Dare to Jump into the “Empire of Freedom”. Hannah Arendt’s Confession of the Ethically Justified Denial of the Individual
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The article “America’s New ‘Angels of Death’: Inject Humanity with a Gene-altering Death-dealing Technology. Medical Professionals Cannot Claim Ignorance” in “Global Research” of 11 July 2022 begins with a remarkable quote attributed to former SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann at the 1961 trial in Israel – and involuntarily conjures up parallels with the political situation in the world today. Eichmann was regarded by the international public as one of the main perpetrators of the “Final Solution” of the Jews in Europe:
“The guilt me for the mass murder is solely that of the political leaders…. I accuse the leaders of abusing my obedience. At that time obedience was demanded, just as in the future it will also be demanded of the subordinate. Obedience is commended as a virtue.” (1)
For the German philosopher and professor of political theory Hannah Arendt, Eichmann’s defining motive, apart from personal ambition, lay in a “misguided fulfilment of duty and a bureaucratic obedience to the cadre”(2). To a certain extent, it was the “sheer thoughtlessness” of the desk criminal that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that time without “diabolical-demonic depth” (3).
In the National Socialist genocide, on the other hand, Arendt saw an “administrative mass murder” (administrative massacres) (4) and – looking far ahead – “the vision of a highly mechanised and bureaucratic world in which genocide and the extermination of “superfluous” (or “useless”) population groups would become commonplace silently and without moral outrage from the public” (5).
For Arendt, a scholar of totalitarianism, the mechanism of totalitarian rule consists both in a “state-mandated reassessment of values” (6) and in an “inexorable intensification of terror that immobilises people” (7).
According to the historian Hans Mommsen, Arendt’s personal response to the National Socialist “crime against humanity” was to profess “rebelliousness“, an ethically justified denial of the individual. In an introductory essay to Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem. An Account of the Banality of Evil”, Mommsen writes:
“She demanded of the individual what she herself tried to practise, to dare the existentially philosophically founded jump into the empire of freedom; (…) and to dare a real new beginning.” (8)
This text from 1986 has lost none of its analytical sharpness and explosiveness to this day.
In her book, Arendt herself speaks of a fundamental question that was touched upon in all the post-war trials and which concerns the nature and functioning of human judgement:
“What we are asking for in these trials is that people should still be able to distinguish right from wrong even when they really have nothing else to fall back on but their own judgement, which, moreover, in such circumstances is in screaming contrast to what they must believe to be the unanimous opinion of their entire environment”. (9)
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (specialising in clinical, educational and media psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-new-angels-death/5786216
(2) Arendt, Hannah (1964). (8th ed. November 2013). Eichmann in Jerusalem. An account of the banality of evil. Munich, p. 25
(3) op. cit., p. 57
(4) op. cit., p. 58
(5) op. cit., p. 18
(6) op. cit., p. 57
(7) op. cit., p. 26 f.
(8) op. cit., p. 43
(9) op. cit., p. 69
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