January 30, 2008
Hannah Arendt on George W. Bush
Posted by
Jonathan Zasloff
For those of you who actually want to learn something about totalitarianism, instead of reading juvenile political propaganda from the recipients of nepotism, there is good news: Hannah Arendt's classic The Origins of Totalitarianism is now available unabridged on audiobook.
Some recent listening allows me both to answer Mark's last post and re-consider Bush's confident assertion that his policies in Iraq will be vindicated:
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility: he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run. (Pp. 348-49).
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