Hannah Arendt thread

John K. Taber jktaber at dhc.net
Mon Aug 21 17:09:29 PDT 2000


Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at tsoft.com> wrote:

< [snipped passages on market system becoming totalitarian]

What Arendt found in other essays on totalitarianism (Mankind and Terror) was the key to the effectiveness of mass terror was that the recipients be absolutely innocent of any objective crime. Thus even this concept applies perfectly to the totalitarian logic of Markets, in that most people in the throws of its terror in poverty or subsisting at the margins are perfectly innocent in the same objective sense.
>

The NY Times recently reported that New York (State?) enacted a law against women who are victims of domestic violence. The State may now take their children away because the mothers are unfit since they are unable to protect themselves from domestic violence.

It seems to me that this law is an instance of totalitarian violence against the poor.

< This is getting too long.
>

But I like it. Didn't George Soros warn that Capitalism itself was a form of totalitarianism?

Public TV recently showed old shots of the beatnik poets. It included a clip of Mayor Daley, during the Chicago riots, angrily protesting "The police aren't here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder."

-- John K. Taber



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