As one of the leading political theorists and public intellectuals of her time, Hannah Arendt spent a lifetime trying to comprehend and seeks answers to a critical issue confronting humanity: why does evil exist, who commits it, and what motivates men to such dastardly acts?
Drawing upon her writings - and a review of two books about Arendt by authors Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Samantha Power, Jerome Kohn, and Ron Feldman - an excellent wide ranging article in the current issue of the London Review of Books by Corey Robin attempts to offer an explanation for such morally deviant behavior and links it to the effect of the neoconservatives' thinking on the Bush Administration
The Bush administration is committed to the interests of its main constituencies: corporations, evangelicals, the military and big oil. It has revived the most toxic elements of American nationalism... though neo-conservatives may savour war for its own sake, Bush has folded their ethos into the rhetoric of national security and human rights.
More below.
(emphasis in bold are all mine).
This growing influence of the neocons had been evident and in the making for decades. In a recent interview I watched on C-SPAN from the Richard Nixon Library, former Reagan Secretary of State and Nixon Chief of Staff, General Al Haig, railed (perhaps conveniently) against the growing power of the neoconservative hawks early on during the Reagan Administration when he told interviewer Tim Naftali that in spite of his many objections, noted neocon and recent Rumsfeld deputy at the Department of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz (along with his staff), was thrust upon him at the State Department's Policy Planning Office by Reagan's senior advisors. When Haig objected vociferously, particularly due to the fact that Wolfowitz had only recently switched political parties (from Democratic to Republican), Reagan tried to pacify him (Haig) by recounting his own early career as a member of the Democratic Party and how important it was to have Wolfowitz on his team. Another prominent neocon, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, became Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations. Numerous others, like Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame, infiltrated Reagan's inner circle and other levels of government.
Cloaked under the guise of 'freedom' and 'liberty' by this administration with a strong assist from the many alarmingly confrontational proponents of the Project For a New American Century (PNAC), what then accounts for the imperialist impulses of this cabal of self-righteous neonconservatives?
In the second section of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that imperialism’s animating impulse is expansion for expansion’s sake. Against the claims of some Marxists, she insists that capitalism provides a model, not a motive, for the imperialist, who patterns the acquisition of power on the accumulation of capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The imperialist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Cromer looked at Egypt and saw India, Rhodes looked at South Africa and saw the world. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ he said. So it is today: Afghanistan leads to Iraq leads to Iran leads to who knows where? ‘The famous domino-theory’, Arendt wrote, is ‘a new version of the old "Great Game"’. As Kipling said, the Great Game finishes only ‘when everyone is dead’.
Arendt correctly identified these tendencies during the Vietnam War and her observations ring so true today given the horrible mess we find ourselves in Iraq and one which even many of Bush's political supporters find difficult to support, as detailed in this diary by thereisnospoon
{Arendt's writings} eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces... empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’
(Note - For more thoughts on whether or not the United States is an imperialist country read my diary from over three years ago).
When George W. Bush talks about fighting the terrorists there (Iraq) so that we wouldn't have to confront them here (the American mainland), Robin reminds us what Arendt wrote during the Cold War
Despite its claims during the Cold War, Arendt argued, the United States was never threatened by Communism. World War Two had made the US ‘the greatest world power and it was this world power, rather than national existence, that was challenged by the revolutionary power of Moscow-directed Communism.’ I wonder what Arendt would have said about Islamist terrorism, which poses even less of a threat to America’s survival.
Hannah Arendt, having died in 1975, would probably be an unlikely source to try to understand and explain the thirst for power by today's neoconservatives - so evident after the tragedy of September 11, 2001. And transparently so. In another political era not so long ago, career 'bureaucrats' like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice were not identified with the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. In fact, when out of political power, many drifted towards the pragmatic world of corporate business. What happened in recent years when traditional conservatives and neoconservatives merged to become one and the same? Much has been written about ideology being the driving force that persuaded many of the so-called 'Vulcans' to trek down to Austin, Texas in 1999 and consolidate their support behind candidate George W. Bush. Or, perhaps it was the explicitly stated goal of world dominance (or, at the least, maintaining global American hegemony) so evident in the PNAC 'Statement of Principles' that explains their actions.
What is the motivating force for these neo-imperialists? What propels them towards actions that are so destructive not only for this country but also for the rest of the world? We hear the names of a few prominent neocons in the press but, at the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th levels of government bureaucracy, in think tanks, universities, foundations, and other such institutions, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of such people toiling away to make a name for themselves. Promoting an ideology crafted by their superiors and stating a preference for a muscular, militaristic foreign policy are probably means to a much more simple and easily understandable end: career advancement. For critical and analytical thinking, as Arendt wrote, was not compatible with careerism. Perhaps it was the same kind of (non)thinking that afflicted one of history's most notorious careerists and Nazi criminals, Adolf Eichmann. As Arendt noted in her reports from Jerusalem for the New Yorker magazine during Eichmann's trial in 1961, he exhibited no outward signs of anti-semitism or psychological imbalance. In fact, he looked and sounded rather ordinary - an idea not without its critics.
Many people believe that great crimes come from terrible ideas: Marxism, racism and Islamic fundamentalism gave us the Gulag, Auschwitz and 9/11. It was the singular achievement of Eichmann in Jerusalem, however, to remind us that the worst atrocities often arise from the simplest of vices. And few vices, in Arendt’s mind, were more vicious than careerism... ‘What for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.’ Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.
This aspect of Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann is often overlooked in favour of her account of the bureaucrat, the thoughtless follower of rules who could cite the letter of Kant’s categorical imperative without apprehending its spirit. The bureaucrat is a passive instrument, the careerist an architect of his own advance. The first loses himself in paper, the second hoists himself up a ladder. The first was how Eichmann saw himself; the second is how Arendt insisted he be seen.
And, no, I'm not equating the misdeeds of the likes of Wolfowitz, Kirkpatrick, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Abrams or their subordinates with the unprecedented criminal behavior of Eichmann. I am sufficiently familiar with history to know that the Holocaust - during which Eichmann, among so many others, was an enabler for the morally indefensible policies of the Third Reich - stands in a category all by itself as a particularly evil chapter in human history.
As Robin concludes
The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of {Arendt's} Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.
We hear about a handful of these neoconservatives being mentioned, analyzed, and criticized in the press. Let's not forget the large number of their underlings and willing accomplices who are, to use Ward Churchill's term, the 'little Eichmanns' doing the dirty work prescribed by their masters that has this country in its present predicament in Iraq. So many of them come from the commercial classes of society, not unlike their bosses. We all know people like that, outwardly pleasant and brimming with superficial 'country club congeniality.'
As Arendt documented over four decades ago, the crimes of 'banal careerists' can indeed be lethal. Not unlike Adolf Eichmann's in the 1940's.
(Cross posted at Progressive Historians)