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It's sort of unsettling how this twitter "mob violence" echoes the patterns laid out by Hannah Arendt's exploration of totalitarianism. The really point isn't
by marginalia_nu 4y ago
It's sort of unsettling how this twitter "mob violence" echoes the patterns laid out by Hannah Arendt's exploration of totalitarianism.
The really point isn't to find who is guilty, which is why these witch hunts almost more often than not targets people on the left that dare stick out their neck or ask the wrong questions, usually left-of-center moderate liberals.
I was trying to find a nice summary in written form of her theses, but here's a nice podcast discussion on Arendt's totalitarinism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_fV_2LOL6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_fV_2LOL6Y
- lapcat 4y agoAnd there we go, Godwin's Law.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIt is arguably as much a work on Stalinism as it is about the Nazis.
- lapcat 4y agoArendt was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and wrote extensively on Nazism.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThe point of her work isn't to explain why the Nazis are bad. It's a discussion about the political mechanics of the new 20th century political systems, and how they differ from tyranny. It's a fairly nuanced and insightful discussion. She holds Stalinism as the most complete example of totalitarianism, in front of the Nazis, and especially the Italian fascists who she merely considers has totalitarian tendencies.
- lapcat 4y ago> The point of her work isn't to explain why the Nazis are bad. I didn't say it was. But whether the comparison is Hitler or Stalin, it's absurd, because both cases involved mass murder, and nothing even remotely comparable is happening with social media.
- meany 4y agoI don’t think the original poster was implying it was comparable to the out comes of Stalin and hitler. Rather that the mechanisms and patterns used to establish control over the political party the leader ran have similar characteristics.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoRight, but that is not the comparison I'm making either. It's possible to say a ball is round like a melon, even if the ball does not share the color or pattern or size. The similarity I'm noting is the erasure of the private life, the arbitrarily shifting rules of what is acceptable, the relentless witch hunts, the irrelevance of guilt and truth, the fear that you might be next. Which is, to Arendt, some of the defining hallmarks of totalitarianism.
- lapcat 4y ago> It's sort of unsettling how this twitter "mob violence" echoes the patterns laid out by Hannah Arendt's exploration of totalitarianism. Except that tweets are nonviolent, whereas totalitarianism is extremely violent. If you wanted to make a subtler point, you started off on the wrong foot. Your original comment felt over the top to me.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI don't think that distinction really matters, twitter dog-piling can arguably be considered an anologous form of political mob violence.
- fncivuenci 4y agoIs that the law that states if you're not willing to learn from the Nazis mistakes you're doomed to repeat them? Something else?