ollective movements cannot be met with words alone, but must also be met with force. As one disgusted by the convenient patience and wishful thinking of European statesmen before and during the holocaust, Arendt would undoubtedly urge us to rid ourselves of our “common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous” and make all necessary sacrifices to guard against chemical attacks, dirty bombs, and other atrocities that our imagination can hardly dare to broach.
Well okay: isn’t that what Bush and Blair have been attempting? But Powers then goes on to ignore completely what she’s just written:
Origins shows that Arendt would not be satisfied with a policy that aimed to violently crush today’s threat without seeking to understand it. In the preface to Origins , she set out “to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved….”
So it goes, as she bemoans our stupid leaders aiming to “violently crush” the terrorists without understanding them. So she’s not serious then. All this talk about force doesn’t really mean force: it’s just words. Against the Nazis, against Stalinism, force was justified, but that was then. It’s stuff you read about in books. [Or is she saying that, according to Arendt, Churchill and Roosevelt should have waited till she’d written her book and had a better understanding of Nazism before they started fighting back?]
Arendt, then, seems fairly robust in her belief that totalitarianism must be countered with force. Powers however reaches this conclusion:
It simply has to be true, given the human costs and nuclear stakes of the contemporary showdown, that we can never know too much about terrorist movements, and that we can never try too hard to alleviate the indignities and inequalities that may help fuel the threat.
It has to be true that for Powers, Arendt is saying what she wants her to be saying, because she can’t countenance any other view, but it doesn’t seem to me that that’s what Arendt’s saying at all. Arendt is arguing that we need to understand why people support totalitarianism: what makes people do these awful things. She’s not arguing that in each case we need to understand why that particular totalitarianism has arisen, and try to ameliorate those particular root causes. How would you have done that in the case of the Nazis? Give them some of what they wanted? – Czechoslovakia say? You can’t deal with totalitarianisms; you oppose them. The attempt to understand the root causes in Powers’ sense is precisely the kind of wishful thinking that so disgusted Arendt about European statesmen in the Thirties.
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