Free Republic

"News" outlets are engaged in feverish speculation about just how dystopian Donald Trump's second term might be. Their fervent imaginations overrule the reality of Trump's first term, which never devolved into dictatorship. On Sunday, Politico's Joanna Weiss conducted a Q&A with liberal Samantha Rose Hill, a scholar of totalitarianism and the author Hannah Arendt. The headline was "‘A Truer Reality Beyond Reality’: Hannah Arendt’s Warning About How Totalitarianism Takes Root."Although Stalinism and Nazism are touched upon (barely), the main focus was Orange Man Bad.

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy... ...Arendt dubbed these...

The default, knee-jerk response to any political or cultural disagreement these days is to declare the situation analogous to WWII Germany and to liken one’s antagonist to Nazi figures of varying rank from brownshirted street thugs up to and including Hitler himself. It’s lazy because it’s common and common because it’s lazy. In most cases it reflects the shallow, minimum-effort, will-this-be-on-the-test approach of the so-called educational system in which a Rachel Carson and her fatuous book will receive a semester’s worth of attention and strange, cult-like worship while Mozart, Newton, van Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur, Watt, and Bohr may never be mentioned,...

RUSH: Now, a lot of people are still asking about motivation. We don’t know. It’s still a matter of speculation because nobody talked to the guy beforehand to hear his grievances. But I want to share something I ran across at Intellectual Takeout today. This is a think piece, and it’s just a possibility that somebody is applying to this after having read some philosophy by a noted philosopher by the name of Hannah Arendt, A-r-e-n-d-t. She lived from 1906 to 1975. She was a German American political theorist. She wrote extensively on totalitarianism, and she predicted before she died...

We’ve all heard the phrase “the banality of evil.” Some of us even know which political theorist to attribute it to, and among those, a few have even read it in context. Hannah Arendt most memorably employed it in both the subtitle and closing words of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her book on the trial of Nazi lieutenant-colonel Adolf Eichmann. To Arendt’s mind, Eichmann willingly did his part to organize the Holocaust — and an instrumental part it was — out of neither anti-semitism nor pure malice, but out of a non-ideological, entirely more...

Wisconsin Governor and GOP presidential hopeful Scott Walker never graduated from college, and according to such critics as Howard Dean, his insufficient education renders him ineligible for the office of the presidency. I have multiple degrees, including a doctorate degree. For the last 16 years, I have taught philosophy at an array of colleges and universities from Texas to New Jersey: four-year and two-year, research-oriented and teaching-oriented, public and private, big and small. Consequently I can assure you, the mere possession of a college degree most definitely does not certify that its holder is “educated.” Though there are exceptions, the...

Ed. Note: this is the first instalment of a detailed critique of a major New Scientist anti-creationist diatribe. This one deals with a substantial section in the article, which tries to downplay the Nazi reliance on Darwinian theories, and instead tries to smear Christianity as a cause of the Holocaust...