Response to a query regarding my existence

A query reached me on 12-8-25, seemingly having to do with whether or not I was still alive.  I am indeed as far as I know but we older folk are never sure about our states of being from one day to the next, so take that with a grain of salt.

In any case, whatever I am, I have been off-line for Internet, Amazon (Kindle) and literary reasons.  

As everyone knows, I read a lot, shifting, typically from one subject or interest to another.  Since this sort of thing increased since Susan died I acquired some annoyances, among other things, when I decided to download a novel from Kindle (for example) I often discovered that I’d already downloaded it but apparently hadn’t read it all, sometimes I saw no evidence that I had read any of it. [as to why, I didn’t remember, I recently checked and am reading, an average of two books every three days.] So why didn’t I read this particular book? I would wonder and try to access it on my Kindle and thereby enter into a world that would (I often thought), qualify as one of Dante’s regions of Hell.  Nevertheless, I persevered and finally learned how to see in a usable manner all the Kindle books I had purchased on Kindle. 

Often, I would notice something about a novel, or series of novels and want to record some comments.  Doing it in my main journal was cumbersome.  Also, I couldn’t readily find what I had written in a reasonable amount of time, the journals being numerous and the writing voluminous as well as being hard to read.

So, I decided to create notebooks devoted just to book matters.  Amazon sells “packs” of notebooks convenient to this purpose, hard-backs, 5.5 by 8 inches in size and in different colors. Since I typically read several hours a day, the using of one of these notebooks say on non-serious (meaning nonliterary and not the sort of novel that wins the Booker or Pulitzer or Nobel prizes, but very popular in the actual reading world – novels that Amazon rates very high in terms of popularity, e.g., detective, detective thriller, detective cozy.

And, since my background is in legitimate literature, the sort that does win literary prizes, the sort critics like to think will live on (be popular) for years, if not centuries, to come.  I’ve another notebook for these (although I find that I usually enjoy the non-serious books more than the legitimate).

Then too I also read factual works.  I recently read a vivid account of the largest battle during the Korean War, fought by Marines.  It was mostly over when I was still in High School.  But I didn’t know that, and it wasn’t officially over, because truce talks were going on.  I tried to enlist when I was 16, but they found out how old I was and sent me home.  My parents held me hostage from the Marine Corps until I graduated from High School; so that is what happened.  I was 17.  The war was still technically going on but this just meant that the U.S., the South Koreans, the North Koreans and the Chinese were conducting truce talks.  We might exchange a few shots over the truce line, but that wasn’t combat in the proper sense.  Even though I was entitled to two stars on my Koran ribbon.  They just meant that I was in Korea when that war was technically active, and before the truce was actually signed.  I was on Cheju Island when the truce was signed.  An officer flew a corsair onto our air strip to officially notify us that the truce had been signed.  There was a prison camp on Cheju Island and North Koreans were released during the truce talks in order to make their way back north if they chose to go back – at least that is what we were told, but I had never before read a history that provided the details of that war, and especially the Battle the Marines fought (Chosin Reservoir) in which the Chinese offered our General Smith the chance to surrender because the Chinese had his force surrounded.  He responded with words like “surrender Hell, we’ve got you right where we want you, all around us; so any time we feel like shooting one of you we look up and there you are.”  That might sound like bravado, but it was actually the case. according to On Desperate Ground, the epic story of Chosin Reservoir -- the greatest battle of the Korean War by Hampton Sides pretty much agrees with general Smith.  The Marines were better trained, better shots, and had better equipment.  The Army asked the Marines to come to their aid at one point, but, despite General Smith’s bravado, the Marines were being hard pressed their whole time adjacent to the Chosin Reservoir and couldn’t go to the Army’s aid. [The Army troops were on the other side of the Chosin Reservoir and did get some Army aid.]  While the Marines didn’t get additional troops, they did get supply drops of additional ammunition, because they used a lot of it.  The Chinese commanders believed that if they kept sending troops, wave after wave at us, that we would eventually be overwhelmed.  Some of the Chinese sent in that fashion were not even issued guns.  They were told to pick up the weapons of the Chinese soldiers we had killed and who lying in their path, dead, with loaded weapons. 

The Battle of Chosin Reservoir took place between 27 November and 13 December 1950.  I finally made it into the Marine Corps when I graduated in July 1952 at age 17.  I did try to enlist after the eleventh grade, in 1951 when I would have been 16.  The history book I read told me that even if I hurried my way to Korea, the battle of Chosin Reservoir would already have been over.

I knew the truce talks were going on, but a lot of us assumed the war would resume.  Everyone in my graduating class knew I intended to enlist in the Marine Corps so many of them made such comments as “bullet-stopper” in my year books.  Enlisting in the Marine Corps in July of 1952 seemed like a risky (foolish) thing to do (according to my fellow students in July of 1952), but in retrospect it wasn’t.

Nevertheless, one didn’t know that when I enlisted in July 1952.  My first duty station was at the Marine air base at El Toro in Santa Ana, something like 16 miles from my home.  When I found that out, I decided that was intolerable.  I didn’t join the Marines to have easy duty 16 miles from home, so I went to my administration and asked if they could find a way to send me to Korea, and they did. There was a fellow who was being sent to Korea that didn’t want to go.  He turned out to be happy to change places with me.

I don’t recall the precise date I got to Korea, but I was there for the (technically) last two battle seasons, but when I inquired about being sent to the line where we were shooting at each other, I was told that volunteers to go up there were no longer being accepted.

My reading answered some questions I had but I had never pursued reading about my time over there.  Why should I, I thought at the time, I had been there.  When my term was up, I met with a recruiting sergeant, who told me that if I would reenlist.  I had only been made a buck (three stripe) sergeant a few months earlier so that sounded strange.  They also offered me any duty station I wanted and suggested sea-duty.  

As to the immediate rank increase, I worked (later, one the C17 program) with a retired Marine Corps captain who said that would have been a very good deal for me.  The ranks had been depleted by all the Marines who had been killed at Chosin Reservoir so for a short time rank increases were offered to anyone who reenlisted.  

I told the retired captain that I didn’t appreciate the “peace time” Marines and so gave up all thought of staying in based on my time served after the truce was signed.  It wasn’t until I read the aforementioned history of the Chosin Reservoir battle that I seriously thought about the fact that I wouldn’t strictly have been joining the “peace-time Marines.” I would have been reenlisting in a Marine Corps training for their next war (which would have been in Vietnam, but I didn’t know that when I got out).

I did exceptionally well at my last duty, which was being a rifle coach.  I was the only one of the young coaches who had been to Korea.  Also, I didn’t drop any of my shooters.  We coaches were assigned a group of shooters each couple of weeks, some of whom had previously qualified and some had not.  Our job was to get them all qualified.  Time after time I got all my shooters, even the ones that had never qualified, qualified.  After a while, the old-time tech and master sergeants who ran the re-qualification situation, let me run things and spent their time in the slop chute.  

I enjoyed all that quite a lot, plus I had a lot of things to say about shooting.   Then too I had a unique coaching method which I was rather proud of, and none of the other coaches could (or even wanted to) do what I did.  It amounted to hanging over the shoulder of each of my shooters and hypnotically, convince them that they just needed to listen to my voice as they acquired a sight picture and very gently always keeping the front sight in the black, as they squeezed the trigger.  And if they listened, and believed what I was telling them, and did it, then they would become qualified if they had never been qualified or would improve their scores if they hadn’t.  I was rather pleased with my approach and the senior coaches, concerned with results, were as well.    I have told that story more than once.  Susan, upon hearing it, objected.  She asked, what happens when your shooters go into combat and you aren’t there to whisper in their ears?   

I took the test for buck sergeant when I was a coach, so the approval of the tech-sergeants was important.  Also, by the time I was getting ready to get out of the Marine Corps, I’m sure 1) the fact that I had volunteered to go to Korea during that war counted in the minds of those deciding whether to offer me as much as they could in hopes of getting me to stay in was concerned.  And 2) the fact that I had been so successful as a rifle coach had to count for a lot.  The senior sergeants I had freed up to spend their days at the slop chute had obviously been grateful and had given me a good report.  

But frankly I had decided to go to college and not to reenlist; and while I enjoyed my life as a coach, the coaching days were limited.  Once every one had been through re-qualification we had come from, we coaches were obligated to return to the duty stations we came from when we became coaches.  In my case that was in the 2nd 90s at 29 Palms and I hated that place for various reasons.

And, I didn’t have a clear understanding of the training required of “peacetime Marines.”  So, an increase in rank to Staff Sergeant and the choice of duty stations wasn’t a serious incentive for me.

In regard to what I was looking toward.  My grandmother influenced my quite a lot.  As a girl, she lost her hearing and couldn’t attend school for a while, during which she became convinced that a knowledge of and appreciation for books could more than compensate (in life) for the lack of a formal education.  My military experience entitled me to a college education; so, I took classes for the joy of them and without respect to a particular job later on. [Rather foolish it seemed to many, including my stepfather who wanted me to get an engineering degree.]

I could have gotten a master’s degree and indeed took half of the classes necessary for one, but by that time I was rather firmly ensconced at Douglas Aircraft company, doing well (and paying my bills) in an arena I had never planned to enter, engineering.  

What I have done undoubtedly sounds strange to some, and entering into engineering with any sort of Liberal Arts degree put a lot of the college graduates hired during that time (when the Air Force complained about the shoddy incomprehensible documentation and communication sent to them by Douglas engineers) in engineering.  Engineers were not going to get better at it; so, Douglas needed Liberal Arts-type graduates who were smart enough to understand engineering matters and persuasive enough to get cooperation from salty old-time engineers.  My Marine Corps experience helped me with the latter.  There was not an engineer so salty or forbidding enough to cow a Marine Corps sergeant.

And, bringing things forward into the era of my retirement, over the years I knew many legitimate (meaning they had engineering degrees) engineers who were not equipped to retire.  They had no legitimate or useful skills or plans for spending time during retirement.  A friend who was the senior engineer over the interior designs of DC10 aircraft, retired.  His big plan, full of interior design experience, was to build himself a perfect house.  And he indeed work away at that, happily as far as I could tell, but before he finished, he had a heart attack and died.

Another engineer was held up to the rest of us as the perfect engineering employee.  Anything management wanted us to do; someone would find occasion to point at this guy and tell us how wonderful he was.  Back in those days everyone had to retire at age 65.  The week after this guy retired, he was in a coffee shop, had a heart attack, keeled over and died.  

Since I became an engineer under false pretenses, that is, I could do the work and was qualified in that sense, but deep down I felt I was largely a fraud because I didn’t have an engineering degree and while no one ever criticized me during my 39 years in engineering, someone could have challenged me in some respect for not having an engineering degree.  I was once offered the job as head of Advance Design and turned it down.  I was a program engineer at the time working on the KC-10 program, but I also delivered the last two DC-10s, one to Nigeria and the other to Pakistan.   I also handled some activity for Advance Design and so was qualified (in terms of being able to do the work).  But I knew a lot of those engineers, stuck up for some of them during some difficult times and maybe they wouldn’t have minded that I was their boss, but they didn’t know I didn’t have an engineering degree.  Beyond that I didn’t have respect for the higher-level director who offered me the job.

12-10-25, 11:00.  I got only that far in regard to answering someone who asked what I had been up to in the last several weeks in as much as I had not posted any general note to that effect.  Well (in my defense), I thought about it but it, but never stopped doing the above in order to write about it.  Besides, what I was doing to organize what I was reading didn’t seem very interesting, and I wasn’t sure how consistent I would be in doing what I set out to do

In regard to watching things on TV etc., I don’t have a TV I watch but I have been watching on Youtube videos on the discoveries being made in regard to DNA analyses of older skeletons, revising many of the theories about our ancestral histories.  I did actually have my DNA checked and found that my mother’s belief that she (and consequently her kids) was part Indian.  Her reasoning was that she saw her great grandmother squatting down in the back yard smoking a corn-cob pipe, “and who would do that other than an Indian.”  It’s been a while since I looked at the results from Ancestry.com, but I thought at the time her great-grandmother was a German.  She had no Indian in her ancestry.  

BTW, her mistake did influence my time in the Marine Corps.  I’d only been on the Marine base in Kunsan a short time when a full-blooded Indian, Emhoolah, stopped me and asked me if I was part Indian.  I said that I was, and he said that since he was the only full-blooded Indian on the base and he is ordering me to show up at the slop chute every day after work and drink beer with the rest of the Indians.  So that’s where I learned to drink beer and do all the other things that “drunken Indians” did, one of which was to be body guard for Bill Salois, one-quarter Blackfoot, who liked to fight every time he was drunk, and he wasn’t very good at it, so my job was to make sure he wasn’t hurt very badly; so I would stop the fights as soon as he was getting a beating, declare them a draw and haul him off.  Bill was good at holding a grudge.  Once, when everyone was off doing something else, he went into the barracks took the M1 rifle of someone he hated and fired 8 rounds through the overhead figuring to get this guy in trouble, but it turned out no one noticed, to his disappointment.  

I did like being an Indian.  Bill tried to talk me into joining him in Montana once we got out.  He said we could start a ranch together.  I objected, "we don't have any money."  He said, "that's no big deal.  We can earn all we need at the rodeo."  Doing what, I asked?   Riding horses and bulls, that sort of thing.  I told him I had never done that sort of thing.  He said, "no big deal.  It's easy."   In a couple of novels, I've read recently the author describing the dangerousness of something as being equivalent to riding bucking horses and bulls.   Well, as much as I liked Bill, I was never inspired by his plan. 

Hannah Arendt's Reflections on Violence

In the July 11, 2013 issue of the NYROB is an excerpt from Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Violence," published in its entirety in in the February 27, 1969 issue of the NYROB and can be found here:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/02/27/a-special-supplement-reflections-on-violence/

I'm sure I'm not alone in mistrusting bureaucracies.  My most recent hatred was directed against the medical profession during Susan's decline and death of a year ago.  Hannah Arendt in the July 11, 2013 excerpt does found her dislike on theory.  I imagine you can find the following in the 1969 article if you search it.  These are the passages I found most interesting:

"Finally, the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence.  In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted.  Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."

and,

"For progress, as we have come to understand it, means growth, the relentless process of more and more, of bigger and bigger.  The bigger a country becomes in population, in objects, and in possessions, the greater will be the need for administration and with it, the anonymous power of the administrators."


and,


"For the disintegration processes, which have become so manifest in recent years -- the decay of many public services, or schools and police, or mail delivery and transportation, the death rate on the highways and the traffic problems in the cities -- concern everything designed to serve mass society.  Bigness is afflicted with vulnerability, and while no one can say with assurance where and when the breaking point has been reached, we can observe, almost to the point of measuring it, how strength and resiliency are insidiously destroyed, leaking, as it were, drop by drop from out institutions.  And the same, I think, is true for the various party systems -- the one-party dictatorships in the East as well as the two-party systems in England and the United States, or the multiple party systems in Europe -- all  of which were supposed to serve the political needs of modern mass societies, to make representative government possible where direct democracy would not do because 'the room will not hold all' (John Selden)."

and finally,

"Again, we do not know where these developments will lead us, but we can see how cracks in the power structure of all but the small countries are opening and widening.  And we know, or should know, that every decrease of power is an open invitation to violence -- if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands have always found it difficult to resist the temptation of substituting violence for it."

Comment:  I have mistrusted the EU but without having a very good reason, perhaps nothing more than having lived long enough to see what seems to be the accomplishment of one of Germany's long-standing (military) goals by peaceful means.  But the cracks Arendt referred to have been appearing.  Administrative decisions have not all been well received by the individual nations.  I thought Britain moving in a wise direction with Brexit.  I have been inclined to credit the EU's immigration policies for the violence in Europe, but I can see Arendt's explanation for it as well; although I don't see the Islamist's' goal as being more political representation.  Her explanation is more suited to the resistance of individual EU nations to the EU's administrative policies on various matters.

Arendt, Jaspers, Eichmann, and ex-post-facto law

            When one considers the Eichmann case, one is faced with the fact that Eichmann was being tried by a nation that didn't exist at the time he committed the "crimes" he was being charged with.  Beyond that, the laws defining those crimes were established by this nation that didn't exist (when he committed them) in 1950, at least five years after Eichmann committed them.  The trial itself commenced in 1961, at least 16 years after Eichmann committed them.

            On page 269 of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt writes, "Jaspers proposed that the court in Jerusalem, after hearing the factual evidence, 'waive' the right to pass sentence, declaring itself 'incompetent' to do so, because the legal nature of the crime in question was still open to dispute, as was the subsequent question of who would be competent to pass sentence on a crime which had been committed on government orders.  Jaspers stated further that one thing alone was certain: 'This crime is both more and less than common murder,'  and though it was not a 'war crime,' either, there was no doubt that 'mankind would certainly be destroyed if states were permitted to perpetrate such crimes.'

            "Jaspers' proposal, which no one in Israel even bothered to discuss, would, in this form, presumably have been impracticable from a purely technical point of view.  The question of a court's jurisdiction must be decided before the trial begins; and once a court has been declared competent, it must also pass judgment.  However, these purely formalistic objections could easily have been met if Jaspers had called not upon the court, but rather upon the state of Israel to waive its right to carry out the sentence once it had been handed down, in view of the unprecedented nature of the court's findings.  Israel might then have had recourse to the United Nations and demonstrated, with all the evidence at hand, that the need for an international criminal court was imperative, in view of these new crimes committed against mankind as a whole."

            I like Jaspers' proposal, but Arendt writes that he was being unrealistic.  Not only did no international court exist, but the U.N. had twice rejected proposals to consider the establishment of one.  Beyond that, Arendt writes on page 271, ". . . for Israel the only unprecedented feature of the trial was that, for the first time (since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans), Jews were able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people, that, for the first time, they did not need to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon the compromised phraseology of the rights of man -- rights which, as no one knew better than they, were claimed only by people who were too weak to defend their 'rights of Englishmen' and to enforce their own laws. (The very fact that Israel had her own law under which such a trial could be held had been called, long before the Eichmann trial, an expression of 'a revolutionary transformation that has taken place in the political position of the Jewish people' -- by Mr. Rosen on the occasion of the First Reading of the Law of 1950 in the Knesset.)  It was against the background of these very vivid experiences and aspirations that Ben-Gurion said: 'Israel does not need the protection of an International Court.'"

            COMMENT:  I would like to agree with Jaspers.  He answers all of my objections, but from a pragmatic point of view (as Arendt tells us) his recommendations would not work.  Beyond that there was the emotion coloring those times, as exemplified by Arendt's description of Ben Gurion.  All of which may mean that I needn't worry about what went on during the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials setting a precedent (fraught with a labyrinth of difficulties) of "victor's justice" because the "crimes" committed by the Nazis were unique in modern human history.

            But as soon as I write that I recall similar crimes committed by modern-day Islamists: cutting off the heads of hapless captives, blowing up civilians, etc.  But perhaps we have laws in place to deal with these modern crimes -- as we moved from treating them as civil crimes during the Clinton Administration to "war crimes" during the Bush and Obama administrations. 

            And just as there are probably few worrying about whether Eichmann and the other Nazis received fair trials, there will be few who will worry about the fair trials of captured Islamists who committed similar crimes.

The Kirsch Review of Faye's book on Heidegger

            A reader sent me the following review of The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 by Adam Kirsch: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Findex.jsonp

            I was not impressed with Faye -- even less so than Adam Kirsch.  Kirsch writes, "In these classes, Faye proves beyond doubt, we do witness “the introduction of Nazism into philosophy,” the outright transformation of Heidegger’s thought into a tool of Nazi indoctrination. The more familiar a reader is with Heideg­ger’s work, the more shocking it will be to see him employ his key terms — being, existence, decision — as euphemisms for nationalism and Führer-worship. Thus we find him, in the winter of 1933-34, declaring that “the question of the awareness of the will of the community is a problem that is posed in all democracies, but one that of course can become fruitful only when the will of the Führer and the will of the people are identified in their essence.” At the same time, Heidegger tells his students — “many of whom,” Faye points out, “were to become combatants at the beginning of the following decade on the Eastern front” — that “to a Semitic nomad,” the “nature of our German space” is inherently foreign."

            Which sounds telling except that his use of words from his philosophy in support of what he was teaching his students about National Socialism would be a natural thing to do if he thought National Socialism was heading in the direction of his philosophy.  Even if he didn't, why would Heidegger use a completely new vocabulary, when he had his own ready to hand -- I doubt that he was concerned about the future Faye suggesting that his philosophy was Nazi philosophy?  It is a very weak argument to suggest that because one uses the same words in two different contexts that the contexts must be connected.  Faye of course goes further and suggests that the contexts are the same.  I did not finish Faye's book because I had no confidence that he understood what comprised a logical argument.  This review by Adam Kirsch has done nothing to change my mind. 

            Kirsch also reveiwed Daniel Maier-Katkin's Stranger from Abroad, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness.  I don't think Heidegger's reputation is in jeopardy as a result of Faye's bizarre allegations.  Kirsch, and perhaps Maier-Katkin assert that Arendt's reputation is tied to Faye being wrong.  Not to worry.  Faye's unsupported allegations are based upon wishful thinking and not sound evidence. 

Wolin on Arendt's Banality of Evil

Richard Wolin in his Heidegger’s Children, Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, 2001, in addition to being a critic of Heidegger is a critic of Arendt. He doesn’t believe that Arendt had the right focus in her Banality of Evil. On page 31 he writes, “The problem was not just Hitler of “Hitlerism,” but the fact that a vast majority of Germans had consciously and willingly met their infamous Fuhrer halfway. Hitler’s seizure of power was not some kind of unforeseeable ‘industrial accident’ or Betriebsunfall, as postwar Germans were fond of claiming, that befell the nation from outside and that left German traditions unscathed. Instead, the genocidal imperialism that the Nazis unleashed upon Europe represented the consummation of certain long-term trends of German history itself.”

Beginning on page 58 he quotes Arendt to say “The mob man, the end-result of the ‘bourgeois,’ is an international phenomenon; and we would do well not to submit him to too many temptations in the blind faith that only the German mob-man is capable of such frightful deeds.”

Wolin draws conclusions for her: “Therefore, to punish the Germans collectively as a people, as some were inclined to do, would be misguided and senseless. Rather than being a specifically German crime, Nazi misdeeds were symptomatic of the ills of political modernity in general. They were of universal significance and, as such, could have happened anywhere. In fact, one of their distinguishing features was that they had been perpetrated neither by fanatics nor by sadists, but by normal ‘bourgeois.’. . The malefactors, she argued, were typical representatives of mass society. They were neither Bohemians, nor adventurers, nor heroes. Instead, they were family men in search of job security and career advancement.”

Wolin then goes on to offer his objections to Arendt’s thesis: “. . . the functionalist thesis, as articulated by Arendt and others, tells only part of the story. What it fails to explain is the specificity of this particular genocide. Why was it that the Nazis explicitly targeted European Jews for extermination?’ . . . It was not only the result of a brutal and impersonal ‘machinery of destruction’; it was also the product of the proverbial ‘peculiarities of German history.’

“The main weakness of the functionalist approach is that it tends to underplay one of the most salient features of the Nazi rule: ideology – specifically, the ideology of anti-Semitism. . . By emphasizing the ‘universal’ constituents of the Final Solution at the expense of their specifically German qualities, she also managed to avoid implicating her country of origin . . . Margaret Canovan puts her finger on the problem when she observes: ‘By understanding Nazism in terms not of its specifically German context but of modern developments likened to Stalinism as well, Arendt was putting herself in the ranks of many intellectuals of German culture who sought to connect Nazism with Western modernity, thereby deflecting blame from specifically German traditions.’”

COMMENT:

In an earlier note I argued that it was more alarming to realize that what happened in Germany could happen in any nation than to see Germany, or parts of Germany, as being demonic. For if they are demonic then they are “outside” of “us.” We could never, or hardly ever (I take Wolin to be asserting), do what the German’s did. I also take Wolin to be placing the Nazi evil above the Stalinist evil because it was “racist.”

If Wolin were capable of removing his “politically-correct” blinders he might be able to see the similarities between Nazism and Stalinism. The danger is not in the demonic nature of the Germans but in the political form of government Arendt calls Totalitarianism.

Heidegger thought that a great “spiritual” leader could lead the Germans the correct technology-controlling path. Meanwhile, over in Moscow, the Russians thought that a great leader could lead them on the right path toward Communism. In both cases excesses, mass-murders, were engaged in for the “good of the cause.”

Wolin is wrong to want to demonize the Germans. He should instead criticize the idea that any leader is smart enough and knowledgeable enough to lead any nation in a “good” direction as a dictator. If he is an average dictator he will concentrate on preserving his power and the heck with the people. But if he is an idealistic dictator, subscribing to an ideology like National Socialism or Communism, then he may decide to “purify” the cause by putting “enemies” to death.

To imply that putting “this enemy” to death is more serious than putting “that enemy” to death misses one of Arendt’s point. And to imply that “racism” is intrinsically worthier of condemnation than “totalitarianism” misses another.

RE: Rosenbaum & Wasserstein attack Arendt via Walter F....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Rosenbaum & Wasserstein attack Arendt via Walter F...":

http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/2161049/ShowForum.aspx?ArticleID=2234010

"Anonymous" just sent me the site showing responses to the article on Slate. There were 58 responses thus far. I read a number of them. Not all are serious discussions, for example, the one that criticizes Slate for inviting Rosenbaum to review Arendt, suggesting that it was like asking Britney Spears to review of the Magic Flute.

Hannah Arendt's critics

Anonymous has left a new comment on the post "Rosenbaum & Wasserstein attack Arendt via Walter F...":

The slanders about Arendt's alleged "antisemitism" are never-ending. The acid bath of actually checking the citations, though, tends to eviscerate the charges. Nice work, but the Arendt-haters don't bother to read her work responsibly anyway (by the way, it's fascinating how the most unreliable and mendacious of Arendt's critics claim that all her defenders are part of some "cult," when they're the ones who can't read the evidence responsibly and can't get their footnotes right).

COMMENT:

Right you are, and such slanders are puzzling. Do these slanderers do it with malice aforethought? Do they intend to lie? Or is something else at work?

I was able to read Arendt with an open mind. I don't claim to read everything with an open mind (I can't read Chomsky that way, for example), but I had no preconception about Eichmann in Jerusalem: the banality of evil. But her critics had preconceptions and apparently judged Arendt as they read. When I read these critics I am shocked. Did I misread something? Was I mixed up? So I go back and check and find that the critics are at fault. They have misread her. What they say Arendt said does not jibe with what Arendt actually said when I go back and look at it.

I have to think they do not intend to lie, that their prejudices get in the way of their understanding. Collingwood can explain why this happens. We bring to a text our preconceptions. And if someone has strong prejudices about a given subject then objective understanding is very difficult. Collingwood wrote in The Idea of History that the responsible historian will strive to set his presuppositions aside. He will strive to understand his subject from the subjects point of view, and not impose his presuppositions on the subject.

None of the Arendt-critics I have read thus far could meet Collingwood's requirements. None of them have striven to write objective "history" about Arendt. Their writings are polemically rather than objective, and, more puzzlingly, rather than being accurate.

RE: Rosenbaum & Wasserstein attack Arendt via Walter Frank

Bob left the following comment in response to "Rosenbaum & Wasserstein attack Arendt via Walter F...":

"Thank you for the seemingly simple disassembling of the latest assault to discredit Arendt for not being jewish enough. Is theirs an example of banal or radical animus?"

COMMENT:

The Rosenbaum and Wasserstein attack is banal. It rehashed the old attacks which, upon examination, turned out to be uninformed (to give them the most charitable assessment). The "new" Wasserstein discoveries, if the Walter Frank example is indicative, are new slanders.

Rosenbaum & Wasserstein attack Arendt via Walter Frank

http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/pagenum/all

The above article was written by Ron Rosenbaum for Slate. It is entitled, “The Evil of Banality, Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger.”

Rosenbaum’s chief source is an article by Bernard Wasserstein from the Times Literary Supplement, which is not available on line – something Rosenbaum notes. While I don’t have access to that article, I do have Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism so it is possible for me to check some of the things Rosenbaum says Wasserstein says:

“And then "in a new preface [to The Origins of Totalitarianism] written in 1967, Arendt commends the work of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank … whose 'contributions,' " Wasserstein quotes Arendt, " 'can still be consulted with profit.' "

“Wasserstein wonders about her motives here [Rosenbaum writes]: ‘Was she bending over backwards not to be totally dismissive of ideological opponents who despised her on categorical (i.e. racial) grounds?’ he asks.

"’But there must have been more to it than that,’ he answers, ‘because modern Jewish history was the only subject where she repeatedly relied on Nazi historians as external authorities, that is, other than as evidence of what the Nazis themselves thought or did. Moreover she internalized much of what the Nazi historians had to say about Jews, from the 'parasitism' of Jewish high finance to the 'internationalism' of [Walther] Rathenau [the Weimar German minister assassinated by anti-Semites.]’

“’Of course, there have always been Jewish critiques of Jews. But Arendt's ‘aversion clearly ran much deeper’ than has been supposed, Wasserstein asserts. He concludes his piece by wondering, ‘Why?’

Let’s read what Arendt actually wrote. In her preface on page xiv she does indeed say what Wasserstein says she says, but he takes her out of context and implies something she never meant. Here is the context:

In her preface she wrote, “Even the dubious products of Jewish apologetics, which never convinced anybody but the convinced, were towering examples of erudition and scholarship compared with what the enemies of the Jews had to offer in matters of historical research.” She footnotes this sentence and in the footnote writes, “the only exception is the anti-Semitic historian Walter Frank, the head of the Nazi Reichsinstitut fur Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands and the editor of nine volumes of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, 1937-1944. Especially Frank’s own contributions can still be consulted with profit.”

Why can the contributions of this “anti-Semitic historian be “consulted with profit”? In the first of four references, Arendt writes (on page 21) “Frank, in spite of his official position under the Nazis, remained somewhat careful about his sources and methods. In this article he quotes from the obituaries on Rathenau in the Israelitisches Familienblatt (Hambug, July 6, 1922), Die Zeit, (June, 1922) and Berliner Tageblatt (May 31, 1922).”

Does this sound as though Arendt has allowed herself to be corrupted by Nazi ideology? Not to me.

The next reference to Walter Frank is on page 100. In her text she writes “Contemporary journalists and later historians have made valiant efforts to explain the conflict between military and civil powers during the Dreyfus Affair in terms of an antagonism between ‘businessmen and soldiers.’ Then in a footnote to this passage she writes., “It is under this caption that Maximilian Harden (a German Jew) described the Dreyfus case in Die Zukunft (1898). Walter Frank, the anti-Semitic historian, employs the same slogan in the heading of his chapter on Dreyfus while Bernanos (op. Cit., p. 413) remarks in the same vein that ‘rightly or wrongly, democracy sees in the military its most dangerous rival.’”

On page 339, Arendt writes “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Then in a footnote she discusses several examples. This is the part of her footnote pertaining to Walter Frank: “The last to fall into disgrace was the historian Walter Frank, who had been a convinced anti-Semite and a member of the Nazi party before it came to power, and who, in 1933 . . . In the Early forties, Frank had to cede his position and influence to the notorious Alfred Rosenberg, whose Der Mythos des 20, Jahrhunderts certainly shows no aspiration whatsoever to ‘scholarship.’ Frank clearly was mistrusted for no other reason than that he was not a charlatan.”

Thus far Arendt has indicated confidence in Frank for his accurate quotations and references. Too bad Rosenbaum and Wasserstein didn’t share Frank’s talent.

In the last of the Frank references in Arendt’s book, on page 402, we read, “A classical instance of this planned shapelessness occurred in the organization of scientific anti-Semitism. In 1933, an institute for study of the Jewish question . . . was founded in Munich which, since the Jewish question presumably had determined the whole of German history, quickly enlarged into a research institute for modern German history. Headed by the well-known historian Walter Frank, it transformed the traditional universities into seats of ostensible learning or facades.”

This last reference is a mere statement of fact about Frank’s career. Frank was appointed to a certain post, and from the previous reference we learned that his Nazi superiors sometime later decided he wasn’t the right man for the job and replaced him Rosenberg.

My conclusion from what I read is that Rosenbaum and Wasserstein slandered Arendt in the way they describe Arendt as commending the “work of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank.”