• ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      How would Hannah Arendt be relevant here? I read a short blurb about her philosophy especially in regards to authority but I haven’t seen starship troopers

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        A hexbear or lemmygrad user could better explain this one, but its a deep-cut satirical comment on how nations that market themselves as “free” (but aren’t), promote philosophies that group and demonize all their enemies into a single camp, and prop up writers like Arendt, who was one of the main ideological peddlers of western moral supremacy during the cold war.

        Losurdo has a lot of good articles on this and Arendt specificaly, and also Gabriel Rockhill has some good articles about this too.

        https://ia801609.us.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-dfBD-isycOcvHvqS/Domenico Losurdo -- Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism.pdf

        • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          I recently started reading Eichmann In Jerusalem, because I was aware it introduced the phrase “banality of evil” and always think of that in moral/ethical discussions about the real world (versus hypotheticals), and was immediately struck by how uncritical she was of zionism when it crops up in her reporting/writing. It’s almost like just a quirk of some of the heads of state that is used to explain their politics, rather than anything with more sinister implications.

          Perhaps this comes from some immature SJW-ish ideal that an author should always negatively represent harmful ideas—or maybe she does later and I’m just impatient—but it still strikes me as ironic that in the seminal work on The Banality of Evil, genocidal colonialism is treated as, well, banal.