Ben > Recent Status Updates

'I am always tempted to repeat what the Jews of Algiers say with a bitter smile: "Racism is like the trolley from Saint-Eugene: it runs through the whole town, the beautiful sections and the ugly ones, it goes very fast . . . but it always leads to the cemetery."'

"One way or another the day always comes when you discover that you are a Jew, just as you discover that you are mortal, not because of the collective and abstract promise of death, but because of your own individual condemnation."

The final section, on totalitarianism itself, is def the weakest. So many of the observations have become commonplaces. And 'totalitarianism', in Arendt's very confined definition, is today hard to imagine. Arendt was very good at identifying the pathologies of liberalism and of the reactions to it, but did not anticipate the extent to which liberalism could internalize those reactions.

The section on stateless people - and especially the bit about the development of an international 'police policy' - feels like it could have been written today

Funny, she predicts that social antisemitism - race prejudice - could have a force in the United States that it could never have in Europe, because of unparalleled Jewish integration. In fact, contemporary American antisemitism is more political than ever - hatred of Jews as a(n imagined) class - with little to no racial/social element. Cuts to some of the main criticisms of Arendt: social/political divide, and race.

Readings for the new gilded age

On that grind

Highly recommend if you want to cry or throw up