Name: Ryan Dell Date: 3.13.13 Discussion sheet~ Arendt “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” You must hand this in at the end of class, and it must be typed. Don’t write a thesis – the whole thing doesn’t need to be more than a page. This is to help you come to class prepared to participate. Points will be assigned points based on such things as thoroughness, insightfulness, student participation and promptness. _____________________________________________ Course themes[1] present in the reading (be specific – include a cite or quote ): There are two obvious themes in Arendt’s piece: guilt and responsibility; thus, the title Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility. Arendt makes these two distinctions …show more content…
Especially when she discusses the issues , well lack of responsibility and guilt with those involved in the Holocaust. I wonder sometimes how humanity back then could have had values and ideals so horrific and not feel a thing for them. To say the least Arendt was a great writed of philosophical issues and I would like so explore more of her beliefs and theories. Discussion question (specific to each text – these may be available online, on handouts or in class): What does Arendt mean the terms “organized guilt” and “universal responsibility”? How do they explain what happened in the Holocaust, and the difficulties of coming to terms with it? I believe that Arendt meant when saying “organized guilt” is that there are certain feelings such as awareness that we must recognize; as well as establishing a difference in moral guilt vs. judicial (law) guilt. As for “universal responsibility” Arendt states that when living in a political society as we do we should take responsibility for all members. These aspects are portrayed early on in this story, through what happened in the Holocaust. She was upset to see how when the government was involved with the doings in the Holocaust there were no feelings of guilt or sense of
The most alarming thing about Arendt's book is that she is able to make a compelling case that the greatest evils of mankind are committed by ordinary people. Her work forces one to look at the world and realize that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident committed by blood thirsty sociopaths. One must realize that the decision making processes that created an environment accepting of the "Final Solution" is still alive an well today as it has been throughout history. The weight of personal moral choice
Arendt simply points out that in order for total terror to be inflicted the Nazis had to do away with all opposition. The lack of opposition would give the Nazis, perhaps, a sense of security while they executed millions of people.
in this paper i argue the opposing views of Daniel Goldhagen 's book Hitler 's Willing Executioners and Christopher Browning 's book ordinary Men. These books deal with the question of whether or not the average German soldiers and civilians were responsible for the holocaust. My research paper argues in favor of Goldhagen 's book, the average German was responsible for the participation of he holocaust. At the end of world war ll the Jewish community and the the rest of the world were crying for justice because of the devastation of there homes. The crimes committed by the Germans were cruel and someone had to pay. Several Nazi leaders were held accountable for the actions of the Germans. Were the Nazi leaders the ones responsible for
◦I found that branding of a company was very interesting because I’m that person that will try not to get sucked into advertising.
Hannah Arendt’s essay suggests she believes that the motives steered by Adolf Eichmann to commit monstrous acts, where “once banal to all human” ( Arendt, Cp). Eichmann was viewed as a demonic monster for his immoral and corrupted mind. Banal evil shares similarities with Radical evil, such that they can both result in extraordinary evil. Unlike radical evil, banal evil can be committed by ordinary people. Eichmann lacked the ability to reflect and he seemed to think in terms of clichés as his goal was to follow Hitler’s orders to undo God’s creation and complete his job successfully and
Hannah Arendt controversially discussed how banality, ordinariness and everyday life played an important role in the manifestation of the holocaust in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In 1961 Arendt reported on Eichmann’s trial in Israel for the New Yorker. Eichmann was a primary organiser of the holocaust and was tried for 15 charges, including crimes against humanity and the Jewish people. Arendt observed that Eichmann himself was not an impressive monster or some Cartesian Evil Genius one would expect to be responsible the murder of millions of people, in fact she described him as completely ordinary. Not only was he physically unimpressive, but he was declared psychologically to be completely normal by six psychologists.
In this paper, I am going to elucidate on the significance of the concepts of forgiveness and forgetfulness in Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Nietzsche’s conceptualization of human action and agency.
As Arendt said, “the hunter will then become the hunted.” (Arendt, 2007) Vladek’s cousin Persis was also a member of the committee and was therefore killed. His wife, having heard this, decided not to allow the Nazis to take her life and those of the children including Richev, Vladek’s son. She gave them poison to dink and then drank some herself. She said, “I won’t go their gas chamber and neither my children.” (Spiegelman, 1986) She knew they would have been killed, so she choose to take their lives instead. Arendt stated, “Terror ultimate goal is not the welfare of men but to eliminate individuals for the rest of the species.” (Arendt, 2007) The Germans indoctrinated the rest of the population with their ideologies, allowing them to think that the terror they enforced upon the Jews were to ensure that they the Germans survive. That is why, “The guards, it was Jews with big sticks. They acted so just like the Germans.” (Spiegelman, 1986) Arendt said, “Ideologies have the tendency to explain not what is, but what becomes, what is born and passes away.” (Arendt, 2007) The Jews that became guards did not fully understand the Germans ‘plans for the Jews were so they became part of the “Iron Band” and turned from the “classes into masses” and having no
Arendt explains that the ultimate power of a totalitarian government is the acceptance of the ideology being propagated. The laws that are put into place in totalitarian government are not to empower the people and protect their rights. Instead, the laws tell the people what they must do, not what they must not do. Arendt tells how the law of nature is the foundation for Hitler's Nazis, and the law of history for Russia's communist regimes. According to Arendt, both the Nazi and communist regimes maintained that those laws gave them justification for their cruelty. These laws of nature and history are not permanent or stable. They are in motion to keep history and nature moving, so that it progresses without ever stopping. <p>Arendt claims that these laws of motion sustain the terror fueling the totalitarian government. Arendt says that terror is the realization and execution of these laws with nothing standing in its way. Throughout the selection, Arendt speaks of terror. Terror is essential for the state to keep its power, or else it will fall. According to Arendt, in a totalitarian state terror terminates individuality among the people. Individual men become a mass of humankind, in the eyes of the state. "Terror exists neither for nor against men", claims Arendt, "it substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly
Firstly, Arendt considers Eichmann of being a “nobody” and he is only a result of a thoughtless man incapable of think, rather than an evil monster. It was his inabilities to think that had resulted in the genocide, and this had brought him the attentions of being a heartless man. During the trial, he showed no emotions of sympathy towards the killings of the victims; however, he displayed annoyance
The mocking tone of Hannah Arendt, which she was condemned for, encompasses not a lack of sympathy for the events but instead a commentary on the people that took part on the events. Such phrases as "but, God knows…", "must have been tempted not to…", and "which most people recognize…" demonstrate the mocking tone, that Arendt takes on for most of the book. As in the rest of the book she uses a mocking tone to display the stupidity of Eichmann, here she uses it to paint the perpetrators not as monsters but lesser beings. Mocking their decisions to follow the plans of the Third Reich, serves to emphasize the stupidity. On the contrary a somber tone criticizing the people and society, would portray these people as monsters.
During the 1930 and 40’s the Holocaust the largest genocide in history, killing more than 6 million people. Despite that Adolf Hitler, the German leader in from 193 was a major role in the killing, many other groups must hold responsibility. Along with Hitler, who was the ruler of germany for 15 years, the National Socialist German Workers Party are also responsible. They were the majority of the ones pulling the triggers, and furthered the Nazi’s Regime. Furthermore, our global community lacked actions against the holocaust, and even limited emigration of jews in the 1030’s. Also average germans must also hold blame, as many of the acted as bystander in the face of atrocity. Although Hitler is the face of the nazi regime, the National Socialist
Hannah Arendt’s begins the chapter with the first part of after the fall of the First World War stating the condition of the stateless people clarified the catastrophe of the nation-state model and the failure of human rights. When the nation-system was created, the people in power in Europe separated the people into 3 major groups which are the state people, the nationalities like the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, and the minorities like the Germans, being the strongest officially economically and in number. The “Minority Treaties” were created by the League of Nations to seek security to the minority groups in the new states. The “real significance of the Minority Treaties” (pg.274) was that currently millions of people were known by the international law since by the nation-states, they have the power to strip down the citizens of that state by banishment or other worse factors. Only nationals could be citizens and
In Totalitarianism written by Hannah Arendt, the entire world was facing proof of Nazi equipment of dread as well as damage. These revelations of the atrocities were being attained, having a high degree of incredulous investigating in spite of a large entire body of data and also a vast caché of registered photographs. The consumer capacity for understanding has been confused, plus the character as well as degree these courses added to surreal character of the revelations. Regarding of dedicated dying camps of the so-called Aktion Reinhard, comparatively sparse proof and incredibly lower survival premiums obscured their own meaning inside speedy years after the war. With phase a couple of regarding Hannah Arendt’s Reply to Problems regarding the woman 's Occasion it had been asserted in which Arendt’s typology regarding government sets within the side by side criteria regarding organizational kind along with a similar ‘principle regarding action’. Inside the post-Origins dissertation around the character regarding Totalitarianism, Arendt argues in which European political considered provides sometimes recognized in between ‘lawful’ and ‘lawless’, or perhaps ‘constitutional’ and ‘tyrannical’ sorts of government. In the course of Occidental background, lawless sorts of government, have been considered to be perverted. Legality like a culmination of protected sorts of government can be an awful prerequisites in as much
In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt articulates a vision of totalitarianism that is juxtaposed against her own conceptions of freedom and the purpose of humanity. In this contrasting however, she ignores her own recognition that the meanings of such concepts are intimately tied with the narrative of a given society or group. As a result, this essay will argue that Arendt’s claim that totalitarianism destroys freedom as a living political reality is unjustified, and that instead totalitarianism gives a meaning to freedom that is informed by the collapse of ultimate concepts such as the law of History and the law of Nature into the sphere of man. To show this, we will explore the way Arendt lays the seeds of the