Old quotes

Sometimes it is good to read my old blogs again. Actually, I do it quite often. Or rather I do not really read them but I browse my blogs in order to avoid that I write two blogs with the same contents, for my memory is like a sieve and soon I have forgotten what I have written. Then I see often interesting old ideas of mine or I stumble upon interesting quotes that I have used, like this one from Hannah Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism (Harvest Book, Harcourt, San Diego etc. 1976; p. 447):

“The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other hand, by placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the juridical procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty”.

The idea expressed here can have many interpretations and it can be put in many contexts. For Arendt herself the context was the German Nazi regime she had escaped from and the Soviet Union of Stalin. Eight years ago in my blog dated April 23, 2007, I related the passage to Guantanamo. However, I think that it can be applied also to Europe today or rather to the present European Union, and then especially to its attitude towards terrorism and terrorists. Although it’s not a new phenomenon, since “Guantanamo” we see that more and more people are placed outside the law because of their extreme acts. For instance, there is a growing support for the idea to deprive terrorists of their nationalities, which will make them stateless. The consequence is that they will be considered a kind of non-people or non-humans, and towards what is not human you don’t need to apply human standards. Guantanamo is a good example of what this leads to. My thesis is that what is done by humans is human and has to be treated that way. Extreme acts are often less extreme as they look at first sight, although it’s not an excuse for doing them. Certainly not!

Let me give an example. Many readers of this blog will know about the cruel acts of the Japanese guards towards their prisoners who had to work on the Burma Railway during the Second World War. I think that everybody who knows about it will call these acts cruel and criminal; acts that have to be severely punished. Recently I read the story of a Dutch prisoner, a soldier, who had suffered there. After the end of WW II he was serving again in the Dutch army where he took part in the Dutch effort to suppress the struggle for independence of Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. What became clear from his story was, however, that he (and other Dutch soldiers) applied towards the Indonesian rebels taken prison the same kinds of cruel and criminal methods he himself had suffered when working on the Burma Railway. Does this show that he has always been a non-human being in disguise? Or take the war crimes done by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Before these soldiers left for Vietnam most of them were honest civilians. After their return home many were honest civilians again. Are they wolves in sheep’s clothes?

In several older blogs I discussed the phenomenon, studied by Zimbardo in his famous Stanford Prisons Experiment, that fundamentally almost any person can commit any kind of evil when the situation is there. “Zimbardo concluded”, and here I quote from my blog dated March 14, 2011, “that it are not psychological dispositions that make people behave in an evil way but that it is the situation that brings people that far. Only very few people are able to resist the pressure of the situation that ‘leads’ them into a certain direction and also only very few display evil behaviour because of a disposition.” Even if only half of it is true, I think that it shows that extremist behaviour is of the kind that human beings do and that most of us have a latent propensity to it, although in most of us there are also enough counter-factors that make that we don’t behave so. Nevertheless human is what humans do and there is no reason not to treat some humans that way.