October 15, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

My daughter, who celebrates her 24th birthday this weekend, was born 76 years and one day after Hannah Arendt. “Hannah” was one of the names we considered for my daughter at the time of her birth.

Hannah Arendt is perhaps best known for her Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she coined the dread term “banality of evil.”

A native of Germany, she pretty much hated the century in which she was born. She witnessed first hand the rise of Nazism and, closely enough, its baleful counterpart, Stalinism. Philosopher that she was, Arendt tried to put both phenomena in perspective. She called them “exceptional and unprecedented” in history as she knew it. Academicians have debated that point, and will debate it for as long as memories of both monstrous systems exist.

Arendt saw in both the worst of human nature: heartless political, social and economic dogma; the perverse relishing of torture and death; the debasement of human beings, often for the sake of depraved entertainment and – perhaps most alarming of all – an unshakable conviction on the part of their theorists and practitioners that Nazism and Stalinism were the acme of human aspiration.

I was barely 20 when it was suggested by one of my college professors (an Arendt-like woman named Isolde Henninger) that I read Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism. It kept me up nights – and that at the same time as I was taking an American literature course in which the spine-tingling stories of Edgar Allan Poe were on the syllabus. A generation later, I would have been in the care of a psychiatrist. As it was in 1959, I soldiered on in a somewhat fragile hope that the contented, almost bucolic milieu of that little Midwestern campus was the wave of the future.

Having recently read here and there of the Arendt centennial now under way in academic and political circles around the globe, I exhumed my dusty copy of her Origins of Totalitarianism from a packing box and leafed through it, taking note of my nearly 50-year-old marginalia.

I felt my flesh congeal as I re-read some of the passages having to do with how Nazism came to power in rigged elections; then developed, pursued and eventually put into practice its ideology, as if Mein Kampf had been the revealed manifesto of an apocalyptic religion. Its proponents were uninterested in the facts, uncaring of the looming consequences of their blind fealty to a führer who was by many, even those close to him, thought to be mad as a hatter.

Concentration and death camps featuring torture and human denigration on an unprecedented scale were excused as part of a “final solution.” Paranoia became a standard part of government, as in, “Those who are not for us are against us,” with no possibility of dialogue even with loyal opponents.

Call me a nut job, but I think what Arendt was describing and analyzing at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s was a political dispensation that bears a nauseating resemblance to what we are even now experiencing as Americans in America.

The catastrophe of 9/11 was the catalytic force that brought out the worst in the cabal that came to power illegitimately in the election of 2000 and in its conflicted aftermath. Armed with their own manifesto known as the Statement of Principles for the New American Century, its leaders have taken the United States of America to a constitutional crisis the likes of which has not been seen for 150 years.

First Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo marred the American escutcheon. Now habeas corpus is to be denied on the whim of that smirking little Texan who, despite his 537-vote margin in Florida six years ago and the murky election process in Ohio two years ago, governs as if he were Genghis Khan astride the world. A police state is in the making with the unwarranted electronic spying on American citizens and the 700-mile long stalag-like, razor-wire fence along the Mexican border.

Presidential handlers Dick Cheney and Karl Rove sometimes remind one of such cunning Nazi lickspittles as Goebbels and Göring. They enable the Lunatic-in-chief in his pursuit of what he can never attain and, in the process, he brings the world around him to ruin.

I invite you to read The Origins of Totalitarianism in light of current events, then let me know if you consider my analysis to be all that far-fetched.

Meanwhile, Sarah – not Hannah – Cook will celebrate her 24th birthday only 24 hours after what would be Arendt’s 100th. Sarah is in her second year of law school at Georgetown University. I think she has yet to read Arendt, but I can tell you this: When the Sarah Cook I love and respect becomes the lawyer she aspires to be and grows in wisdom and stature, totalitarianism in America will have a most formidable adversary.

© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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