Hannah Arendt on War

Statue on the Mort Homme Hill near Verdun remembering the
 fallenFrench soldiers there in the Battle of Verdun (1916).
"They didn't pass", as the text on the monument says.

“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.”
(Hannah Arendt The origins of totalitarianism. San Diego, etc.: Harvest Book, Harcourt, 1976; p.447).                                                                          

Currently we live in turbulent times. An already two years lasting world-wide pandemic still makes victims. It seems gradually to fade away (but maybe it will return; you never know), but now we are startled by a sudden war between Russia and Ukraine. This war is not just a local or regional conflict as they happen to take place, then here and then there (which is already bad enough), but the possibility exists that it will lead to a world war that even can result in a nuclear war, with all its devastating consequences. In these turbulent times, especially because it happened so suddenly (for who had expected that a war would break out in Europe?), people are looking for explanations. Then it is only one step to ask: What does Hannah Arendt tell us? Didn’t she live in a time that in many respects was not too different from what we experience today? For then we saw a dictator who attacked his neighbours looking for Lebensraum (“space to live”), now we see a dictatorship that has invaded a neighbouring country pretending to look for “security” (and both strove or strive for power, of course). And this dictatorship will certainly stretch its arms to other neighbours as well, if it will be successful in the present war (happily, it is not). Although we don’t find in Arendt’s work a real explanation of what it is going on now (for times have changed), nonetheless it can help us understand the present situation and draw our attention to important aspects.
Take, for example, the quotation at the top of this blog. Arendt refers there to the concentration camps in Nazi-Germany and the former Soviet Union. The quotation is not only striking because it seems to describe what has been happening in Russia during the past twenty years, but also because it refers to the same geographical place: Then the Soviet Union, now Russia. It is as if history is repeating itself, ten years after the dissolution of the USSR. In order to make an end of the chaos in Russia during the first years after this event, Putin came to power. Gradually he tightened his grip on the country until he had become the dictator he is today. One way to do so was “killing the juridical person in man” as Arendt calls it: Opponents were put aside by false accusations and sent to prisons or concentration camps, or they were murdered. Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny are clear examples of such victims. But listen, Putin, Arendt warns you: “Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements … than the startling swiftness with which [their leaders] are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.” (ibid. p. 305)
Or take this quotation from Arendt’s The human condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958/1998), which I changed a little for editorial reasons: In modern warfare men go into action and use means of violence in order to achieve certain objectives for their own side and against the enemy. In these instances, speech becomes “mere talk”, simply one more means to the end, whether it serves to deceive the enemy or to dazzle everybody with propaganda; here words reveal nothing, so Arendt, p. 180. Don’t we see this also in the present war? The “truth” about the war in the Ukraine in the “official” media in Russia is a case in point. Here facts have become fake, or “alternative facts”, as some call it. For instance, just a little point, the war is called a “special operation” (which is a striking case of Orwellian newspeak). But we see this fear of what is real in a sense also in the Western countries, for why else has a TV sender like Russia Today been forbidden? Because they tell too much fake news, of course, but isn’t it an essential point in a liberal democracy that fake can be checked against facts by everybody and not only by an authority? In war, there is a fear of truth.
Hannah Arendt did not directly write about war (although she did write about violence), but her works are still relevant when we want to understand how wars come about and what is happening then. Arendt developed her ideas in a time that democratic and dictatorial systems clashed, first Nazi-Germany and the western democracies in the Second World War and then the latter and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Such clashes still happen, unfortunately.