself — to the extent that it is more than a technical, logical operation which electronic machines may be better equipped to perform than the human brain — arises out of the actuality of incidents, and incidents of living experience must remain its guideposts by which thinking soars, or into the depths to which it descends (Arendt 2018: 200-201).

3. The banality of evil

“The Banality of Evil” is the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). At her urging The New Yorker magazine assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) in Jerusalem.¹¹⁾ Marie Syrkin (1899-1989), also a Jewish-American intellec-

tual, wrote: “Who better qualified to report on the trial in depth than Hannah Arendt, scholar, student of totalitarianism and of the human condition, and herself a German Jewish refugee who came to the United States after the rise of Hitler” (Syrkin as quoted by Wisse 2018).

Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel, and not among the top Nazi echelon, had long been considered the principle coordinator of Nazi mass genocide. In January 1942, at what historians call the Wannsee Conference,¹²⁾ held in a suburb of Berlin, Eichmann, known for his organization skills, was commissioned to carry out the deportation of Europe’s Jews to “special camps” (and he personally supervised Hunga- ry’s deportation of Jews that killed about four-hundred and thirty-seven thousand people). Yet, the Final Solution had not been placed directly under his authority, the R.S.H.A. (Reich Main Security Office), but under the S.S. Head Office for Economy and Administration, managed by Heinrich Himmler (1900- 1945) (Arendt 1963: 84). Eichmann described the conference’s results at his trial:

In country after country, the Jews had to register, were forced to wear the yellow badge for easy identification, were assembled and deported, the various shipments being directed to one or another of the extermination centers in the East, depending on their relative capacity at the moment (Eich- mann as quoted by Arendt 1963: 114).

Five “death camps” in Poland had been quickly constructed (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek, which also served as a “work camp”) — with the already existing “work camp” of Auschwitz- Birkenau — and fitted with Zyklon B gas chambers. All those deported to “death camps” went directly into gas chambers, those to “work camps” went first through “a selection” where between seventy-five to ninety percent were destined for the gas chambers. Those who passed worked as “slave laborers,”

commissioned by hundreds of private manufacturing companies, including some of Germany’s most famous: IG Farber, Siemens, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and even in extensions of American compa- nies: Ford Motor Company (Ford-Werke), General Motors (Adam Opel AG), Kodak, and General Electric.

After the war, and using a false name, Eichmann fled to an area fifty miles south of Hamburg, where for four years he worked as a lumberjack. Yet, in the late 1940s, because of the successful capture of many Nazi leaders, Eichmann solicited ODESSA, a clandestine organization of former S.S. members, to help him leave Germany. An Austrian Catholic Bishop in Italy (and Nazi sympathizer), Alois Hudal (1885-1963), helped in falsifying documents for Eichmann, and presented him with a “humanitarian”

Red Cross passport under the name Ricardo Klement. Eichmann stayed in monasteries in Italy, known as “safe houses,” again with Hudal’s help, before immigrating in 1950 to Argentina, where his wife and children joined him two years later. Eichmann lived peacefully in Buenos Aires for ten years, working part of the time for the Mercedes Benz Corporation as a department head. In 1960, the Israeli Secret Service (Mossad) kidnapped him to stand trial in Israel for “Crimes Against Humanity” and fourteen other charges.

At his trial that began on April 11, 1961, Eichmann claimed he harbored no ill will toward anyone and vehemently denied he was an anti-Semite. He claimed instead he had tried to save Jews with his plans to transport them to Madagascar (Snyder 2015: 114; Arendt 1963: 43; 73; 91).¹³⁾ Eichmann’s state- ments convinced Arendt he represented a new kind of criminal, since he could not have been capable

on his own of committing such atrocities (Arendt 1963: 36).¹⁴⁾

Arendt wrote that Eichmann could be viewed as the typical “company man” (Arendt 1963: 287-288);

he did not think independently nor have any real opinions about anything — his only goal was to advance himself ever higher in the company (the Nazi S.S.). For Arendt, with Eichmann as her muse,

“evil” became a surface psychological phenomenon. The more superficial a person, the more susceptible he or she will be to participating in acts of evil encouraged by the social group. After all, the devil in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is a mild-mannered, shabbily dressed poor elderly gentleman who complains of rheumatism — his only goal is to reduce “meaning” in the world. Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005), founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helped track Eichmann down, also affirmed Arendt’s perspective: “The world now understands the concept of ‘desk murderer.’ We know that one doesn’t need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one’s duty.”¹⁵⁾

Arendt’s book created such fierce furor against her, which she had not anticipated, that it continues even today (Owens 2007: 155). The trial had taken place early in the second decade of Israel’s nation- hood, with its founding father, David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), serving as Prime Minister for the second time. It was an era of “national cohesion,” and national survival surrounded by hostile nations, in the shadow of the Holocaust, only fifteen years or so earlier. The Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner (1915- 1990) recounted Israel’s mythic history of persecution from the Bible in his opening addresses — it was the first time in nearly two thousand years the Jewish people collectively held someone accountable for any crimes against them. Arendt, strangely out of tune with any of this, called the court a “show trial”

(Arendt 1963: 48), evoking comparisons with paranoid Joseph Stalin’s (1878-1953) purges of the 1930s, with the Soviet Union’s sham justice system, targeting innocent people, where the outcomes are always known in advance (Linfield 2019: 72).

Arendt made further references to the dark recesses of the Holocaust: The collusion of some Jewish leaders with the Nazis in the deportations — this, of course, had nothing to do with the trial of Eich- mann. The Nazis had set up Judenrat (Jewish councils) in areas they conquered (a tradition from the Middle Ages for collecting taxes). The communities then elected those that headed them — religious leaders or other prominent figures — who were at first responsible for distributing food and medicine.

Later, some cooperated by supplying names and addresses — records synagogues had — to help prepare for deportations and they encouraged communities to follow Nazi instructions, rather than to run away (Arendt 1963: 117). Whether the council members knew how those deported would meet their end is open to question, at least when it began in 1942, but certainly many had heard rumors of Nazi atrocities from 1940 in the Ukraine and surrounding areas, where a million and a half had been shot before thrown (or dropped) into pits. Some among the councils resisted and even thwarted Nazi plans and some committed suicide rather than obey Nazi orders (Bernstein 2018: 60).

It is a disquieting topic, as are the Jewish police which worked under the Nazis to assist in deporta- tions — in essence she implied that the Jewish people participated in their own victimization — but these were the grave moral choices that especially interested Arendt (yet could those deported have imagined what horror awaited them?). By referring to the councils, however, she intended to highlight how the moral rot of the Nazis had spread to everyone, even to the councils. Yet, she went too far,

declaring that without the councils, the number of deaths would have been much lower (Arendt 1963:

117).¹⁶⁾ She did not take into account the successful Nazi mass murder in the Ukraine without the help of the Judenrat. Fierce outrage flared deep and wide against her and has never really ended (it is not possible to predict how things may have been, had history been different). Arendt may have been too haunted by her experience as a stateless person — too attached to German philosophers, some of whom had become Nazis, to deal objectively with such subject matter up close at such a spectacular event.

While her sarcasm may have been defensive, she made the mistake she had cautioned everyone not to make: In order to see clearly, never impose your theories (or ideology) on an event (Bernstein 2018: 48).

Arendt, to surmise something of her deepest intentions, bent the whole project out of shape by using the trial to offer a more modern interpretation of evil — to demythologize evil, based on her earlier work, away from the strict Judeo-Christian ethic, where evil is a demonic force one surrenders to in carrying out horrid acts of malice. Evil should not be seen as Satanic, a force outside one’s control. Evil can be understood. It does not arise from any fundamental human flaw either, except for humanity’s propensity for selfish short-term gain. In fact, calling someone or some group “evil” explains nothing of their reasons, even when their acts are reprehensible (Owens 2007: 49).

Evil today, if one must define it from Arendt’s work, is ideological (and from this hierarchical), for when taken to extremes these monopolize and distort all objective reality: “Genocide (from an ideology) is an attack upon human diversity, as such, without which the very words ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’

would be devoid of meaning” (Arendt 1963: 267). The hideous cruelties have come from these absolutist systems: Imperialism, Nationalism, Bolshevism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism, and, more recently, Pol Pot’s (1974-77) “Angkar” (Communist Party) for absolute social equality. A one party system, therefore, because of its assault on diversity, is inherently evil from its demands for blind submission that obliter- ates everyone’s capacity for independent thought and action:

For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the “riddles of the universe,” or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough promi- nence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all the others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races (Arendt 1951:

159) — here Arendt refers to Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), respectively.

Arendt’s comments on the banal evil of Eichmann, to put them in the most generous terms possible, was also “cultural,” from her Jewish-Germanic intellectual tradition, its extreme irony in the face of dreadful social crises. This tradition was destroyed in the Second World War, of course, and so a great deal of Arendt’s tone, what people most reacted to, is lost on us today — the reason she appeared to lack the gravity the situation required. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) remains its most compelling example.

As he began reading a draft of The Metamorphosis (1915), of a young man who suddenly turned into an insect, his small audience at a Prague coffeehouse roared with laughter. Kafka himself could not finish for laughing (Bloom 1994: 428-432): Cruelty for them, in a strange twist, appeared comic, their

way of coping with their cruel society — the anti-Semitic rhetoric that had labeled them parasitic. This

“metamorphosis,” Kafka showed, is a higher form of evolution, his way of thumbing his nose at the insult. Today, no one laughs when reading The Metamorphosis. Rather, people shudder. The world is on the other side of the Holocaust, when people reduced to vermin were exterminated.

If Kafka is the visionary of this new expression of systemic evil, seen most clearly his book The Trial (1925), created by the rise of nation-states and anti-Semitic ideologies for consolidating political power, then Arendt is its expositor. Both saw totalitarianism in its stark absurdity — Kafka predicting what it would lead to and Arendt reflecting back on what it was. No justice is possible in Kafka’s vision, where the verdict of death is predetermined. Legal terms only cloud the bureaucratic labyrinth as Joseph K., the main character, attempts to defend himself of a crime he has not yet been informed of — and will never know — in a system where it is not possible to win, no matter what one does and so Joseph K. could only play along. Yet, “playing along” with the world of “necessity, injustice, and lies”

meant cooperating in his execution (Arendt as quoted by Stonebridge 2018: 36). When a state is crim- inal, then, everyone with loyalty to that state is criminal by association, even while within it one is seen as behaving normally. Arendt had said of K. in Kafka’s The Castle (1926), “It was not his fault that this society had ceased to be human, and that, trapped within its meshes, those of its members who were really men of good will were forced to function within it as something exceptional and abnormal — saints or madmen” (Arendt 2006: 293).

George Orwell (1903-1950), a kindred spirit of Arendt and Kafka, conveyed this sense of systemic evil in his parody of the Soviet Union, where the state party alone (INGSOC) determines what is true.

Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), an outer party member and journalist for Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, found himself in a Kafkaesque wasteland where Big Brother is the only reference point. The prison chaplain instructed K. in Kafka’s The Trial that in reality truth was no longer refer- ential: “For it is not necessary to accept everything as true. One must accept it as necessary, a-no- choice situation.” “A melancholy conclusion,” said K., “It turns lying into a universal principle.” When INGSOC suddenly changed its enemy, from Eurasia to East Asia, its previous ally, Winston could only follow orders by tossing all documents contradicting this into the “Memory Hole.” After all, “Double- think” trained people to hold two contradictory beliefs in mind simultaneously and to accept both of them as true: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

Orwell’s world dominated by three totalitarian regimes, where “independent thinking” is the real enemy, systematically reduced the number of words in the language. Language is thinking. The

“un-words” had to be discarded with each new edition of INGSOC’s dictionary, soon to have its tenth- edition. As Winston discussed with fellow Ministry of Truth journalists, this whittled away at “thought,”

and all of its Goldstein-isms, until it would no longer be a part of human activity — people were to be guided by their automatic reactions. “Thinking” is a radical act, a secular salvation, what Arendt termed vita cotemplativa (contemplative life) (Arendt 1958: 248-325).

In the Nazi cosmos Hitler was the law, so Eichmann “not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law”

when he obeyed Hitler (Arendt 1963: 137). This banality was a new form of the “grotesque,” where “evil,”

the methodical murder of a race of people, is normal:

Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual ... Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal both through ideological indoctrination of the elite formation and through absolute terror in the camps; and the atrocities for which the elite formations are ruthlessly used become, as it were, the practical application of the ideological indoctrination — the testing ground in which the latter must prove itself — while the appalling spectacle of the camps themselves is supposed to furnish the “theoretical” verification of the ideology (Arendt 1951: 438).

When Arendt singled out ideologies as the true monsters behind the Holocaust, she shifted moral refer- ences as well, which opened her to the accusation she was reducing the Holocaust to moral relativism.

Yet, the minimization of the Holocaust was what she strove to stop — she called it “unprecedented”

(Arendt 1963: 266-268). The prosecution, from her view, had presented the Holocaust as just another incident in a long line of anti-Semitic attacks, beginning with the Pharaoh’s slaughter of Hebrew male babies in Egypt (Exodus 4: 23). The Holocaust transcends all past persecutions and must remain so if the world is ever to address its causes, to create a world where horrors like these no longer occur.

People also interpreted Arendt’s indictment of ideology as empathy toward Eichmann — it was not Eichmann who made the Holocaust successful but the ideology that carried everyone into the abyss.

Arendt flatly refuted this:

If we are to apply this whole reasoning to the Eichmann case in a meaningful way, we are forced to conclude that Eichmann acted fully within the framework of the kind of judgment required of him: he acted in accordance with the rule, examined the order issued to him for its “manifest”

legality, namely regularity; he did not have to fall back upon his “conscience,” since he was not one of those who were unfamiliar with the laws of his country. The exact opposite was the case (Arendt 1963: 293).

Half a dozen psychologists in Jerusalem interviewed and tested Eichmann; all agreed he was “normal”

psychologically by every measure. He was “abnormal” only in the sense he was “too normal.” One psychologist had said, “Eichmann is more normal than I am after examining him” (Arendt 1963: 25-26).

“The trouble with Eichmann,” Arendt wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and terrifying still are, terribly and terrify- ingly normal” (Arendt 1963: 276).

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), a young psychologist at Yale University, himself the son of Jewish immi- grants from Romania and Hungary, spellbound by Eichmann’s trial, proposed an experiment to under- stand why “normal” people like Eichmann “obeyed authority” so easily, even to the point of murdering children.¹⁷⁾ Does not a person have to be a psychopath to participate in such heinous acts? Can ordinary people, even after a lifetime of honest and decent behavior, still tumble down a path that leads to an abyss of criminality?¹⁸⁾ Milgram’s study (1961) remains among the most famous of the twentieth-century and was itself “shocking,” since roughly sixty-five percent administered electrical shocks high enough to kill the subjects had they been real, all following the order of an authority figure, a scientist in a lab

coat.¹⁹⁾ Milgram concludes Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974):

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systemati- cally slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhu- mane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

The fact that Eichmann’s evil was “banal” did not excuse his participation in the evil goals of the social order. Arendt agreed with Eichmann’s sentence, after his conviction on all fifteen counts: Death by hanging — carried out on June 1, 1962 (Bernstein 2018: 61).²⁰⁾

Amos Elon, in his article “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt” (2006), states it was more Arendt’s “tone” than any “facts” she referred to that created a civil war among intellectuals after her book’s publication (Elon 2006: 95). Others add it was her inflammatory language, calling the Chief Rabbi of Berlin during Hitler’s time the Jewish Führer, for example — though she excised this after the first edition — and she used the word “selection” repeatedly — among the most grievous words possible for Holocaust survivors, indeed for Jewish collective consciousness (Linfield 2019: 71-72). Admitting her tone was “inexcusably flippant,” “brash,” and “insolent,” Elon affirmed her place today among the Pantheon of original thinkers by paraphrasing Tony Judt from The New York Review of Books: “Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for that she deserves to be remembered” (Elon 2006: 100).

4. Origins of totalitarianism

Eichmann in Jerusalem, undoubtedly Arendt’s weakest book, pales when compared to her sustained insights on human rights that I now turn to. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is her great contri- bution, for through it she transforms fundamental perceptions of politics, statelessness, and human rights (Linfield 2019: 19). No one reading it deeply ever sees the world quite the same again.

Arendt had witnessed — and deeply reflected on — the breaking apart of the great multiethnic empires after the First World War (1918): the German Empire, the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, some of which had lasted for over five hundred years. She was sensitive to the grave dangers of empire dissolution. Since these were multinational societies their governments had at least the ideal of protecting everyone equally, albeit under a monarchy, even if not specifically stated in their constitutions. Would nation-states based on ethnicity and language alone ruthlessly and mercilessly dominate its minorities? She places her two most important chapters back to back: Chapter Eight: Continental Imperialism: the Pan-Movements with Chapter Nine: The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.

Arendt also understood what few others of the time had: Colonialism had deeply damaged Europe’s spiritual core, incapacitating it to live up to its own human rights ethics. Peoples in lands it colonized had no civil protections and mainly served colonial economic interests. This altered the political DNA both of Europe and the United States, as Arendt said, “that the unprecedented, once it has appeared,

may become a precedent for the future” (Arendt 1963: 273). That is to say, once nations cross a moral threshold in how they treated fellow human beings abroad, it was a small step to treat “others” within their own borders similarly. Further, once a nation (Germany and the many others under Nazi occupa- tion) had carried out, or cooperated with, the systematic genocide of “others” on a massive scale, the world entered the realm, a new world really, where those Arendt called “superficial people” could poten- tially be annihilated.

Despite the United Nations’ valiant articulation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), it could not stop recent genocides while these were taking place in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to name just two of the most notorious instances. The UN watched, in the case of Yugoslavia, for years and years, bogged down in endless negotiations over borders that only bought more time for the victimizers to murder more people. The world was shocked that peoples living side by side for generations suddenly turned on each other with murderous intentions. Perhaps Arendt would not have been shocked by the harsh nationalism that arose in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, for it, too, was a multiethnic, multinational empire based loosely on universal goals — more honored in the breach, of course, but a part of its ethos nonetheless, overtly stressing as it did the evils of nationalism and fascism in its march to a new economic, worldwide order.

Arendt began her discussion of imperialism in Chapter 6 with Joseph Conrad’s (1857-1924) classic novel The Heart of Darkness (1899), where Europeans from the “lower classes” gobbled up territory on behalf of their countries, consumed with moral duplicity toward native populations. These pioneers of colonialism, from Conrad’s perspective, were the criminal elements (if only latent), as Arendt quoted Charles Marlow, Conrad’s ambivalent hero, on his journey down the Congo River to the center of Africa, to his first encounter of the native population:

The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us — who could tell? We were cut off from comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be, before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone leaving hardly a sign — and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly ... the men ... No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (Conrad as quoted by Arendt 1951: 190).

Colonialism injected a new strain “of infinite possibilities” into the circulatory system of “democratic and civilized” powers, where “the others” collectively became a means to an end — greater economic wealth. In effect, the “heart of darkness” entered Europe and the United States, something Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), an early advocate of universal rights, had implored the world to be mindful of: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity in all your actions as an end, and never as a means only” (Kant as quoted by Benhabib 2004: 58). The wholesale enslavement of vast populations, with estimates as high as

12.5 million Africans captured as merchandise for the slave markets of the world (Gates 2014), affirmed only the law of the economic jungle. This was the cowardly launch of modern totalitarianism.

Arendt is insightful on this topic: “Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist produc- tion came up against national limits to its economic expansion” (Arendt 1951: 18). Thus began the competition to find new markets. In the first stages of colonialism “for profit” companies ruled the colo- nies: The British East India Company (1600) in India, the Dutch East India Company (1603) in Indo- nesia, the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670) in Canada, and the British South Africa Company (1889) in Rhodesia. The colonial powers excluded the colonial populations from citizenship — they were “subjects”

not “citizens.” Colonialism took place, as Conrad wrote, outside a civilized world that held people accountable, where “kind neighbors ready to cheer or to fall on you stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums” (Conrad as quoted by Arendt 1951: 193).

It was an ominous moment as Arendt recognized, “Outside all social restraint and hypocrisy, against the backdrop of native life, the gentlemen and the criminal felt not only the closeness of men who shared the same color of skin, but the impact of the world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play” (Arendt 1951: 190). It is the Great Game, as British Imperialists had called it, that inflicted grave moral wounds on the “civilized world,” beginning with the Spanish and the Portuguese in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, followed by England, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Italy claiming wide swaths of land in North America, Africa, and South Asia — the United States, hypocriti- cally professing anti-imperialism, later subjugated all its Native Peoples (who only became citizens in 1924) and replaced Spain as the colonial masters in the Philippines in 1898. This domination of “the other” brought astronomical economic benefits, its “infinite possibilities” as Arendt had declared, with great expanses of land, raw materials, and free — or nearly so — labor. Pandora’s Box let fly both great wealth and moral ruin from the same opening, its rot lingering today.

The modern world’s totalitarianism, then, whether of the Right (Fascism) or the Left (Communism), originated in the colonial period and continues its assault on human dignity — since there is a thin line between depriving people of their rights and depriving people of their lives. Rights, as Arendt stressed again and again, could only be realized within a community. The logic of totalitarianism, then, is in its complete domination of the person. The Nazis kept testing to see how far they could go in their Final Solution, with the death camps serving “as laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitari- anism that everything possible is verified” (Arendt 1951: 430-438). The camps were meant not only to degrade and exterminate people but also to serve the ghastly experiment of elimination under scientifi- cally controlled conditions.

As the murder increased the Nazis found that no other country protested — these people, then, were not wanted anywhere. Arendt detailed a frighteningly accurate process the Nazis used for dehumaniza- tion: The first is killing the “judicial” person, which the Nuremberg Laws (1935) effectively did, barring Jews from appealing to a court for any adjudication. The second was to destroy the “moral” person — this was done in the concentration camps by removing all choice. In fact, the only choice of not to participate was suicide — since surviving for that particular day by gathering enough breadcrumbs and drinking enough watery soup to live to the next day were the inmates’ only focus. The final degra-

dation was to destroy any “individuality:” “After the murder of the moral person and the annihilation of the judicial person, the destruction of individuality is almost always successful ... [It is] to destroy spon- taneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources” (Arendt 1951: 455). Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four emanates from here as well.

The many personal accounts of the Holocaust experience, from Anne Frank’s to Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl’s, all affirm the pealing away of human dignity, reducing individuals to the hunted or incarcerated animal. As Arendt related, “There is only one thing that seems discernable; we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally super- fluous” (Arendt 1951: 455). In If This Is A Man (1947), Primo Levi (1919-1987) supports Arendt’s scenario of degradation. Levi, an Italian Jew, was arrested and transported early in 1944, which, though the last year of the war, was the time of greatest privation from food shortages in Auschwitz. Levi used the term musslemann (living corpses):

It is the demolition of a man — to annihilate us first as men. Our comrades are marching like automatons — their souls are dead. There is no longer any will. The Germans have succeeded. We, transformed into slaves killed in our spirit long before an anonymous death. This time last year I was a free man, an outlaw but free. I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself (Primo Levi as quoted by Linfield 2019: 75).

We find in Arendt a great terror: What is the future of civilization now that the knowledge of how to dominate and eliminate vast populations is seared into its collective consciousness? The world’s economic system is based on predatory economic individualism, utilitarian to its very core, with sweat- shop laborers the new means to a more bountiful world, at least for the rich. Will humanistic forces prevail or will those of the baser, more selfish sort? “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up wherever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, economic misery in a manner worthy of man” (Arendt 1951: 459). In essence,

“totalitarianism” is something new in human experience and differs by kind and degree from the simple despotisms of the past: It seeks to change human nature by destroying the right to have rights and it is a small rationalization, as I mentioned above, from this to destroying masses of stateless people.

In “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Arendt sounded the alarm of the great gulf between the inalienable rights guaranteed by sovereign nations and the denial of those rights to others even within their domain:

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion — formulas which were designed to solve problems within communities — but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.

Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them, not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain “superfluous,” if nobody can be found to claim them, may their lives be in danger (Arendt 1951: 295-296).

Arendt wrote that in fact “nation” and “state” were separate entities (Bernstein 2018: 16). The “nation” is the people collectively: their culture, language, music, religion, ethnicity while the “state” is the accumu- lated body of law and the legal framework in place ensuring rights (which are always “artificial constructs”) to its citizens. It is a dichotomy, with the two often in conflict. The nation-state arose in the eighteenth century, beginning with the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions, their constitu- tions spelling out a citizen’s “inalienable” rights (rights that could never be taken away). Within each nation-state, however, fierce battles arose over who is a “citizen.” Who, these nations began to ask, is the

“true” American, the “true” Frenchman, the “true” German, the “true” Englishman? Thus began the process of narrowing down those who might qualify. When this takes place, the “nation” defeats the

“state” by limiting those with full legal protections.

Black American men received the equal rights of citizenship in the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteen (1868), and Fifteen (1870) Amendments to the United States Constitution. Yet state governments in the American South effectively disenfranchised them from voting until around 1970, one hundred years later. What had began so well — this legal framework — was whittled down, stripped away from black Americans and bestowed on American corporations, which became new “legal persons” that now domi- nate global economic life.

Between the two world wars, the League of Nations formulated the Minority Treaty, as I will discuss a bit more below, legal protections for those living in countries that had rendered them stateless, but this treaty could not be enforced, since a nation’s sovereignty was, and remains, the supreme authority.

The United States and Germany created “modern” racial discrimination by refusing to extend the rights of citizenship to their minorities. The League of Nations, and later the United Nations, though enshrining universal rights in its framework, had no real authority to protect any of them in a practical sense:

The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them (Arendt 1951: 291-292).

Constitutional governments today, then, are juggling this tension and international bodies can only apply a few external diplomatic pressures for enforcement: Conservatives place the “nation” first, while liberals honor the “state.” When the balance breaks down, an “Us” against “Them” mindset takes prece- dence, as we see happening in many parts of the world, with the United States among the most afflicted today. The numbers included in “We The People,” therefore, is continually fought over and cut down.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was an astute observer of this:

As a nation we began by declaring that, “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings (a nationalist party of the time) get control it will read, “All men are created equals except negroes, foreigners, and Catholics.”

When it comes to that, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of

loving liberty — to Russia for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy (Letter to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855).

5. The right to have rights

After Immanuel Kant, only Hannah Arendt tackled the thorny questions of just what governments could do to ensure human rights. Arendt, unlike Kant, did not offer any comprehensive blueprints for how “the right to have rights” could be realized (when she attempted it she was almost always woefully wide of the mark). While Kant envisioned a stronger federation of nations with a military force to protect human rights, closer to NATO today, Arendt is more of an archivist of the plight of the state- less, its causes, and the humanitarian disasters that could come about from it. Today, with Great Britain leaving the European Union, we understand that these are not merely theoretical challenges of jurisdic- tion; they reflect stark realities of what democracy means: Local autonomy versus multinational federa- tions.

After the First World War, eleven new countries emerged in the wake of crumbled empires: Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, and Turkey, each with huge minority populations. Poland, for example, was only sixty-percent Polish — Jews, Germans, Russians, Lithuanians, among others, made up the rest of the population (Benhabib 2004: 53).

The League of Nations established the Polish Minority Treaty (1919), where minorities in these new countries could petition the League for redress of violations against them or their property. The United States Congress, however, did not approve President Woodrow Wilson’s (1856-1924) initiative to join the League, mainly from Wilson’s own political ineptitude, and this greatly weakened the League. The winners of the First World War — England, France, and Italy, with permanent seats as governing members — refused to sign the Minority Treaty. From the very beginning, then, the Minority Treaty was hypocritical, done mainly to further humiliate the defeated, leaving the absurd consequence that a minority person in Poland could petition the League but one in Italy could not.

The League of Nations was doomed to failure, since it was only a half-hearted attempt to deal with gargantuan challenges it was not equipped to handle. Its failure was capped off by the worldwide economic depression that spread to Europe largely because of the United States. After the Wall Street meltdown of October 1929, President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) recalled all US loans outstanding from the Weimar Republic of Germany, pushing it into economic collapse and with it most of the Europe, along with the dreams of a federation strong enough to address issues of statelessness. The nation-state had also become a much more sinister entity by this time. The “state” became “lawless,” for its primary goal was no longer the protection of citizens’ rights but a tool for its own preservation (Benhabib 2004:

54). As Arendt had written, “The nation had conquered the state. National interest had priority over law before Hitler could pronounce ‘Right is what is good for the German people’” (Arendt 1951: 275).

Great horrors result when the nation dominates the state, as history has shown.

The philosopher Seyla Benhabib, in The Rights of Others (2004), examined Arendt’s statement “the right to have rights.” The first, of course, is an obligation to recognize the innate humanity of a displaced person as a member of the human race — its singular origins — the common bonds of feeling

and thinking, the needs and desires that unite everyone. W. H. Auden (1907-1973) articulated this in his poem in the 1971 Hymn to the United Nations: “Where All Are Brothers. None Faceless Others.” The second is the social and political rights of citizenship. These are triangular: the person, the community, with the governmental body. It is the right of belonging that includes five aspects: 1) The right to have a place in the world; 2) The right to have citizenship; 3) The right to belong to a nation; 4) The right to be part of a social community; and 5) The right to be part of a political community. These overlap, of course, but each in its own way expresses Arendt’s concern: To belong somewhere to “a place” in the world (Benhabib 2018: 109-110):

We become aware of the existence of a right to have rights, that is to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinion — a right to belong to some kind of organized commu- nity, only when millions of people emerge who had lost and cannot regain these rights because of the new global political situation (Arendt 1951: 177).

These “rights” transcend obligations that arise in a cultural context. The eldest son in many Confucian societies, for example, by reason of birth, has the obligation to care for his aging parents, despite the fact that nothing is written down in any legal sense (he also inherits the property). Here the cultural traditions, animating the nation, have precedence. It is inspiring, even noble, a clear practice that everyone is aware of, and is a social good, handed down for generation after generation. Yet, racism and bigotry can potentially be passed down from generation to generation as well, as is evidenced the world over. Will the nation allow this to continue or should the state guarantee equality?

The old Confederacy — states in the American South — refused to extend legal protections to black Americans — and prevented the enforcement of the Amendments to the Constitution granting to everyone born in the United States equal protection under the law (I will here will refrain from mentioning the extrajudicial murdering of black men by vigilante groups except to call attention to the dangers of “nation” precedence). Segregation, the legal separation of the races after the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy versus Ferguson (1896), effectively voided any constitutional rights. In Brown versus Board of Education (1954), however, the “state” began to assert its authority over culture. Brown was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to ensure equality: “Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act and change and build a common world together with his equals ... We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (Arendt 1951: 301).

Yet, a social organization — whether local or international — has its short-comings: “World govern- ment would destroy the space for politics in that it would not allow individuals to defend shared public spaces in common. The nation-state system, on the other hand, always carried within itself the seeds of exclusionary injustice at home and aggression abroad” (Benhabib 2004: 61). Arendt, who in her later years believed that the nation-state would transition toward international federations, understood that the nation-state, in all its weaknesses and susceptibilities to cultural forces, alone guaranteed human rights.

International bodies have addressed many of the concerns, in remarkable and sweeping ways that those living after the First World War could only dream of — that Kant and Arendt first pointed out:

the creation of the World Court (1945), the UN High Commission on Refugees (1950), the International Red Cross adding the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), Conventions on the Preven- tion and Punishment of Genocide (1951), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976), the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1976), and the International Criminal Court (2002). Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) makes asylum a universal right: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not be involved in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” Yet, with all these genuinely miraculous advancements in addressing international human rights issues, nothing the United Nations set in motion could grant “citizenship” in a nation-state or “force” a nation-state to accept anyone as a citizen (Benhabib 2018: 112), the only place in today’s world where these rights can be realized.

Political theorists have seen politics as a struggle for power — and power always involves violence —

“legally” legitimate violence forces citizens to obey. Libertarians in the United States, for example, see all power, or all government authority, as an infringement on personal rights, based on the dignity of self-determination (Bernstein 2018: 95). Arendt, however, showed the inherent dignity of politics in and of itself, where politics means “persuasion” that takes place in the public commons. She understood violence could accomplish nothing of permanence: “Violence is anti-political ... Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it” (Arendt 1970: 62). Power is the capacity to act in concert with others, never the domain of a single individual; power belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group stays together (Bernstein 2018: 97-98):

When we say of someone that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment the group from which power originated to begin with (without a people or group there is no power) disappears, “his power” also vanishes (Arendt 1970: 44).

As Kant articulated, and I paraphrase: The judging person “woos” the consent of everyone else in the hope of coming to agreement with him eventually. This “wooing” or persuading is what the classical Greeks called Peitho, speeches to convince and persuade the crowds in the market places. This, for Arendt, was the purest form of democracy and an ideal that should be returned to — talking with one another. Persuasion ruled the dialogue of the citizens of the polis, not violence (Arendt 1977: 222).

Today, with the spectacular rise in internment camps in Turkey, Greece, Jordon, Bangladesh, and the borders of Mexico and the United States, along with the recent news of internment camps and steriliza- tion programs aimed at the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang Province, even in this third decade of the twenty-first century, Arendt’s analysis remains absolutely true: She warned the world of the fragility of rights and the potential abuse of the stateless and minorities, given humanity’s history of genocide right up to our own time. Ten million people in the world today are branded with the status of

“Stateless Person.” DACA (Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals), a program the US government created

in 2012 for the children of undocumented migrants to become full citizens, is another instance of forced and prolonged statelessness. Though the potential recipients have grown up in the United States, attended schools, worked in important public service jobs, even served in the military, today they are in a permanent limbo, denied citizenship, and may even be returned to countries they have never even visited. Here, the nation, with its cultural priorities of defining and restricting “who” a true American is, crowds out the state.

The leaders of the American and French revolutions saw human rights as issuing from human nature, its own “goodness,” with its desire to treat everyone equally and with respect. Arendt disagreed with this. Rights, rather, are “artificial,” not natural, created to prevent the violence of nature from taking over and here I repeat Arendt’s famous statement:

We become aware of the existence of a right to have rights ... The right that corresponds to this loss and that was never even mentioned among the human rights cannot be expressed in the cate- gories of the eighteenth century because they presume that rights spring immediately from the

“nature” of man ... the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible (Arendt 1951: 296-297).

6. Conclusion

I end with Franz Kafka’s story The Great Wall of China (1930). It is an astonishing parable for it details a cycle of building and tearing down. With the shrewdness of genius, Kafka writes that the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9), humanity’s attempt to reach the divine on its own, fell apart not because of divine intervention and the confounding of the languages, but because the Tower lacked a solid foundation. The architects of the Great Wall of China wanted to use it as a solid foundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Chinese emperor, understanding the workers’ propensity for losing confidence in the face of such an enormous project, divided its building into hundreds of smaller sections, with each project separated by a vast distance, so no one on a particular project could ever gain a broader sense of what he was working toward. In the Tower of Babel, we have a bitter irony: No great project will succeed, since the divine presence is in opposition to humanity’s efforts at unity.

Yet, the builders of the Great Wall offer humanity an important lesson, as Kafka wrote: “Human nature, which is fundamentally careless and by nature like the whirling dust endures no restraint. If it restricts itself it will soon begin to shake the restraints, chains, and even itself all over the place.” The force that attempts to create a better world for everyone is the same force that can just as easily tear it all apart. The question as we consider creating a world where everyone has a home: Which force will prevail?

Notes

1) The word “genocide” is a recent word in our vocabulary (genos — Greek for “race or tribe” with cide — Latin for “to kill”). A Polish Jew, Rafael Lemkin (1901-1959), coined it in 1944. Though the crime was ratified