Fascinating morning!

Reading an article about Gaslighting, the author quotes Hannah Arendt, her thinking about the overwhelming presence of lies in politics and her analysis of the Watergate saga, Nixon and the Viet-Nam war. There is a book collecting her work from that time – last book before her death, I think, in 1975. One of the essays in this book was published in the New York Review of Books. I wanted to read it but they won’t let me without paying. So, I bought the whole book, second hand, for $5. Worth it. What is interesting though is that this article attracted the attention of Joe Biden at the time! He wrote to Arendt to ask for a copy of it!. No joke.

Back to gaslighting, which, according to the author, Héléne Frappat, was, originally, a vicious way, for a vicious husband, to subjugate, belittle and otherwise deny his wife her agency: driving her crazy with lies and unfounded facts. George Cukor, an American movie maker from the 1940’s, made a movie around this and named it “Gaslight”. Anyhow, this would be only anecdotal if the New York Times, last week, had not published an article revealing that the Israeli Government had been warned, in earnest and more than once, about an impending possible Hamas coup. The Netanyahu government denied the information. Not only was said intelligence gathered by lower-ranking military personnel and dismissed every time, but also, the agents were women! I am not certain the Times really affirmed that, had the agents been men, the informations would have been taken seriously! If the Times did not, I do! And I am comforted in my affirmation by everything I just wrote above about official lies, Cukor’s movie, women information agents … This belongs in the more general picture of corruption of the mind which is slowly but surely eroding the foundations of most democracies, founded in part on the trust citizens should have in their elected leaders.

A last Arendt quote, related tot the general topic of political corruption and what motivates politicians ” … not ideological, but obsessed with power. In other words, it is as though a bunch of con men, rather untalented mafiosi, had succeeded in appropriating to themselves the government ‘of the mightiest power on earth.’” Clearly, Hannah Arendt is not tender and, in the article below, the ending says that it is not because Nixon did not succeed in his subversion that in the future, an other would-bedictator won’t grab power at some later date. Yes, we may get there in November 2024.

https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/when-joe-biden-wrote-hannah-arendt-2020-08-06

It is good to see that Bard College has an Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.

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I also want to go back to the paper ‘It Takes Two to Hope’. When I ask myself whether it is possible to have a symmetrical judgement on the warring parties of an outrageously a-symmetrical conflict. I offer that in such a situation it is necessary to establish, beforehand, a set of ethical and otherwise principles, to be on an irrefutably clear foundation, a principled basis. I even use the word ‘moral’. And if I apologize for it, it is because I have not, in the given context, listed TINYisPOWERFUL’s own set of values like autonomy and reciprocity, which should appease some of the fears raised every time one brushes with anything ‘moral’. What matters is to make sure that proposals, opinions should remain syncretic, inclusive, empathetic.

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And getting ready for the Podcast, Thursday.

• talk about the TALE OF CHARLESTON
  TALE FOR REPARATIONS
  SPACE FOR REPARATIONS
• do they know Setha Low? And her book PUBLIC SPACES MATTER
• COMMONS