While reading On Violence and On Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose (you can read my review here), I noticed Jacqueline Rose referred to Hannah Arendt’s On Violence and Crises of the Republic frequently. I’ve read a lot of Hannah Arendt’s work, but I hadn’t read these two books.
My favorite essay in Crises of the Republic (1972) is “Lying in Politics.” Hannah Arendt writes: “…the aspects of deception, self-deception, image-making, ideologizing, and defactualization…all these people, involved in an unjust war and rightly compromised by it…” (p. 44-45). Arendt is writing about the Vietnam War (and the Pentagon Papers) but what she writes about could easily be applied to the Catastrophe in Afghanistan now happening.
For over 20 years, we were told by our Government that progress was being made, that success and “nation-building” was just around the corner. Arendt debunks that flim-flam in On Violence, too: “…only in a world in which nothing of importance ever happens could the futurologists’ dream come true. Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern…” (p. 7)
The world considers America powerful, but Arendt explains how debacles like Vietnam and Afghanistan can happen despite our vast technology and power. “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.” ( p. 44).
Clearly the “group” in Vietnam and now Afghanistan couldn’t keep it together. After 2400 casualties, 60,000 injured service personnel, and $2 TRILLION spent we’re in the state of chaos…again. What do you think of what happened in Afghanistan?
Hannah Arendt was one of the greatest thinkers of the last century – a Jewish woman who went against all the prejudices that existed in Germany.
Just looking at her wiki entry makes me admire her again – though I can’t claim to understand her and following her – too many sources she uses.
One of the really great personalities of history!
But probably even she with her fantastic mind would have difficulties trying to understand what has been going on and will continue in Afghanistan, areally incomprehensible sad story.
And now I have to think of Dawkins:
Religion is the source of all evil …
As an atheist, I certainly know religious institutions have allowed no little evil to flourish…but so have avowedly “atheist” societies such as those topped by Leninists. (Though, of course, Stalin was almost as wrapped up in mystical crackpottery as was Hitler, but even the actually atheist have done no little damage to the understanding of others in the faith in a natural universe free of supernatural aspects.) Dawkins might not be the atheist one wants to invest one’s faith in, certainly…
Todd, toxic politics did as much to bring Afghanistan down as any religious factors. A whole cluster of mistakes and gaffs were necessary to produce a catastrophe of this magnitude!
Wolf, I started reading Hannah Arendt’s work in the 1960s with Eichmann in Jerusalem and later, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM. Over the years, I’ve read over a dozen of her books. She was a brilliant woman who confronted the true issues of our Times.
George, here again I have to admire you – I managed just a few of her critical articles.
Just a thought:
Maybe you had too much spare time in your job??? 🙂 🙂
Wolf, I spend every moment I can reading and thinking. I try to read a book a day.
The term “cluster-f**k” comes to mind almost immediately. A full-scale invasion ostensibly to find one man, and the immediate search for Osama Bin Laden was farmed out to the locals. Our ensuing policy was characterized by carelessness and papering-over.
Dan, I totally agree with you. From the very beginning, the mission in Afghanistan was botched.
Remember in National Lampoon’s Vacation when the Griswolds get to Wally World and it’s closed—and John Candy says, “Sorry folks, park’s closed. Moose out front should have told you so”? Well, history should have told us so about Afghanistan. As I said in a recent email: It started all the way back during the expansion of the British Empire. Every colonial power that has ever tried to conquer Afghanistan has eventually failed. Geography, culture, history, whatever—they would rather have the Taliban ruling them than anyone else. History should have warned us.
I gather it’s more the warlords would prefer the Taliban to any outsiders or any coalition of domestic Other Warlords.
The Taliban got its first major impetus in ejecting the Soviet invasion after 1979.
And well before the British Imperial failure, famously even the Genghis Khan invasion failed to get very far…probably because there was no central hierarchy the Khan forces could subjugate, no established firm hierarchy for them to replace.
What Most Afghans want, as with what most everyone everywhere wants, has little to do with the governments they are saddled with. Did You want the Trump Admin? Or for that matter the Bill Clinton Admin?
Deb, George Santayana wrote: “Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.” And, here we go again!
Karl Marx already realized:
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
He wrote something like this in an Article on Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon 3rd – which appeared/was printed in New York City (in German even!).
Wolf, Afghanistan is a farce, but nobody’s laughing.
Papering-over in terms of pallets of cash falling into who can say for sure who’s hands, as well. Relatively unpartisan critics have suggested that the small residual force of US troops and others’ diplomatic involvement helped give pause to the Taliban and its going forward with the complete takeover. Hence, yet another foolish move in an endless stream of foolish moves. The not terribly robust former government of Afghanistan left without its tie to US and other theoretical support…though, sadly, the residual US forces were somewhat similar to the US forces in Korea, particularly near the DMZ–go ahead, attack US forces, see what That gets you. The already weak power-dynamics keeping the Taliban and the warlords who will support them over Alien Interlopers at bay were thus broken, to borrow your take on Arendt. I’m a big fan of Arendt, too…and a deplorer of what she will tend to deplore.
But, of course, Afghanistan isn’t the only monstrosity going on, by any means. Consider the situations in Haiti, in Burma (if the military is somehow overthrown, I wonder if the country will continue to embrace “Myanmar” ), and damned near everywhere else on the planet, including in too many sites in the US. The current neoliberal administration here keeps doing one good half measure after another, and pairing them with continued dismal failure, such as the current Mexican border situation, where the berserk Trumpole policy always was entirely too much gibbering intensification of the Obama/Biden policy.
A contributor to JACOBIN notes, though her case could be buttressed some more, that she reckons the Obama post-presidential career is one of if not the worst of any recent president; my paleoconservative friend from our days at Punahou School in Honolulu, the mother of our souls (coughing) including hers and mine in ’82 and Obama’s in ’79, notes that the situation limned by the essay is the Typical Post-Punahou Career: “Go on to brand-name schools [for post-high school], get a prestigious-sounding job, retire rich, and have fun.” This not so much approvingly.
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/barack-obama-worst-ex-president-wealth-birthday-covid-public-interest
Whose! (Rushing as I was turning over the Dread Acer to Alice to do video-conferencing with her clients.)
Todd, I admire your analysis…and agree with it. A lot of people have plenty to answer for with the collapse of Afghanistan.
Still, the worst thing for me – as always – is the sheer, bald-faced hypocrisy of Trump, Pompeo, Cruz and the rest of the Republican Party. Let’s not forget, boys, that this is THEIR deal. THEY held a bilateral meeting with the Taliban, cutting out the (admittedly corrupt) Afghan government, and made the deal to leave. So just SHUT THE FUCK UP you scum-sucking lying pieces of shit, OK?
Yes, Biden told Obama to get out after they killed Osama (in Pakistan, of course) and he wouldn’t listen (nation-building, you know). But he should have been preparing for this for months.
Face it, we shouldn’t have been there from Day One and any Republican who even pretend that if we stayed just a little while longer and it would make all the difference, needs to go home. It’s all politics, period.
Jeff, Biden is going to be the scapegoat for Afghanistan going down the tubes. The GOP and Fox News will bash Biden for his “failures” until the next Presidential Election.
I’ll go with Jeff’s first paragraph. We spent 2 decades giving guidance, training, equipment, weapons, and support to an Afghani army who dropped their weapons and ran, and ITS OUR FAULT? NOT FUCKING LIKELY! The GOP will hammer Biden into the ground over Afghanistan cowardice, when, as much as anything this is another Trump failure. Bah!
No short story post?
Rick, I’ll have a short story post next Wednesday. I was upset about Afghanistan and decided to vent today.