Hannah Arendt Minority Treaties

Have you ever had rights taken away from you because of your beliefs? In the novel, Night, By Elie Wiesel the Jews had their rights stripped away from them by the Nazi’s. Throughout the holocaust the conditions of the Jews’ and the process of Dehumanization got worse.

The Holocaust was one of the world’s major tragedies. If you were a Jew the Nazis would take you to concentration camp and you would have to do everything they said, you would get your head shaved, and be treated awful. Millions died. They would choose Jews to take to the gas chamber, usually the weakest and most unhealthy ones because they weren’t much good to work anymore. “Yolen, Jane. The Devil's Arithmetic. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Viking Kestrel, 1988. Print.”

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

    Do you think you have the right to live? Do you think others should decide for you? Genocide is a humanitarian disaster to our society and it has created inhumanity in our world. Because of many devastating murders, the world learned what genocide really is. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, created the term “genocide,” defining it as acts commited to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group (BKE). Humanity is coming together and realizing the serious results of genocide and are creating awareness; however,  it may not be possible to resolve ethnic cleansing due to the following reasons: the lack of adequate awareness, the struggle to change one’s beliefs and ideas, and history always repeats itself.

The third human right which is the right to life, liberty, and personal security is also violated since the officers made the Jewish feel fear and less secured. “Anyone who still owns gold, silver, or watches must hand them over now. Anyone who will be found to have kept any of these will be shot on the spot.” explained by a German officer. What this quote in particularly saying is that the right of both life and liberty is violated since the Jewish people are forced to give away their valuables or they’ll die. “After two days of traveling, we began to be tortured by thirst.” Eliezer remembered. All of the rights listed in the 2nd human right is violated since the Germans are forcing Jewish people to move out of their preferred territory which both harms them physically and mentally as well.

Thesis: A key concept to understanding Hannah Arendt’s “Total Domination” is the essence of terror and the importance of concentration camps in maintaining the Nazi totalitarian state.

During the Holocaust, over six million Jews were horribly murdered, starved, burned, and ripped of their humanity and rights as a human. Unfortunately it wasn’t until after the Holocaust when the United Nations came up with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that every single human being has their own rights that should never be violated. From having the right to life and liberty, to no torture, and even being equal to the law without discrimination.

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

Many of the non-Jewish wanted all invaders out of their country and to not be under Nazi rule. “Non-Jewish partisans joined the fight either as ultra-nationalists who wanted to rid their their countries of all foreigners, or as socialists-leftists who wanted to combat fascism.” (par. 17 pg. 4) What these men and women wanted to rid their country of were fascists and foreign invaders. However, some others may say that resisting is futile and will only cause even more loss of life. What these people didn’t realize was that communism and fascism must be stopped at all costs. If those ideologies were allowed to spread millions would lose their lives at the under those extreme

“Kristallnacht provided the Nazis with an opportunity to completely to remove the Jews from public life”. This person is trying to explain how the Jews got removed

In her esteemed work, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt, a prominent Jewish-American political theorist, juxtaposes Nash and conveys her skepticism of universal rights. Per Arendt, the aftermath of the events that transpired on August 4, 1941, namely the beginning of World War I (WWI), specifically statelessness and rightlessness, prohibit the world from achieving a cosmopolitan-from-above framework. By comparing the days preceding and following the initiation of the lengthy combat to the calm before and the aftershocks of an explosion, Arendt dramatizes the permanent ending of a period and the beginning of a new and unprecedented era. Creating a domino effect, the exertions of WWI dismantled the European aggregation of nations beyond repair. In addition, inflation, unemployment, civil wars, and migration caused the rise of stateless individuals, those who have lost the protection of their government and who therefore rely on international agreements for safeguarding. However, following World War II (WWII), the term “statelessness” was replaced by the term “displaced person,” no longer recognizing the pandemic obstacle and implying that the individuals are simply temporarily removed from their residence. As minorities emerged in Eastern and Southern Europe, stateless individuals were driven to Central and Western Europe, and disintegration was consequently introduced to postwar Europe and used at a weapon for the rising

The “Truth in Politics” expands upon Arendt’s “history of thought and politics and in her situation less between Europe Totalitarianism and post-war American democracy” (qtd. in Rosenfeld 221). Moreover, Arendt resolves politics and deception link together in some way. Furthermore, not all lying past to present are identical in form or effect. In “Truth and Politics” Arendt stands firm on the position of “total totalitarian regime in all reality become phony and boundaries between truth and lies blurred” (qtd. in Arendt 221).

Having human rights in place imposes certain obligations on the government and justifies the complaints of those whose rights and freedoms have not been respected. Everyone is entitled to human rights regardless of their nationality, gender, race, religion, or political opinion. The failure to recognize these rights results in conflict and a vicious cycle of violence as more human rights are violated. To avoid such clashes, human rights have become a fundamental part of global law and policy. However, they have not always been that way. Catastrophic events in history that claimed thousands of lives ran their vicious course before it was recognized that there had to be human rights established. The most famous example of genocide is the Holocaust, which killed around six million Jews. After the Holocaust, the United Nations recognized that there had to be human rights put into place. Two human rights from the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” that were perversely violated during the Holocaust are Article 5 (the protection against inhumane treatment or punishment) and Article 25 (the right to a standard of living.) Light is shed upon the exploitation of human rights during the Holocaust in both Night by Elie Wiesel and The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal. The Holocaust was a devastating event that opened our eyes to just how cruel humans can be, and why human rights must be enforced and protected.

In, Life That Does Not Deserve to Live, Giorgio Agamben aims to expand on Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’, to express the way in which the state has power over society in the way that ‘bare life’ is produced. He uses the Latin term homo sacer – literally translated to ‘sacred man’ – to describe a life which can be “eliminated without punishment” , one that possesses no value to the state and therefore can be terminated without the act being considered a crime. Examples of this can be seen in people who experience ‘brain death’ and subsequently have their life support machine switched off, and in people in prison camps such as Guantanamo Bay. However, the biggest example we are given of bare life, is in the Jewish

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