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    Tony Greenstein: Hannah Arendt – a Jewish Pariah and.... Archived Message

    Posted by George Brennan on April 29, 2019, 1:49 pm, in reply to "Hannah Arendt – a Jewish Pariah and Daughter of the Diaspora"

    That is how this should have been titled. John Lilbourne is one guy I always blindly click trusting he will convey something useful and interesting. But he sometimes trades on my brand loyalty. When I am king, the titles here will always have to name the author or publisher conspicuously. I shall not explain why.



    Greenstein has put a lot of work into this. His ending reminds us of words in Arendt’s famous 1962 letter to James Baldwin

    "In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free."


    Some of us on the left, with our historical affection for and affinity with the diaspora, used to lament that ‘the Jews of all people” ought surely to know better. Pure sentimental racism on our part. The liberated slave with his hands on the whip is no more to be trusted with a whip than anyone else. Jewish chauvinists who have the whip hand today demand to be treated as members of a sanctified race, and are in fact treated as such by our most esteemed political gossip columnists.

    gb

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