The World of Hannah Arendt

To enter the world of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is to encounter the political and moral catastrophes of the 20th century. Her life spanned the convulsions of two world wars, revolutions and civil wars, and events worse than war in which human lives were uprooted and destroyed on a scale never seen before.

She lived through what she called ‘dark times,’ whose history reads like a tale of horrors in which everything taken for granted turns into its opposite. The sudden unreliability of her native land and the unanticipated peril of having been born a Jew were the conditions under which Arendt first thought politically, a task for which she was neither inclined by nature nor prepared by education.

Insecurity and vulnerability are the general conditions, as she came to realize, in which an urgently experienced need to think is political, though not, to be sure, in a conventional sense. For the traditional view of politics, which may be summarized as the perceived usefulness of government in securing the people’s private interests, is in times of crisis precisely what has failed. In her determination to think through the darkness of the 20th century, Arendt discerned a radically different meaning of politics, whose source was the original clearing, in the midst of a plurality of human beings living, speaking and interacting with one another, of a public space that was brought into existence not for utility but for the sake of human freedom.

There is abundant evidence that Arendt’s understanding of what it means to think politically has struck a responsive chord in the contemporary world. In recent years, increasing numbers of people have turned to her as a guide they trust in their need to understand for themselves and realize in their own lives the courage it takes to be free. The earliest of Arendt’s writings in the collection dates from 1925, when she was 19, and the latest from 1975, the year she died. By far the greater part of them comes from the period after her emigration to the United States, in 1941, as World War II raged in Europe.

Born in 1906 into a well-established, nonreligious German Jewish family, Hannah Arendt was raised in Königsberg, the ancient capital of East Prussia. At the end of World War II, that strategic port on the Baltic Sea was ceded to the Soviet Union, its name changed to Kaliningrad, after the Russian revolutionary M.I. Kalinin, and its German population dispersed. The fate of Königsberg, today an all but unrecognizable ruin, was sealed when it fell under the sway of not one but two totalitarian regimes, first Hitler’s and then Stalin’s.

Unlike the city of Königsberg, however, Arendt could and did move. As a young Jew working for a Zionist organization, she was arrested, escaped and fled her homeland in 1933. By way of Prague and Geneva she made her way to Paris and from that moment on was in effect stateless, a woman without a country. She was to remain so for 18 years. She knew from her own experience how ‘the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons,’ as she wrote to Karl Jaspers in 1946, fetters free movement, and from that experience came her insight that the denial of the right to citizenship, prior to any specific rights of citizenship, is integral to the rise of totalitarianism.

Arendt believed that the right to citizenship, the right of a plurality of people ‘to act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each,’ is not only denied by totalitarianism, as it is by every despotism, but stands opposed to the principle that guides the acts of destruction that characterize totalitarian systems. That principle is an ideology explaining the entire course of human affairs by determining every historical event and all past, present and future deeds as functions of a universal process. Looking deeper into the phenomenon of totalitarianism Arendt saw that the ‘idea,’ the content, of the ideology matters less than its ‘inherent logicality,’ which was discovered separately and prized by both Hitler and Stalin.

In broad outline, ideological logicality operates like a practical syllogism: From the premise of a supposed law of nature that certain races are unfit to live, it follows that those races must be eliminated, and from the premise of a supposed law of history that certain classes are on their way to extinction, it follows that those classes must be liquidated. Arendt’s point is that the untruth of the ideological premises is without consequence: The premises will become self-evidently true in the factitious world created by the murderous acts that flow from them in logical consistency.

In their adherence to the logicality of two utterly distinct ideologies, one that originated on the far right and the other on the far left, Arendt found Nazism and Stalinism to be more or less equivalent totalitarian systems. If the ruined city of Königsberg could speak after having witnessed the terror, the killings by torture and starvation under the regimes of both Hitler and Stalin, it is doubtful that it would point out significant differences between those regimes. To focus on the different content of racist and communist ideologies only blurs what Arendt at first thought of as the ‘absolute’ and ‘radical’ evil they both brought into the world. Her emphasis on the logical deduction of acts from ideological premises, moreover, is linked to her later understanding of evil, stemming from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as ‘banal,’ ‘rootless,’ and ‘thought-defying.’ The logicality of totalitarian movements accounts for their appeal to the atomized and depoliticized masses of mankind, without whose support those movements could not have generated their immense power. Thus Hitler’s ‘ice- cold reasoning’ and Stalin’s ‘merciless dialectics’ contribute to Arendt’s uncertainty as to whether any other totalitarian regimes have existed — perhaps in Mao’s China, but not in the despotisms of single-party or military dictatorships (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘Introduction,’ third edition, 1966).

In 1941, after France fell to the Nazis, Arendt escaped from an internment camp in unoccupied Vichy, first to Spain, then to Lisbon and finally to New York with little money and practically no English- language skills, once again a refugee from totalitarian persecution. But in America she found more than refuge. Within a year and consistently thereafter she published articles of a political nature, in a new and at first only half- mastered language, unlike anything she had written before leaving Germany. Only 10 years later, after assiduous work, she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major book and a tremendously complicated one. That it was first conceived as a study of imperialism suggests that when Arendt started it she saw Nazism and Bolshevism as a radical development of the 19th century European phenomenon of colonization and as what she then called ‘full-fledged imperialism.’

The book, however, grew and shifted ground as it was written, and in its final form totalitarianism appeared as an entirely new form of government, one that had no historical precedent, not even in the harshest of despotisms. The book also underwent major revisions in subsequent editions. Its original conclusion was replaced by an essay written in 1953, ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government.’ An epilogue on the Hungarian Revolution was added in 1958 and later deleted, and substantial new prefaces were written in 1966 and 1967.

Although shortly after its publication The Origins of Totalitarianism was hailed as a justification of the Cold War, that was not Arendt’s intention. By that time the Cold War was being fought against the Soviet Union and its satellites and not against totalitarianism, which, according to Arendt, had ended in the Soviet Union, or at least had begun to end, with Stalin’s death in 1953. Furthermore, the Cold War obscured the fact that the historical elements that had coalesced in totalitarian movements remained intact throughout the world and by no means only behind the Iron Curtain.

‘Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport,’ in which Arendt wrote, ‘I with to use this document in lieu of a passport which I, a state-less person, cannot obtain at present.’

Arendt’s portrait appeared on the cover of The Saturday Review of Literature, a popular American literary magazine of the day. Her fame, which at times approached notoriety, increased with her subsequent publications and has continued to grow posthumously. Today her place among a handful of profoundly original, influential and controversial political thinkers of the 20th century is secure. In 1951, the same year that The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, Arendt became an American citizen, formally marking a new beginning in her life.

This new beginning in America and its political orientation, while constituting a break with the tradition of Western thought, has been misunderstood as a break with the past itself. Arendt made a decisive distinction between a fragmented past that can be retrieved to give depth to the present and the continuity of a past handed down from generation to generation (tradition) across many centuries. She did not deconstruct the past but dismantled its traditional structure as a uniform stream or unbroken thread that leads progressively from the past to the present and from the present into the future. She was convinced that the advent of totalitarianism in the 20th century had irreparably ruptured the continuity of history and that the complacency of the idea of historical progress is deleterious to political life.

Arendt saw the present as a ‘gap between past and future’ in which every individual’s active recollection and deliberately selective retrieval of the ‘no longer’ fosters responsibility for the ‘not yet.’ While the ability to respond to the past does not determine the future, it does throw light on it. In her seminars, which always had a historical dimension and which she conducted as if they were miniature public spaces, she urged her students to participate: ‘Insert yourself,’ she would say, “and make the world a little better.”

Arendt never forgot her foundation in the German language and in German philosophy, particularly in the thought of Immanuel Kant. She was only 14 when she first read Kant, who in the 18th century had also lived in Königsberg and, despite serious controversy with the Prussian autocracy over his teaching of religion, never experienced a need to leave it. The differences in the external circumstances of their lives notwithstanding, Arendt’s appreciation of Kant deepened as she grew older. She increasingly came to esteem the subtlety of his philosophically radical distinctions, the role of imagination in his critical philosophy, his equanimity in destroying the shibboleths of metaphysics, and his recognition of human freedom as spontaneity. To her he was more than the philosopher who reconfigured the European tradition by discovering the conditions prior to experience that make experience possible in our knowledge of the world, in our moral conduct and in our capacity to judge the beautiful and sublime. He was present to her — she used to say she sensed him looking over her shoulder as she wrote — as the last and greatest champion of humanity and dignity.

To plumb the depths of her fundamental concept of plurality as the essential condition of political life requires some familiarity with her unorthodox approach to Kant. In Kant’s late work on aesthetics Arendt discovered the political significance of common sense, the world-orienting sense that both unites what appears to the private senses and fits what is thus united into a common world. That discovery was crucial, for the agreement of common sense realizes a world that lies between human beings, keeping them distinct and relating them, a shared world in which they can appear and be recognized as unique beings. In the last analysis, recognition of human uniqueness is the same thing as equality in freedom, which for Arendt is the raison d’être of political life. Kant not only revealed to Arendt a way of seeing the crisis of the 20th century, i.e., the refusal of totalitarian regimes to share the world with entire races and classes of human beings and, before that, the superfluity of the world-alienated masses who supported those regimes, but also pointed a way to go beyond that crisis by accepting the challenge of restoring a common world.

The humanistic education to which Arendt was naturally drawn and received at the universities of Marburg and Heidelberg also deepened throughout her life. She studied philosophy, ancient Greek literature (poetry and history as well as philosophy) and Christian theology because she loved wisdom and tragic beauty and was puzzled less by the existence than the exactions of a transcendent God of love. The teachers who exerted the greatest influence on her were Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, whose ‘existential’ philosophies were considered revolutionary by their peers and by themselves. With Heidegger and Jaspers, Arendt studied the tradition of philosophic thought from the vantage point of its self-conscious conclusion, and with them both she developed lifelong personal and intellectual relationships, equally meaningful but different in kind.

Heidegger awakened in Arendt a passion for thinking, and that awakening, sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not, pervades her work. With him she experienced the awestruck wonder of pure existence that begins the activity of thinking. What Heidegger called the ‘facticity’ (Faktizitat) and ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) of human being, the ‘naked that it is,’ not how or what or where it is, at one time led Arendt to think that a new political philosophy might be developed from the shock of ‘speechless horror,’ akin to ‘speechless wonder,’ at the crimes of totalitarianism. She thought then that Heidegger indicated a way to ‘directly grasp the realm of human affairs and human deeds,’ which no philosopher had ever done. She gave up that idea, or at least altered it beyond recognition, because of what she also learned from Heidegger: Philosophical thinking is ‘out of order’ in the everyday world of common sense from which the thinker, the thinking ego, withdraws.

Although habituated to the activity of thinking, Arendt was haunted by this withdrawal. In the end she turned away from philosophy because she did not believe its truths were relevant to the realm of human affairs. Not the truth but the ever changing meanings of the phenomena of the actual world were the ‘products’ of thinking that increasingly concerned her. A philosopher such as Heidegger may dwell in a ‘land of thought,’ withdrawn from the world, but a political thinker like Arendt returns to the world where every nonanalytical truth becomes a meaning, in her case an often controversial meaning, an opinion among the opinions of others.

Karl Jaspers introduced Arendt to a trans-historical, public realm of reason where it was possible to exist in the present and think in living communication with thinkers of the past, which is one important way that she retrieved the past. From Kant via Jaspers she derived her notion of an autonomous faculty of judgment, and through active, public participation in the realm of reason she developed her own formidable power of judgment. If anything did, it was her exercise of that faculty that eventually reconciled her to what she once referred to as ‘this none too beautiful world of ours.’ That remark, made in 1944 at the height of the war against Hitler, is tempered by her belief that ‘all sorrows can be borne’ if, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, their witness sufficiently distances himself from them, fits them into a story and tells and retells that story. Dramas are made to be repeated, stories to be recounted and retold, in order to keep their meaning alive. Although she did not write fiction, Arendt believed that stories and not the methods of social, political and historical science capture the contingency of human events; and like all great storytellers she realized that the meaning of a story can never be entirely abstracted from it.

What she said in 1944 also differs markedly in mood from what she wrote almost 30 years later, toward the end of her life, about our natural fitness to perceive the diversity and the beauty of the world’s appearances. That too is ultimately a function of judgment, of its ‘disinterestedness’ or disinclination to evaluate appearances according to the standard of their usefulness.

Arendt examined the intricacies of St. Augustine’s concept of love in her dissertation written under Jaspers’s direction, an extremely personal work composed in the dense style typical of German scholarship of the period. Although her dissertation bears no indication of any interest in contemporary politics, a decidedly nontraditional Augustine, less Christian than Roman, would later play a vital role in her rediscovery of the prephilosophical, political conception of action. In his De Civitate Dei, Arendt found the perfect representation of her view of human beings as beginnings: Initium ut esset homo creatus est (‘that a beginning be made man was created’) not only concludes The Origins of Totalitarianism but resonates as a leitmotif throughout her work. Nor is any political concern explicit in her second, ambiguously subjective, book, published in 1958, on Rahel Varnhagen, in which she dealt historically and critically with the question of Jewish social assimilation, in this case the vicissitudes of the life that an extraordinarily intelligent German Jew elected to live at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Arendt wrote most of the book while still in Germany (the first draft was completed in 1933) and completed it during the Paris years at the urging of Walter Benjamin and Heinrich Blücher — ‘rather grumpily,’ presumably because its subject had become ‘remote’ to her. By that time Arendt, as a Jew, had endured a rude political awakening, and the failure of Rahel Varnhagen to establish ‘a social life outside of official society’ would take on a far darker aspect in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt met Heinrich Blücher (pictured in photo above with Arendt, ca. 1950) in 1936 in Paris, where he was a non-Jewish political exile, and married him there in 1940. Under his influence, her mind was opened not just to Jewish politics but to the political as such. At the end of World War I, in 1918, Arendt was only 12 years old, but Blücher, seven years her senior, had fought in that war, experienced its devastation and at its conclusion became an active leftist participant in the riots, strikes and street battles that led to the establishment of the German Republic. A member of the Berlin working class who had a limited formal education, Blücher was politically savvy and aware, as Arendt could hardly have been at that time, of the fundamental changes taking place in those postwar political upheavals. Blücher revealed to Arendt a realm of political reality at the core of the actual world, a realm capable of generating human freedom and, when corrupted, human bondage. Although Arendt consistently avoided situating herself on the left, right or center of the political spectrum, Blucher became her political conscience, not only when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she dedicated to him, but throughout their life together.

The intellectually and spiritually rarefied world of Hannah Arendt’s youth was to be shattered by the rise of Nazism in Germany. It is not possible to grasp Arendt’s meaning when she writes of the newness of totalitarianism without realizing that not only her own world but the greater German world of which hers was a part — the world of inherited religious beliefs and moral and legal standards thought to be eternal — would be swept away. It must have been as difficult for her as it is for us to comprehend totalitarianism as neither necessary nor entirely accidental, as something brought forth by human beings of her own country and her own generation right in the heart of European civilization and not as some monstrous thing that attacked it from the outside. It must have been difficult for her to write about what she wanted to destroy rather than preserve. And it must have been difficult for her to think about the evil of totalitarianism, since, as she eventually came to see, that evil defies thought.

But Arendt did think, write and try to understand what for her was the real turning point of the 20th century. As she put it in the preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live.’ As her thought expanded beyond the framework of that work, her concern with the entire range of phenomena she associated with totalitarianism grew broader and deeper.

Among the most valuable and interesting features of the Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress is the presentation of her lecture notes and manuscripts, including those ostensibly dealing with Karl Marx but which in fact reach back to the beginnings of political philosophy. These documents furnish indisputable evidence that Arendt’s effort to understand totalitarianism continued in the early 1950s. Other documents make clear that her search for understanding continued beyond that period and underlies much of what she wrote in The Human Condition and On Revolution — which, when read apart from the archival material in her papers, have frequently been seen as distinct from that search. Indeed, it can now be said that Arendt’s effort to understand totalitarianism continued to the end of her life. Her work on the faculty of judgment, just begun at the time of her sudden death, was to have dealt with the way individuals bereft of moral rules and legal strictures can recognize evil and stand up and say no to it.

Analytical Essay on Identification of Groups of Academia: Hanna Arendt and Giorgio Agamben

This paper will identify three groups of academia. Firstly, a theoretical philosophical approach by Hanna Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. Secondly, a group that consists of Bicocchi and Weissbrodt, and Collins elaborates on the academic work on statistical data and the problem of de facto statelessness. Finally, a third group consisting of Belton, Bicocchi, Bhabha & Matach, and Fekete which deals with the consequences of statelessness will be discussed.

Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben are two scholars who have discussed the problematic definition of statelessness and its relation to human rights. They gave a theoretical philosophical approach to this definition. In 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote one of her most quoted phrases “the right to have rights”. With this quote, she summed up her notion of the concept of human rights. (Gessen, 2018). Human Rights should belong to every person by virtue of existence in theory. Hannah Arendt brought forward that in reality being a ‘person’ was not enough. To be guaranteed Human Rights, one must be a ‘citizen’ as well. (Arendt, 1958). She had perfectly summed up the problem of not being a citizen. If one is not a citizen and therefore ‘stateless’, a person is not guaranteed their human rights.

Following Arendt, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben came up with a possible epistemological solution for this problem in 1998. Agamben had a close affinity to Hannah, and his work is highly inspired by her. In a letter, in 1970, a young Agamben even writes to Arendt to thank her for her work. (Wolters, 2013). This started a long correspondence between the two. Agamben attempted to redefine the word ‘citizen’ and is one of the leading figures in philosophy and radical political theory (Mills, 2019). Therefore, there can be argued that his work ‘homo saucer of 1998 gives philosophical insight on the answer to the problem. Agamben wrote about humanity’s ‘bare life’ and how this relates to one’s rights. In this work, he equates citizenship to birth. (Agamben, 1998). Reference is made to the 1789 Declaration of the rights of the man. Article 1 states “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” (Lillian Goldman Law Library, 2008). This would mean that ‘men’ is given rights by the mere fact of being born. However, the second article of the declaration of 1789 speaks of citizens of a nation and extents ‘rights’ exclusively to them. Agamben argues that the etymological origins of the word ‘nation’ define the nation by ‘birth’. Therefore, it is possible for rights to extend to everyone, even non-citizens. (Agamben, 1998).

In line with what Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben wrote about the problematic definition, there is the problem of de facto statelessness. Weissbrodt & Collins’s argument about the definition of statelessness brings forward the problem of ‘de facto statelessness. They argue that the legal definition of the stateless leaves many people as not being registered as stateless but as an ‘unknown’ nationality. (Weissbrodt & Collins, 2006). In their article ‘The Human Rights of Stateless Persons’ published in the Human Rights Quarterly, a broad examination of the human rights of stateless persons is presented. (Weissbrodt & Collins, 2006). Their argument is that the definition laid down in the 1954 convention relating to the status of stateless persons is a purely legal description; the characteristics and value of a person’s nationality that differs from state to state is irrelevant to the definition. According to this definition, a person simply is or is not a citizen according to a state’s laws and court system. The argument of their article is that the definition of statelessness should be broadened to include de facto statelessness. (Weissbrodt & Collins, 2006).

In addition to this, Bicocchi and Weissbrodt, and Collins elaborate on the academic work on statistical data and the problem of de facto statelessness. Many academics point out issues with regard to statistical data on statelessness. In line with this, in the book ‘Children Without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge’ Bicocchi points out that an issue is that there is no specific category for statelessness children in statistics about statelessness. (Bicocchi, 2011). The Dutch government’s database of Statistics, Statline, does not provide statistics where it separates people with an ‘unknown nationality, so de facto stateless, from persons that are identified as stateless. According to their latest data, there are 55621 people living in the Netherlands that are either de facto stateless or stateless. There is no specific category for children, but 31 percent is 20 years or younger and 9153 children are aged 10 or younger. (CBS, 2019). This confirms Bicocchi’s argument.

The third identified group consisting of Belton, Bicocchi, Bhabha & Matach, and Fekete deals with the consequences of statelessness. In Chapter 2 ‘Statelessness: A Matter of Human Rights’ Belton shows that many stateless people do not hold many international human rights as a result of their statelessness. For example, article 21 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights refers to having an indirect or direct involvement with regard to the formation of your government. Since stateless people are not part of any state, they cannot get involved. Then, Article 6 states that ‘‘Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law’’. (United Nations, 1948). Legal recognition is obtained through citizenship, which you need for traveling, claiming property, getting a bank account, or receiving a marriage license. The latter implies that also article 16 ‘‘the right to marry’’ is not available to the stateless. (Howard-Hassmann & Walton-Roberts, 2015).

Bhabha and Matache argue in their chapter ‘‘Are Children’s Rights to Citizenship Slippery or Slimy’’ that deportation of stateless children leads to psychological suffer. Their main argument is that a child’s environment has many life-lasting effects. Therefore, it is highly problematic that this environment is changed in a radical manner through deportation, because of, among other things, the problematic issue of statelessness and de facto statelessness. (Bhabha & Matache, 2015). In line with this, in the book ‘Children Without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge’ Bicocchi writes about de facto statelessness. Here he confirms Bhabha and Matache’s argument and argues that deportation of stateless children also happens in Europe, while also stating that others are placed in detention facilities. (Bicocchi, 2011). Adding to these arguments, Fekete talks about the health implications and the psychological impact of these detention facilities on children. In her book ‘Detained: foreign children in Europe’, she mentions sleeplessness, weight loss, depression, and an undermining of the ability to learn as health implications. Psychological problems especially occur to children that have already been through a lot when arriving in a detention center with horrendous conditions. They can get retraumatized as the conditions remind them of past events, and in some cases, they even commit suicide. Therefore, she argues, it is problematic that there are no employees with knowledge on suicide present in these facilities. (Fekete, 2007). With regards to housing, there are no protective laws for stateless children and social housing is solely available to citizens. One common problem that Bicocchi identifies at all three issues, is that families are afraid of getting into trouble when trying to claim these rights, as they fear the authorities will act on their illegal status. (Bicocchi, 2011).

The Operational Framework of Hannah Arendt: Analytical Essay

The Operational Framework

In the diagram below, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “right to have rights” appears in the middle, topmost part of a square that encloses what defines the “right to have rights”. The Uyghurs, being that they are deprived of their right to religious freedom, are considered stateless given that an individual is a citizen if – and only if – one is part of a political community and is practicing their rights (Degooyer, 2018). The PRC serves as the government whose duty is to uphold and protect these rights, and whose omittance, therefore, renders a citizen stateless (Birmingham, 2006).

Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the right to have rights” begins with givenness and natality as the basis for the right to have rights, and carries on to the concept of common responsibility, making all actors accountable for safeguarding and securing rights, overall, changing the conception of citizenship and the dialogue of human rights. The diagram moves on to a reconstructed conception of citizenship that acknowledges statelessness and ends with ensuring “the right to have rights”. II.4 Methodology

The researchers are mimicking the methodology used by Peg Birmingham in her work Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (2006) in which she sifted through and analyzed the different publications, from books to essays and articles of Hannah Arendt to concretize the concept of “the right to have rights”. The researchers are patterning this methodology in collecting data from different credible sources regarding the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, and are sewing the data together with Hannah Arendt’s concept of “right to have rights”.

Given that the researchers are limited in quite a number of areas, credible and official documents and their analysis or secondary data analysis are primary sources and methods used for this research. The issue of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China has been going on for quite some time and is still currently ongoing, changing with added data and different perspectives. There are only a handful of resources possible other than that of secondary data from documents, articles, and journals to analyze, thus, document analysis as a method of research will aid in defining, outlining, and contextualizing standpoints, making statements clearer.

In order to elaborate and expound on certain ideas in Hannah Arendt’s concepts and other human rights concepts in general, the researchers are using a historical approach. The researchers are using different works from various authors and analyzing these in order to compare concepts and interpretations. This approach is being used to contextualize definitions and readings to better communicate what the authors were trying to convey. Similar to the methodology of Hannah Arendt, the researchers are using certain events and cases in history to compare and outline to further bridge ideas. Alongside this, the method is also used to give an origin and historical background to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China to be able to better assess their situation and how their predicament came to be.

For this paper, the researchers are using a qualitative approach. Statistics are rarely used in this research other than as a point of reference to factual data that will be used to support claims. The research mainly focuses on a scientific method of observation to gather information and non-numerical data. It rather refers to definitions, descriptions, concepts, ideas, and an analysis and interpretation of documents and statements.

Hannah Arendt’ Concept of “the Banality of Evil”’ Analytical Essay

To what extent does Anwar Congo exemplify Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil”?

In 1965, in Indonesia, Anwar Congo played a critical role in the mass murder of nearly half a million of his own people. The claims of a coup attempt by Communists released pent-up communal hatred; these flames of revulsion were fanned by the Indonesian Army, which quickly blamed the PKI (The Communist Party of Indonesia). Communists were purged from political, social, and military life, and the PKI itself was disbanded and banned. The massacres began in October 1965, in the weeks following the coup attempt, and reached their peak over the remainder of the year before subsiding in the early months of 1966. Despite the inherent evil of the acts, Congo’s intentions were banal. In Congo’s seemingly sadistic and depraved actions, his intent to merely do his job was disturbingly normal. Anwar Congo exemplifies Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” by feeling no remorse for his actions and expressing a shallow cluelessness, he displays resolve to do his job, whatever it may be, without sadistic motives, similar to Adolf Eichmann in Arendt’s study.

The year following Indonesia’s 1965 coup saw the murder of more than a million so-called ‘communists,’ who were, in fact, merely enemies of the military; including ethnic Chinese, intellectuals, and union members. One of the military’s main objectives in the killings was to destroy the anti-colonial labor movement that had existed up until 1965 and to lure foreign investors with the promise of cheap, docile workers and abundant natural resources. The unrest was rooted in the paranoia that the Communist Party of Indonesia, or the PKI, was stealing money from the rest of Indonesia’s population. Anwar Congo, head of a gang of killers called the Frog Squad, the most notorious death squad in North Sumatra, personally slaughtered approximately 1,000 citizens. He is the subject of The Act of Killing, a documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, that invites Congo and his friends to dramatize their crimes and to boast about their starring roles in a genocide. The documentary follows Congo and some of his fellow Frog Squad members as they reminisce on their times as “gangsters.” Throughout the film, some of Anwar’s friends talk about how the killings were wrong, while others worry about how the story will portray their public image. Ultimately, throughout most of the film, Congo acted as if he was careless or proud of his actions, further strengthening Arendt’s argument of the banality of evil.

Several people have compared Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” and Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Arendt argues that Eichmann was somehow not capable of thinking independently. It was thoughtlessness that drove him, as the evil was ignored so well that its perpetrator did not recognize the cruelty of his deed. This is exactly what Oppenheimer saw in Congo. For students of Arendt Congo, Oppenheimer’s film seems to invite comparison, not least at moments when its subjects, the perpetrators of genocide, discuss relationships between their pasts to official history and to international human rights law. But most of these commentators simply align Arendt’s Eichmann with the film’s central subjects, Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, and Adi Zulkandry, and uncritically conclude that their murderous behavior and intolerable (lack of) defense are simply another example of the banality of evil. Hannah Arendt described Adolf Eichmann similarly to Anwar Congo – as a small-minded functionary, more concerned with the managerial methods of his job than the moral or existential whys. According to Arendt, Eichmann wasn’t a man interested in asking difficult questions, he just got on with the logistics of the job: managing timetables and calculating travel costs. Congo was the same exact way in the methodical killing of almost a million of his own people, even while personally killing more than a thousand himself.

Despite the fact that Congo’s stated intent during the violent times was ordinary, his words and actions today reveal a different story. Although Congo has expressed little to no remorse about his murderous actions, Congo has stated that he still has nightmares about what he did. He tries to forget with alcohol, marijuana, and ecstasy. Congo has talked about ghosts of his victims that visit him in his nightmares. Congo often has nightmares about his past, which would suggest that Congo might actually indeed feel some remorse or regret about his actions. He can’t fully confront his past or decide if what he did was wrong because he’s part of a grand narrative that says he was supposed to kill for the good of the country, for its New Order. In the film “The Act of Killing,” after Congo plays a victim, he cannot continue. This is significant as it highlights the fact that Congo just might finally recognize the horror and evil behind his actions in the past. Congo’s self-medication and clear suffering after the fact show, despite his protestations, that he feels real remorse for his horrific actions.

Anwar Congo was one of the founders of the Pemuda Pancasila, which remains to this day a formidable right-wing paramilitary organization in Indonesia. Its members brag openly about extortion, killing, mass murder, and other war crimes. The killings are skipped over in most Indonesian history textbooks and have received little introspection by Indonesians, due to their suppression under the Suharto regime. The search for satisfactory explanations for the scale and frenzy of the violence has challenged scholars from all ideological perspectives. In Congo’s seemingly cruel and immoral actions, his intent to simply do his job and “be a gangster” was disturbingly normal. Anwar Congo exemplifies Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” by feeling little to no remorse at the time of the actions and expressing a shallow cluelessness, he only desired to do his job, whatever it may be, without sadistic motives, similar to Adolf Eichmann in Hannah Arendt’s study.

Bibliography

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