Arendt was also right about Trump. All that was required for his messaging to succeed was a mass of indifference to fascist communication.
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How would you feel if Congress and the President passed a law making it illegal to think in a fascist way? And then a power of Attainder to deal with Mr Trump.
Reply
Richard Murphy says:
January 13 2021 at 10:47 am
I would think such a law crassYou can’t stop people thinking
You can seek to stop the dissemination of such thought in ways that are harmful to society
It’s all anti-fascism, d’ye see?
Arendt was also right about Trump.
Hannah Arendt died in 1975, 41 years before Donald Trump became president.
I’ve read more of her work than was justified by its quality and for the life of me I don’t remember her predicting a Trump presidency.
State control of what people communicate is not state control of what people communicate…..
Ooooh Kayyyy
I tried Arendt, found her unreadable and closed-minded to the kinds of totalitarianism we see now, imposed by people who see themselves as the good guys and everyone who even questions them as not just wrong but evil. And yes, they do seem to want to control everything, and that is what totalitarianism is, no matter the other ideological ingredients.
Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil is a bad a book as I’ve ever read. The best part of it was the second half of the title. If she’d had stopped there, it would have been better for us all.
Spud really is a tiresome bore. Everyone is a fascist. Trump, Boris, Rishi, Noel Edmunds, the bloke behind the counter in the newsagents, Daffy Duck.
Remember last year when Boris was a fascist for proroguing Parliament?
Since then he hasn’t been fascist enough for the same crowd who want even harder lockdowns and jail for everyone who breaks ministerial guidelines.
Jeez but I’m programmed differently. I had thought the Spud was saying something I agreed with.
“You can seek to stop the dissemination of such thought in ways that are harmful to society”
I read this as “the acting of seeking to stop dissemination can be harmful to society”, which is absolutely true and absolutely what is happening now.
He means “there are ways that the dissemination of such thought can be harmful to society and those ways should be stopped”.
He’s the fascist here.