hannah arendt

Send in the Clowns–Putin, Trump, the Fifth Column, and the importance of history

When Benito Mussolini was seen on newsreels in the United States it was as a “rotund, strutting clown, who struck pompous poses from his Roman balcony and tried to upstage Adolf Hitler when they first met, in Venice in 1934.” Much of this impression was established thanks to Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film “The Great Dictator,” where the Il Duce character was effectively lampooned by the actor Jack Oakie. This reinforced the widely held public prejudice in England and among many Americans that “Mediterranean Peoples,” especially Italians, were inferior oafs, unintelligent and clownish hotheads. Intellectuals and world leaders would come to regret underestimating the Italian autocrat, who was just the first of fascist and quasi-fascist leaders to wreak havoc on the world.

As with Mussolini, Hitler and the Nazis were first seen as a clown show with their thuggish behavior, mediocre backgrounds, buffoonish uniform-like garb, their appropriation of mythic symbols, and their completely unintelligible and ignorant interpretations of history and society. It was noted that Hitler himself was ignorant, lazy, a self-absorbed narcissist, and overly theatrical in his public appearances. He also effectively tapped into the grudges and nationalistic lies that cleaved German society, finding convenient scapegoats, especially Jews and other vulnerable groups, lumping them in with Communists and external threats to “German-speakers.”

Yet, so effective was the disinformation and propagandist jumble of Nazi ideas and assertions to define themselves and intentions, that even today intellectuals debate the definition of fascism, and whether clearly quasi-fascist governments like those under Franco in Spain and Pinochet in Chile were really fascist governments, despite the not only clear linkage to the methods and ideas of fascism, but the evidence of the dead bodies.

One would think that this debate was closed with Umberto Eco’s definition of Ur-fascism, (who knew about fascism first-hand) but we still get hand-wringing and pearl-clutching from intellectual Mugwumps who continue to want to obfuscate this issue. And for the uneducated on this subject–no–liberals and socialists aren’t fascists (or communists) or even close; especially given that they are usually among the first ones rounded up and murdered by fascist and quasi-fascist thugs along with Jews and others outside the fascist tribe.

Thus, about two weeks ago, I was struck by the comments of Sergey Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, regarding Ukraine and the West. He posited an alternative and counter-factual interpretation of history that is astounding in its echo of fascist movements. As he cautioned the West from coming to Ukraine’s aid, he referenced Russian historical continuity, the importance of uniting “Russian speakers,” and warning the West of the so-called lessons from the latest version of Russian ultra-nationalist self-delusional history that puts forth the notion of a single Eurasian people under Russian rule. Here is what he is saying: the various countries and ethnic groups from the border of Sweden down to Germany, and to Moldova, and, perhaps, to Serbia are within Russia’s orbit. He would sweep away these countries and peoples, murdering anyone in his way.

Vladimir Putin has shown himself to be an obviously corrupt kleptocrat, sociopath, narcissist and mediocrity. What he lacks in intellectual honesty and character, he more than compensates with ruthlessness, murderous intent, and links to the powerful oligarchs that keep him in near-totalitarian power. He is a fanatic. Fanatics, as Aldous Huxley noted, can be defeated because they compensate for a secret doubt, but they are also dangerous since any opposition or disagreement is interpreted as a hostile act. When such an individual has nuclear weapons, which this tyrant has been all too vocal in referencing, the situation is dangerous.

But the United States and its allies have overcome existential threats in the past, and make no mistake, Putin and the current Russian government is an existential threat. I served my country in the U. S. Navy for almost 23 years during the Cold War. I deployed to the theaters of contention close to the Soviet Union and Communist China. I also served, at times, as a special weapons courier. My military colleagues, and anyone paying attention, knew and developed the steel to oppose the imperial ambitions of those nations knowing that we were under nuclear threat by hostile powers. We also accepted the fact that in case of an attack on us, that retaliation against these countries would be swift and overwhelming.

Last night Mr. Putin delivered an unhinged and self-deluded speech. He is a clown. The clowns in this world have caused a tremendous amount of human suffering and destruction. As Hannah Arendt noted, evil is banal. The clowns of this world, augmented by our so-called post-truth era, create an environment for banality to thrive. They spread the sickness–the pandemic–of their deranged minds onto the world.

Thus, almost in a caricature of the comedy of life, Donald Trump, the dictator’s sycophant and a man of personal cowardice unknown in any previous U. S. president, praises the evisceration of Ukraine. The man is a Quisling and compromised. He and his followers, who act as a cult, and cult-like, change and contort their minds on a dime to align with his statements, represent a dangerous anti-democratic and–yes–anti-American Fifth Column.

The election of Joe Biden and the corrective of American democracy is the trigger that caused this crisis because Putin thought he had neutralized the United States. His Quisling is in exile, though he has more than a few mini-quislings waiting in line. As all extreme narcissists, he actually believed his own delusion. This is an attack borne of desperation. Unfortunately Ukraine is the pawn he has chosen. It is timed to undermine American democracy and seed division, so that he can realize his other imperial ambitions in threatening our allies and defeating democratic self-government–government of the people, by the people, and for the people–in Europe and elsewhere. He hates what we are. Anyone who supports him shares in that hate.

Wake up. History is calling.

Weekend Musical Interlude — Guy Clark performing “El Coyote”

Not much more can be said of Guy Clark that has not already been written.  I had the pleasure of seeing him in concert with Lyle Lovett, Joe Ely, and John Hyatt a few years ago as they toured the southwest.  Clark embodies the best of folk and what was called “country and western” music, with emphasis on western.  His songs tell stories that are genuine and organic to their surroundings, embodying the best of what pure art should embody: clarifying and transforming what is apparent into something else–an insight into the human condition, recording it with all of its imperfections and in all of its embodiments.

“El Coyote” tells a story that has been much in the news the last few years, generating outrage and suspicion: the emigration of people into the United States from south of the border.  There are many reasons for the migration just as our forebears had their reasons for coming to this land.  The reasons in the American southwest are a bit more complicated than many would acknowledge, the border being somewhat fluid over the last 160 years, with trade and movement flowing both ways, which I learned first hand when I resided for many years in New Mexico.  Clark’s story song is told in the third person, but from the perspective of the campesinos.  As such, it harkens back to the music of Woody Guthrie, telling the story from the perspective of those whose lives and destinies are being recorded in song.

A few days ago I viewed for the first time the excellent biopic of Hannah Arendt starring Barbara Sukowa.  Arendt is a philosopher whose intellectual power and influence marks her as the essential source for understanding the human capacity for doing evil.  Her clear-eyed observations of people in extraordinary times and circumstances disturbed many of her contemporaries, but it is this intellectual honesty that marks her as one of the giants in recording and understanding human nature.  Her first-hand insights confirmed what Joseph Conrad wrote sixty-three years before in “Heart of Darkness,” that “The mind of man is capable of anything–because everything is in it, all of the past as well as all of the future.”

Arendt’s insight in her work, but most especially in Eichmann in Jerusalem, was that human evil is not only banal, but in its most common form is derived by the denial of thought, which is the most basic human activity that defines each of us as human.  By refusing to think about (and therefore take responsibility for) the consequences of his actions, Adolf Eichmann, a petty bureaucrat, was able to commit a very great evil, a horrendous crime.  The humanity of the people being led to their slaughter became unimportant–a commodity–and so it became easy to do what he was ordered to do because they were stripped of their humanity by the absence of thought.

We must be mindful as a people, I think, that thought leads to the acceptance of the humanity of others, which leads to empathy, sympathy, and–eventually–to basic human compassion and decency.  Stereotypes, euphemisms, and slogans are evils designed to deny people their basic humanity and there is no doubt that the purveyors of such devices do so with that harmful intent.  We must resist the easy path of thoughtlessness, and appeals to fear and tribal loyalty.

People can be undocumented in coming into a strange land, but people can never be “illegal.”  It wasn’t too long ago when my own swarthy forebears were pejoratively called “W.O.P.s”–a term that is derived from the acronym “with out papers;” that is, those of Italian descent who were undocumented and therefore, “illegal.”

We are a nation of immigrants.  My sympathy and advocacy for decency is with the campesinos and with the children seeking safety in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  We simply need to live up to those words which, in the end, is what defines a people as exceptional, given the all too common penchant for cruelty in human history.

Sunday Contemplation — Finding Wisdom — Albert Camus

Albert Camus

“The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”

Albert Camus was a philosopher like Bertrand Russell was a philosopher.  Camus, whose fiction is among the greatest written in the 20th century, denied that he was a philosopher or that he was proposing a philosophical position.  Indeed, in reading his fiction and essays it is apparent that he places little value in modern philosophy, ideology, and religion because, ultimately, each promises a utopia that is unrealizable and that oftentimes ends in evil, even though the intentions of the proponents of those schools of thought may be good.  Out of these writings, however, he does construct an edifice for how we can live our lives in a universe that we learn is vaster and older than we ever imagined.  In this way he anticipates the current crop of scientific writers who are beginning to extend their interests to this same territory, in particular, the so-called New Atheists through such works as Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins as in this talk:

But also other writings from various specialties such as Lewis, Amini, and Lannon in A General Theory of Love.  Or perhaps it is they who have continued his line of thought, though they may not be entirely aware of that fact.

For Camus, who lived first-hand during the fall, humiliation, and Vichy collaboration of his beloved France–a member of the Resistance–life was an “absurd” proposition since we live our mortal lives and ask ultimate questions in the face of a silent universe.  In his book length essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942; Eng. tr. 1955) he noted that we humans continue to ask such questions yet, like Sisyphus, find ourselves tumbling back down the hill.  Reason and deductive philosophical methods fail to answer these questions since they attempt to prove using circular reasoning the propositions that they assume as true.

For me the essential wisdom to be garnered from Camus lies in the novels The Stranger (1942; Eng. trans., 1946), The Plague (1947; Eng. trans., 1948), and The Fall (1956; Eng. tr. 1957), though along with the essays The Rebel (1951; Eng. tr. 1954) and the aforementioned The Myth of Sisyphus, though he hardly ever wrote anything that was not worth reading.  Wisdom derived from these works is not simply in the philosophical propositions that they explore but in their insight into the human condition.

In The Stranger, the main character Meursault, a French Algerian, describes his world in a detached and pathological manner.  He is what today we would recognize as a sociopath, a condition that may describe as many as one of every twenty five people.  It is here that Camus explores the nature of evil.  The book opens with him discussing the death of his mother in a dry, almost passive voice, which he learns through a telegram.  He is asked to travel to a nursing home a distance away to make arrangements for her burial, which he does reluctantly.  He then returns home as quickly as he can to spend time with his girlfriend, for whom he expresses no feeling.  As we explore Meursault’s character we find that he does not care about anything, nor does he share empathy with his fellow human beings.  He decides eventually to kill another person as an intellectual exercise.  He wants to know: can he kill a stranger without anger?

When he is arrested for the crime Meursault barely tries to defend himself, explaining to the jurors that he feels nothing but annoyance at having to defend his actions.  As a result he is put to death for his crime.  The Stranger was first published in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France.  It was during this time that Camus was editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat.  All around him was the horror of human cruelty given legitimacy by an invading force that killed without regret.  It is in this context that the novel’s flat tone is both shocking and intimate given the monstrous human phenomenon it describes.  For Camus, evil is ignorant–pathology and solipsism being extreme forms of ignorance.  The character Meursault sounds much like the pleadings of Eichmann after his capture by the Israeli authorities chronicled in Hannah Arendt‘s landmark book Eichmann in Jerusalem.  In her study of the man Arendt posited that Eichmann was anything but an aberration but, in her terminology, evil it turns out is banal.  In this same vein Camus’ Meursault is a very banal man, and the embodiment of his own country’s collaboration with fascism and the Holocaust which caused people to do horrible things to their fellow human beings.

In The Plague, Camus’ masterpiece, scores of people are falling ill and dying in the Algerian city of Oran.  Despite the reality before them, the city’s leaders are unwilling to accept that it is bubonic plague.  As the disease runs out of control with fear running amok, the government finally takes action and places the city under quarantine.  The people of the city are now not only cut off from the outside world and their loved ones, but also cut off from social contact within the city.  Fear, isolation, and panic overtake the community.

As Camus develops his story the people of Oran react in one of two ways to the plague: those who personalize the danger and regret their lives, and those who dedicate themselves to caring for the sick, despite the personal danger to their own health.  Among this latter group is Dr. Rieux and a few of his acquaintances.  Only after almost half of the city’s population dies does the community realize that all of them have a high probability of dying.  Accepting their own mortality they develop a sense of unity and place the needs of the community of a whole above their own personal needs and desires.  This is a theme that Camus will revisit in later essays and literature.  Faced with the realization of one’s mortality in an indifferent universe does one give up and die, pursue one’s own interests, or is there still another way to preserve the best that makes us human?  Camus comes down strongly for finding such a way in the compassion, sympathy, and empathy felt among one’s fellow human beings, which speak to the needs of all of us.

In The Fall, probably Camus’ most controversial and complex novel, we follow the conversation between former Parisian lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, and a fellow Parisian he meets in a seedy dockside bar in Amsterdam named Mexico City.  The conversation is one-sided, and first person through the second person, not an unfamiliar approach for those familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad.  The story covers a period of five days in five separate locations starting at the bar and ending in Clamence’s apartment.  Clamence describes himself as a “judge-penitent,” and it is not entirely clear what he means when his narrative begins, but which reveals itself as the story unfolds.

The novel follows three main sections:  Clamence in Paris and his fall, Clamence in a prison camp during the Second World War, and Clamence’s acquisition of the painting “The Just Judges.”  Each of these sections pose a dilemma and explain Clamence’s self-description of “judge-penitent.”

In Paris, before his self-described fall, Clamence had been a well respected lawyer.  He viewed himself as the defender of the downtrodden and actively sought out cases that bolstered his image in this way.  His actions were not so much motivated by altruism than both public approval and self-image.  Clamence’s fall, and his self-imposed exile to Amsterdam, is caused by his own lack of action when a woman falls to her death along the River Seine.  He passed the woman along his walk and saw that something was amiss.  Regardless he presses on and hears a splash, though he doesn’t see her fall.  He chooses not to go back and investigate, avoiding the choice of whether to place his own life in danger in saving the woman.  He tries putting the incident out of his mind and avoids reading the newspapers in fear that they may confirm that the woman did, indeed, jump–an act that would undermine his own self-image.

Then one day, he finds himself close to the same location along the river while in a self-congratulatory mood.  He hears laughter in the distance and it seems to be coming from the water, though he turns and it most likely came from two lovers in the distance, though there is enough doubt in the narrative to suggest that it was generated by Clamence’s subconscious and that he himself uttered the laugh.  He is thus reminded of his cowardly behavior and the possibility of the woman’s death.  He is struck by the contradiction of his self-image and the reality of his motivations and actions.

Later Clamence’s “fine picture of himself” is literally shattered by a sucker-punch to the face coming from a motorcyclist with whom he gets into an argument for blocking a congested city street.  Dejected and seeing for himself for the first time for what he truly is, Clamence attempts to destroy the image he built of himself, living a life of debauchery and consorting with the worst elements of Paris.  Despite these attempts the myth of his public image is too strong and he fails as a public penitent.

In the second part of the narrative, Clamence tells the story of his desire during the war to join the Resistance, but his fear of death is too much for him.  In fear he instead flees to North Africa with the intention of ending up in London.  I was reminded in reading this portion of the book of the Humphrey Bogart movie Casablanca and came to realize that its narrative was very close to the experience of many Frenchmen during this time.  During his transit Clamence is arrested in Tunis, supposedly as a precautionary measure, and ends up in a German prison camp.  While in the camp he meets a veteran of the Spanish civil war, captured by a “Catholic general” and handed over to the Germans.  The man tells him that, supposedly as a result of the Church’s collaboration, he has lost his faith in Catholicism and posits that a new Pope is needed.  Only able to control the limited environment of their imprisonment, the inmates at the behest of the Spanish inmate elect Clamence the camp “Pope,” with wide latitude over the distribution of food, water, and work assignments.  At first diligent in his duties Clamence abuses his power one day by drinking the water of a dying man.  For the second time we have the imagery of water.  In the first case Clamence refuses to immerse himself to save another.  In this case Clamence consumes the water to cause the death of another.

In the final sequence, the stolen Jan van Eyck panel entitled The Just Judges from the fifteenth-century Ghent altarpiece entitled The Adoration of the Lamb hangs in a cupboard in Clamence’s apartment.  He explains that he acquired it from the bartender of the Mexico City who, in turn, had received it from the thief in return for a drink.  Because Clamence knew that the painting was being sought by the authorities he extended a “kindness” by offering to hide the panel for the new owner.  The subject of the panel are the judges on their way to adore Jesus.  To Clamence the judges will never find him since he cannot offer people the redemption that they seek.  Since Jesus’ teachings emphasized the avoidance of judging others, the Church subverted his message and turned him into the ultimate judge, separating him from his innocence as the Lamb.  It is here that he defines his role as judge-penitent.

Many critics have looked at The Fall as a break from the more optimistic and positive messages in The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Rebel.  Instead, however, I believe that this work is the fullest rendering of the human condition that he wrote, exploring the themes that he always visited.  Unlike The Stranger, there is no final judgement that brings justice.  Unlike The Plague, there is no community to pull together.  Instead, in the atomistic post-World War II world we only have individuals who appear to be trustworthy and acting in the public interest, though the reality is starkly different.  What goes around does not always come around.  In this way Camus is much like Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Bad Little Boy.”

The narrative structure goes a step further by insinuating the reader into Clamence’s world.  As such we, the second person, allow him to be what he is.  And, as such, we are co-conspirators to his actions and, by extension, to the world we allow to take place.  It is a book, along with its predecessors, that still speaks to our time.