28 September 2013
AN ABSENCE OF THINKING !
The flower – a symbol for peace and nature seen in the iconic Pulitzer prizewinning photograph of the ‘flower-power’ antiVietnam war protest movement. This image came to mind as the concept ‘ecocide’ originated and has been legally recognised as a crime since the Vietnam war. Ecocide was the name given to the widespread and longterm ecosystem destruction when toxic herbicides were used by the US during the Vietnam War. Hannah Arendt in the early 1970s presciently thought about ecocide as a new form of totalitarianism in the 21st Century’. Photo by Marc Riboud taken at the Pentagon, Washington D. C, 21 October 1967.
Hannah Arendt
and the totalitarianism of ecocide by Cathy Fitzgerald www.ecoartfilm.com
This is a revised article from my blog.
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early 1970s was thinking about ecocide being a new form of totalitarianism in This article describes the this century. Arendt’s deep work of the political analysis of totalitarianism theorist Hannah Arendt is useful for identifying who is best known for her how totalitarianism forms work naming and and how it is perpetuated. identifying totalitarianism Similarly, I believe the 20th Century. Her understanding how biographer Elizabeth totalitarianism operates is Young-Bruehl wrote in useful to understand how Why Arendt Matters (2006) environmental violence, that ‘no-one reading ecocide, is obscured by Arendt’s seminal book, cultural norms. The Origins of Totalitarianism carefully Accidentally finding would ever have trouble Arendt’s interest in identifying a regime as ecocide fascist’. Interestingly A colleague, Iain Biggs, Young-Bruehl wrote suggested that I look to briefly that Arendt in the
Arendt’s work as my own transdisciplinary eco-art, action-based practice was leading to new political understandings (i.e in my work on national nonclearfell forest policy (2012) and how I developed a motion against ecocide (2013) that was adopted by the The Green Party of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was a helpful suggestion in thinking how my work, circling ongoing explorations of ‘deep sustainability and its opposite, ecocide’, is creating a ‘thinking space*’ for new policies
(and other works besides) to form. Arendt passionately argued through much of her writing that civic engagement in politics that encouraged a plurality of ideas was fundamental to counter totalitarian states. However, when exploring Hannah Arendt’s ideas I was to find something else too; Arendt had presciently thought in the early 1970s that ecocide would be a new form of totalitarianism in the 21st century!
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Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). A political theorist, author and lecturer; her best known works are: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1968), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), On Violence (1970).
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However, I need to back up a bit to explain how Arendt came to this idea. Arendt is best known for seminal studies on totalitarianism; chiefly her examination of Nazism and Stalinist communism. After reading some of
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Arendt’s work, and particularly the excellent and accessible biography of Arendt by her late student Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, aptly titled Why Arendt Matters (2006), I could see how Arendt arrived at critical understandings of totalitarianism; how the ideologies of totalitarian states led to the Holocaust, for example. Arendt’s series of books and teachings were driven by acute personal experience and reflection. A German Jewess (who later emigrated to the US), Arendt escaped from a Vichy internment camp in southern France in 1941. Arendt later provided piercing analysis of genocide and violence by arguing that totalitarian states often led to such activities when they overwhelmingly suppressed emergent publically-centered and publically-engaged politics. Totalitarianism, in her view, was when erroneous ideologies, bodies of ideas, were uncritically adopted instead, which in turn led to ‘an absence of thinking’ and to devastatingly “thoughtless” actions.
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Arendt wrote both academic books and general articles. She is most popularly remembered for her seemingly controversial analysis of the Nazi SS lieutenant colonel, Adolf Eichmann, that was published as a series of essays for The New Yorker magazine in the early 1960s during his trial. The filmed trial with live recordings caused a sensation and was followed by audiences around the world. Eichmann was one of the main logistics organisers for the mass exterminations performed in German concentrations camps and is often referred to as one of ‘the architects of the Final Solution’. Eichmann at the end of the trial was convicted and hung on 31 May 1962.
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Arendt’s views of Eichmann’s behaviour, following her attendance of his trial in Israel, outraged many people and Jews in particular (although many were quick to criticise her without reading her writings), when she came to the conclusion that she didn’t think that Eichmann was inherently ‘diabolical’ or anti-Semitic, but has abandoned his morality, his autonomy, to terrifyingly banal ideologies of evil that arose in the totalitarian state of Nazi Germany. Arendt thought that Eichmann was not stupid but highly ambitious, that he was an embodiment of a ‘banality of evil’. In Arendt’s view, Eichmann’s total adoption of Nazi aims meant he unquestioningly ‘followed Nazi orders’ (Eichmann also argued this in his own defence) to develop the worst industrialscale and industrially-organised concentration camps the world has ever known. Arendt spent most of life trying to understand how societies can work to prevent such tragedies and her work The Human Condition is still often referred as a key political text of the 20th Century.
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Importantly, Arendt didn’t believe that totalitarian ideologies disappear. In her view the totalitarian ideologies from the WWII filtered into the Cold War and US postWWII societies. In this context, while reading Young-Bruehl’s review, I was startled to find that Young-Bruehl remarks that Arendt had also been looking at the concept of ‘ecocide’ before her death in 1975 (unfortunately she didn’t write about it); particularly as I knew the term had only being coined in 1970! I wondered why Arendt was familiar with this new term.
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In The Invention of Ecocide (2011), David Zierler argues how US scientists and others from around the world during the Vietnam War successfully lobbied to ban the use of chemical herbicides, particularly Agent Orange.
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The term ‘ecocide’ was coined by plant biologist Arthur Galston at the conference on ‘War and National Responsibility ‘in 1970 to describe this gross and persistent environmental damage. Galston and others subsequently and successfully argued at the US Senate to outlaw the use of lethal ecosystemic herbicides in all subsequent Wars, and importantly, as the name suggests, they linked ecocide to as crime similar to genocide. This conference dealt with growing international scientific concern against the use of Agent Orange (and other new chemical agents) in Vietnam, as its longterm (and unfortunately ongoing to this day) poisoning of Vietnam’s forests, lands and its peoples was becoming shockingly apparent. Ecocide was recognised as an international War Crime during the final stages of Vietnam War in the early 1970s. As I have written previously*, ecocide, the large scale destruction of ecosystems by man’s activities didn’t arise in the 1970s;
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it has been occurring over the millennia but it is has accelerated with the technologies and ideologies of industrial growth society that believe in the civil religion of economic progress at all costs. Ecocidal ideologies are fundamentally, I have presented previously, alternatively perpetuated and obscured by the erroneous beliefs and images we have of the natural world**.
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In one of Elisabeth YoungBruehl’s last blog posts before she died in 2011, she wrote of a conference where she was asked to comment on ‘the relevance of Arendt’s thinking for today’. Her concluding comments were that she believed
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‘Arendt could imagine the ideologists of Economic Progress recommending and committing not just genocide but what she called, ecocide, destruction of the entire ecosystem on the earth. Untrammelled economic growth might take longer, but its results could be as lethal as those that can be caused in an instant by nuclear weapons. Like their totalitarian predecessors, the ideologists of Economic Progress rationalise destroying the very habitat in which they are to be the triumphant group, that is, they rationalise destroying everything and everybody they hoped to rule over.
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No one since 1975 has written The Origins of Economic Totalitarianism…‘ (Young -Bruehl, 2011 [online])
I think Arendt’s early insights of ecocide where she appears to see it as a another form of totalitarianism are fascinating and so important to think about today. However, I think Arendt’s later ideas on ecocide have been overshadowed by her former and much more detailed work on the Holocaust and the still lingering hostility from many about her perception of Eichmann (also her early preWWII relationship to Nazi sympathiser and philosopher Martin Heidegger has distracted attention from her later writings). In fact while researching Arendt’s connection to ecocide, I discovered a Arendt’s involvement at the Eichmann trial, and the widespread public outcry and personal costs to her, is the feature of the 2012 film, Hannah Arendt (above).
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While its important that Arendt’s ideas about Nazism are not lost, I think its very timely to reflect, particularly when the majority of the world’s scientists have confirmed that industrial growth society is overshooting many of the UN’s recently accepted ecological boundaries for the Earth, that Arendt in her deep analysis of the Holocaust, saw familiar totalitarian patterns in the of ecocide in Vietnam. That she saw ecocide becoming the totalitarianism of the 21st century. Conferences about Arendt’s work continue today, chiefly led by the US Hannah Arendt centre for Politics and the Humanities established in 2006 (it has a website and blog). Its mission is to bring together non-partisan politics and the humanities. As far as I can see no conference has yet addressed specifically Hannah’s ideas of ecocide – I’d imagine she’d think it was well overdue. The center has great aims however and Director Roger Berkowitz writes it ’emphasises Arendt’s call for ‘relentless examination
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of issues from multiple points of view, with an emphasis on unimagined and unintended consequences—what Arendt called “thinking without bannisters”‘. Berkowitz touches on Arendt’s ideas and ecological degradation here but I think much more could be explored,
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‘In her book Men in Dark Times, Arendt explains that darkness does not name the genocides, purges, and hunger that mark the tragedies of the twentieth century. Instead, darkness refers to the way these horrors appear in public discourse and yet remain hidden. Concentration camps in the mid-twentieth century —and now environmental degradation, the emergence of a superfluous underclass, and dangerous economic irresponsibility—confront us daily. They are not shrouded in secrecy but are darkened by the “highly efficient talk and double-talk of nearly all official representatives, who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns.” Darkness, for Arendt, names the all-too-public invisibility of inconvenient facts.’ (Berkowitz, 2013 [online])
Ecocide is therefore something we should all think about and do our best to act against. I think we have all asked ourselves what we would have done if living in Germany in the
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mid-20th century. A different but somehow similar situation is now occurring with ecocide, in how it is both right here and ‘hidden’ in political denial and our world of mass distractions and hyper-consumerism. Much of Arendt’s work talked about action as such a necessary part of our humanity, what she called ‘the human condition’ – the name of her most celebrated work. The very least we can do today is inform ourselves, think again of how our actions effect our environments and sign the petitions to help make ecocide a recognised and punishable crime not only in war-time.
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________________________ Join the campaign against ecocide here http:// eradicatingecocide.com/
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References:
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Berkowitz, Roger (2012). ‘Letter from HAC Academic Director – Roger Berkowitz’. September. [online] http:// www.hannaharendtcenter. org/?page_id=8044. [Accessed 31 August, 2013].
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Young-Breuhl Elisabeth (2011) ‘A thinking space’. Who’s Afraid of Social Democracy? A blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. [Accessed April 10, 2013] http:// elisabethyoung-bruehl.com/ 2011/10/26/64-a-thinkingspace/.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (2006) Why Arendt Matters. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, Kindle edition.
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Zierler, David (2011) Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
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