*This essay was originally published in 2018 in Seedy Clips, a zine made and edited by Sara Fantry, Brooklyn, NY. It is being reposted now due to the uncanny similarities in the politics that followed in the years to come under the Trump Administration.
On Exceptionalism & Reoccurring Violence
Violence
Noun, behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
Evil
Adjective, profoundly immoral and malevolent.
February 19th, 2018—I woke up this morning and opened the digital version of Wall Street Journal. The home page for the titan newspaper was splashed with multiple stories, covering most of the page, of the 19 year old disturbed Nikolas Cruz who gunned down 17 people in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Many stories, across many news organizations, tell of a troubled teenager who was easily able to legally obtain a semi-automatic firearm. A teenager, who for years prior, had been carefully attended to psychologically by the school, through the use of discipline, counseling, and temporary transfer to a high school for emotionally troubled students. Still, Cruz was able to walk into the school on February 14th, and massacred those 17 unlucky people, and wounding far more.
The response, as many expected from the same political arena that upholds Trump’s America, was tepid—President Trump condoned the violence, and pointed to mental health issues as the main cause, while blatantly skirting the issue of gun control. Many Republican lawmakers took to Twitter to write of their “thoughts and prayers” for those in the tragedy; many of the same lawmakers who had received funding towards their various political campaigns from the NRA. Many Democratic legislators pointed towards a need for stricter gun-control laws, and indeed, in the days following this tragedy, we’ve seen the national dialogue spring up around gun-control laws once again. If the past shootings are of any indication, the interest will wane and lawmakers shall forget the issue until the next mass shooting. To me, this seems an obvious example of the banality of evil within American society, and to which I first turn to Arendt for relief.
I look to Arendt for that same moral-philosophy “comfort food” that I sought in my undergrad navigating the political sphere for the first time—reading The Public vs. The Private Realm essay is seminal to my understanding of feminist seizure of space. However, this time, I focused on excerpts from Eichmann in Jerusalem, as read in the Portable Hannah Arendt. This is Arendt’s famous recanting of the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem in 1961, for organization the deportation of Jews by the Nazis from Hungary and elsewhere.
Eichmann was forced to recount multiple horrors during the famous and televised trial. Throughout, he protested that as a Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel), he had no authority within the ranks of the SS and was only following out orders that were ultimately made by Himmler, Müller, Heinrich, and Hitler, and as such claimed that he had no guilt or hatred on his conscience regarding what he had done. Of course, there were multiple instances of times when Eichmann visited the internment camps, and witnessed mass shootings of Jews there—so he could not claim to not have known that the people he was deporting were being killed. Ultimately, Eichmann was found to be guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, guilty of membership in one of three Nazi organizations (SS), and guilty of crimes against Slovenes, Poles, and Romani. The judges concluded that he believed in the Nazi extermination campaign wholeheartedly, as well as was following orders. He was hung on May 31st, 1962.
Arendt, it must be said, might have the wrong example for her famous “banality of evil” concept in Eichmann, as historical research indicates that Eichmann was a lifelong Nazi and not the plain-faced bureaucrat that he had cultivated for the trial, and for which Arendt has been criticized. However, many examples of this exist easily within the political sphere. This idea, the “desk murderer”, the ones who feels absolved of wrongdoing because they were “following orders”, “not making the rules”, or “had no ability to change anything”, who aided and abetted in the violence of the states towards specific bodies.
Arendt writes in a letter to Mary McCarthy on the subject of Eichmann in 1963, “It is indeed my opinion that now that evil is never “radical”, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying”, as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality””(Arendt, “Holes of Oblivion” letter to Mary McCarthy in Banality and Conscience).
Arendt’s ideas are this—if we strip the exceptionalism of the Holocaust from that moment in history, it is a moral failure of judgment. Perhaps it is not exceptionalism in that that specific violence is constantly reoccurring—(or, in the aforementioned example of the most recent mass school shooting, is a regularly reoccurring violence), but it still functions as violence and as a moral malfunction within a supposedly just society.
Arendt ultimately believed voting populations need to understand the power of the word “no”—and of course, to also understand the broken mechanisms of two-party politics. She wanted these populations to really think objectively, and to not function as an automaton within a system or party. She argues that there cannot be a mass prescription of individuality—i.e., American exceptionalism is a key concept to avoid here. However you slice it, she argues that this individuality needs to be built into the culture itself, so that the culture self-regulates responses to violence and the needs of the community.
I think, given the above logic from Arendt, one should individually grapple with responses to the question of “When is Violence ok to employ?” I already know my own opinion, which is to resist fascism in all respects, to resist inequality in all respects, and to resist the growing economic divides in America. I’m personally not one to watch gorey films or violent war movies, but I do want to see Nazis punched in the face by the black bloc at the Women’s March. I do want racists to be afraid to walk in the street. I do want to see catcallers kicked off public transportation and being doused in hot soup on trains. I do want to see people who blame school shootings on mental health and children before guns (knowing full well that it will happen again to more children) to be forcibly removed from public places. I want to see the diversity of my country protected by the people within in—lord knows those who represent us within the political arena, with its Trumpism and “alternative facts” won’t stand for us.
Because the “unprecedented” in violence has already happened, as in the case of the horrors of the Holocaust, it is precedented now that it has occurred, and moral judgments in favor of human life can be made. If the precedented violence has still occurred, as with the case of reoccurring school shootings in the US, and those in power seek to maintain the status quo, then we have, in similar, “tiny Eichmanns” representing us within our government, who in turn grapple with their own banality of evils. To that end, Arendt believed we should aim to squash fascism in all its respects, and any intolerant models of government and power that seek to eliminate diversity—of people, economic standings, education, access to citizenship, etc.—and instead check and vote for models of power that embrace the diversity of our society. Her freedom ultimately lies in the public arena, and more specifically, within the voting booth. Whatever your opinion of “legitimizing” forms of fighting back over others, voting offers an above-the-board tool that hopefully, someday, will reflect the needs of the people who vote these legislators into power. In the meantime, it’s time to take to the streets.