"Particularly refreshing is the conclusion, viz.: 'Hannah Arendt argues that the content of the century is the assault launched by totalitarianism against freedom. This overarching metaphysical description is characteristic of bourgeois ideology in that it completely ignores the central social and economic crisis of our time. [...] The content of the century is not a parable of good and evil (which is, of course, a generalized form of Christian myth) but the long and tortuous efforts to overcome and overthrow capitalism-imperialism. Humanity is still faced, to this very day, with the choice between socialism and barbarism.'"
[B.]:
Okay, so on the one hand it's lazy reductionism -- and, even worse, "characteristic of bourgeois ideology" [!! - ha] (them's fightin' words in some parts!) to reduce the 20th century to this kind of Manichean (or, Christian, as the author prefers) "totalitarianism versus freedom" schema Arendt paints, according to the author.
And yet Remick quotes, in contradistinction to this, we are also "still faced ... with the choice between socialism and barbarism."
... Which is not lazy, Manichean reductionism.
Huh.
Corey Robin, in his great recent book on fear, used Arendt to great employ, referencing her book _Totalitarianism_; I went out and finally read it as a result, and was actually greatly impressed by some of her insights.
What I took from her work, and from Robin's interpretation of it, was that -- just as anarchists have been saying for many decades -- there is a real struggle between the forces of authoritarianism, be they cloaked in the red flag of communism (which has often really been, as even Chomsky has argued, a kind of state capitalism w/ the state as the sole capitalist overlord instead of a multitude of capitalists in the West) or cloaked in the swastika -- something I think is fair to say is totalitarianism in either case, as Arendt says. They're variants of the same problem -- which is illegitimate, unjust authority. Capitalism is one extremely pernicious form of illegitimate authoritarian rule, and of course that dragon needs to be slain. Maybe Arendt didn't go far enough in applying her totalitarian logic to Western capitalism; but the example of Nazi fascism is still authoritarian in extremis and useful in and of itself, even if she didn't go as far in her conclusions as hardcore Marxists might have liked.
Social reality is complex, and things are more complicated than even 1000 pages of heavily footnoted text could ever properly explain -- but there's still something to Arendt's contention about totalitarianism vs. freedom, as lazily reductionist or whatever that may seem. Freedom, however, should not mean the shabby, false freedom of bourgeois 'democracy, of course. But I'm not sure that detracts from Arendt's insights into the very vile nature of how a really totalitarian society like Nazi Germany's operated.
Of course, it would be hard to speak ina nything but oversimplifying, reductionist language, esp. on an email list where emails are routinely skipped over if they appear to be over 5k or so. Sound bytes are are poor at capturing reality faithfully. It's nice and elegant when they can.
-B.