Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish immigrant during WWII, became famous for her criticisms of Totalitarian regimes during the Cold War. In her work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt attempted to explain the link between the totalitarian Nazi regime through which she lived, and the totalitarian Communist regime during the Cold War. According to Arendt, the intense "tribalism" of both regimes, in the forms of pan-Germanic Nazism in Germany and pan-Slavism in the Soviet Union, fueled ideologies which became the roots of totalitarianism. Arendt was a strong critic of totalitarianism during the Cold War, and her thinking continues to influence how we view totalitarian governments today.
In his article on Arendt, Pat Duffy Hutcheon describes his reactions to a lecture Arendt gave at Yale when he was a student there in 1968. Arendt was both a critic of the Vietnam War and the violence often glorified by anti-war protesters. Arendt made the distinction between the concepts of force and power, and was against the use of violence for any political means, no matter their intentions. Hutcheon argues that Arendt was ahead of her time in her criticisms of totalitarianism, anticipating the evils of soviet communism and predicting the evils of Chinese communism which many of her colleagues saw as a positive revolution in the 1940's.
Arendt's commentary on revolution as entirely separate from power, strength, force, violence and authority came as a bit of a surprise to me - not because of who she is or where she came from, but because of those are very essence of the word 'revolution' today. The differentiation she draws makes sense and is an all-important one that redefines 'revolution,' or rather brings it back to its roots.
ReplyDelete