- anteontem
Hannah Arendt, bold 20th century political thinker, drew from her WWII experiences as prisoner and refugee to develop influential theories on totalitarianism that remain relevant today.
Categoria
😹
DiversãoTranscrição
00:00:00You
00:00:30Never has our future been more unpredictable.
00:00:49Never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense.
00:00:56Forces that look like sheer insanity if judged by the standards of other centuries.
00:01:03Hannah Arendt was a fearless thinker and becomes one of the most prolific political writers of our time.
00:01:17Anti-Semitism had been a feature of her life.
00:01:21Hannah Arendt saw this. She was there. She was living there.
00:01:26She escapes Nazi Germany and she boarded a boat bound for the United States.
00:01:32And that's where she writes the origins of totalitarianism.
00:01:38No one could ignore it. It's too important.
00:01:41At the same time, she becomes an American citizen.
00:01:44Never have been a member of the Communist Party.
00:01:47McCarthyism takes hold. It's very familiar.
00:01:50In the 1960s, she became the voice of American politics.
00:01:58Arendt sees this rise in violence that can threaten the norms and the institutions that preserve freedom of the United States.
00:02:06I had a member of my family killed.
00:02:10She sounds awful warning.
00:02:12She says you can actually destroy the Republic from within.
00:02:15The crisis of our time has brought forth an ever-present danger that is only too likely to stay with us from now on.
00:02:24The questions that my generation has been forced to live with.
00:02:30What happened?
00:02:32Why did it happen?
00:02:34How did this happen?
00:02:35How did this happen?
00:02:36When we discovered others from here to the top of our country...
00:02:39War 6
00:02:53The layout is now as binary as an enemy.
00:02:59Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanna Immuner brat.
00:03:02in Hanover, Germany, and pretty soon the family moved to Königsberg.
00:03:10She was born into a secular Jewish family.
00:03:14Her mother was a musician.
00:03:16Her father was educated, erudite, loving.
00:03:20Her parents were creatures of the Enlightenment.
00:03:23They were creative. They were deeply, deeply loving.
00:03:28Her great-grandparents had fled the pogroms.
00:03:30It was a historical understanding of her identity.
00:03:35It was part of her family story in that way.
00:03:39My father had died young.
00:03:42My grandfather was the president of the liberal Jewish community
00:03:46and the civil official of Königsberg.
00:03:49I never heard the word Jew at home when I was a small child.
00:03:55I first encountered it through anti-Semitic remarks from children on the street.
00:04:01After that I was, so to speak, enlightened.
00:04:06All Jewish children encountered anti-Semitism.
00:04:09And it poisoned the souls of many children.
00:04:12The difference was that my mother was always convinced that you must not let it get to you.
00:04:18She would say, you have to defend yourself.
00:04:20It's almost impossible to describe what happened in Europe on August 4th, 1914.
00:04:37The days before and the days after the First World War are separated.
00:04:45Like the day before and the day after an explosion.
00:04:49The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since.
00:04:56And which nobody seems to be able to stop.
00:05:03Hannah Arendt's life was disrupted by World War I.
00:05:08Königsberg was not a safe place for people to be at the time.
00:05:12Arendt and her mother were forced to flee to Berlin.
00:05:18Things were moving very, very quickly.
00:05:22She'd seen the soldiers coming back without limbs.
00:05:26The marches.
00:05:28The fear.
00:05:29The anger.
00:05:30She'd seen all of us.
00:05:32There was violence on the streets.
00:05:34And it's really important to realize just how profoundly shaking that was.
00:05:38Because it wasn't just, oh, these are bad things happening.
00:05:41But that sense of your experience of the world being profoundly altered in ways you do not understand.
00:05:48Was Hannah Arendt's starting point?
00:05:51As it was for many of her generation, too.
00:06:00You studied at the University of Marburg with a major in philosophy and minors in theology and Greek.
00:06:06How did you come to choose these subjects?
00:06:09You know, I thought about it often.
00:06:13I always knew I would study philosophy, ever since I was 14 years old.
00:06:21I read Kant.
00:06:23I had this need to understand.
00:06:25The desire to understand was there very early on.
00:06:28You see, all the books were in the library at home.
00:06:32One simply took them from the shelves.
00:06:36Kant, she said, teaches us that we're thinking beings.
00:06:40And it's thinking that gives us a place in this new world.
00:06:45That how we think has consequences for other human beings.
00:06:50That's the thing that Kant taught her.
00:06:53And she never forgot it.
00:06:59As soon as the young Hannah Arendt gets off the train at Marburg, what's happening in the rest of Germany?
00:07:04Adolf Hitler steps on the stage.
00:07:16So the very time that she's studying, she's reading Kant, of course, she's reading Hegel, she's reading Plato.
00:07:21Hitler publishes Mein Kampf.
00:07:23So the beginnings of her anti-totalitarian thinking run in direct parallel to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
00:07:33Students from across Germany were flocking to Marburg to take courses with Martin Heidegger.
00:07:42Thinking has come to life again.
00:07:49There exists a teacher.
00:07:53One can perhaps learn to think.
00:07:56Martin Heidegger was at the beginning of what became known as existentialism.
00:08:01Which is to say there is nothing to ground us except what we make of our own being.
00:08:10For a generation of young thinkers, it was exhilarating.
00:08:16You could exist, you could be, fearlessly, on your own terms.
00:08:20We are so accustomed to reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking,
00:08:38in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback.
00:08:42But it is more than questionable that we would ever have discovered this without the existence of Heidegger's thinking.
00:08:52She was thoughtful, she was restless, she wanted to fall in love.
00:08:56She wanted to be, she wanted to exist, she wanted to experience life.
00:09:02She was serious, and she was very, very beautiful.
00:09:07My most momentous encounter in Marburg was with Hannah Arendt, whom I met in 1924, at the time she was 18.
00:09:17I noticed her at once.
00:09:19Who wouldn't have?
00:09:21The beauty was mainly in her eyes.
00:09:24The way she looked into the world, or the way she looked away.
00:09:28We were the only Jews in a seminar on the New Testament.
00:09:31Our position as outsiders immediately created a bond between us, which lasted for the rest of our lives.
00:09:40Among the philosophy students, the Heidegger cult was hard to take.
00:09:45It was more like a sect, almost a new religion, which I found profoundly repellent.
00:09:51What was developing in Marburg in those days wasn't healthy.
00:09:54He is a 35-year-old married man with two sons.
00:10:01He nonetheless writes a note to her and says, why don't you come to my office and let's talk.
00:10:08Hannah confided the following to me.
00:10:13At some point, Hannah had to see Heidegger during office hours.
00:10:18It was late in the day, and in his office it was growing dim.
00:10:22Hannah got up to leave. Heidegger saw her to the door.
00:10:25Suddenly, he went down on his knees before me.
00:10:30He reached his arms up towards me, and I took his head in my hands, and he kissed me.
00:10:36And I kissed him.
00:10:39This moment marked the beginning of something from which both parties never freed themselves.
00:10:44He has an odd way of signaling when he wants to make her appear before him.
00:10:59There'll be a lamp lit in the room, and that will tell you that I am not available.
00:11:05Or I will be taking the train to such and such a place.
00:11:08Why don't you come on at the next station and sit in the car behind me?
00:11:12She always knew that to be in love was to be totally immersed.
00:11:18And she kind of wanted that.
00:11:25I no longer know how love feels.
00:11:28I no longer know the fields aglow.
00:11:32And everything wants to drift away simply to give me peace.
00:11:42The affair went on for two years.
00:11:45He was married and staying married.
00:11:47And when it became apparent, Hannah was the one who cut it off.
00:11:52So on the one hand, this is a story about a professor who has an affair with a female student.
00:11:58But the other side of that story is about a younger thinker and an older thinker.
00:12:02And the older thinker opening up a passageway for the younger thinker to move into.
00:12:06And I think that's why Heidegg was so important to her.
00:12:11What I want to tell you now is nothing but a very frank assessment of the situation.
00:12:25The path you showed me is longer and more difficult than I thought.
00:12:29Do not forget me.
00:12:32And do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life.
00:12:39This knowledge cannot be shaken.
00:12:41I dreamt the last night of a small machine that makes life so much easier.
00:13:06Hannah Arendt goes to Berlin to become a journalist.
00:13:11She starts writing book reviews for the major newspapers.
00:13:15She bobbed her hair.
00:13:17She started smoking long cigarettes, going to parties.
00:13:22After the untidy end of her relationship with Heidegger.
00:13:33She begins work on her dissertation on St. Augustine and the theme of love.
00:13:47She found in Augustine the idea of neighborly love.
00:13:50No one exists alone.
00:13:53And we have an ethical responsibility to one another in the world.
00:13:58Which gave her a way of thinking about how one should be in the world.
00:14:06So the passage from Augustine that Hannah Arendt always goes back to is that man was born, a beginning was made.
00:14:13Which means as long as new people are born into the world, then we can always act to change the world that we inhabit.
00:14:23It's a beautiful thesis.
00:14:27As she's writing, the culture of death is taking hold all around her.
00:14:39At the time, she was invited to a Marxist ball, and at the ball she met Gunter Stern.
00:14:54Stern came from a good family.
00:14:57He was Jewish.
00:14:58He had also studied at the University of Marburg with Martin Heidegger.
00:15:03So they had a common base.
00:15:05And six months later, they're married.
00:15:08At the time, Hannah Arendt encountered a still very lively city, but a city where you could sense tensions.
00:15:25There's a sense of resentment that many people feel between a deeply unhappy, depressed, working class, often unemployed group of people, and a more artistic, sexually free, libertine culture.
00:15:42At the same time, you have Roma, Jews, Slovaks, Poles, moving in between borders because suddenly after World War I, there was a lot of homelessness, a lot of rootlessness.
00:16:00The world was in flux.
00:16:01When you've got a profound fear of the future, and then you bring the figure of the migrant Jew, it's very easy at that point for Hitler to step in and say, look, these migrants are destitute, they come with nothing, they're menacing, and they're on your borders.
00:16:26You've got the perfect recipe for Hitler-style fascism.
00:16:31I think a lot of people had the sense that something was going to happen.
00:16:39It's like the moment before the thunderstorm starts.
00:16:48Hannah, bored with philosophy, gets interested in German romanticism, but she's also becoming increasingly aware and troubled and disturbed by anti-Semitism.
00:17:01Where do these two histories come together for her?
00:17:04They come together in the figure of a woman called Rahel Von Hagen.
00:17:10Arendt is working on a book on Rahel Von Hagen, who's a 19th century woman who was born Jewish, ran one of these very famous salons at the time, and hid her Judaism in order to fit in with and assimilate into Berlin society.
00:17:27Naturally, one was not going to cling to Judaism.
00:17:30Why should one?
00:17:33Excluded for centuries from the culture and history of the lands they lived in, Jews were only tolerated, but usually oppressed and persecuted.
00:17:48Rahel's life was bound by this inferiority, by her infamous birth from youth on up.
00:17:53It remained a nasty present reality as a prejudice in the minds of others.
00:18:02When Hannah Arendt started to work on Rahel, I think she saw the danger of assimilation.
00:18:10You have to forget that you are a Jew and you have to become a German and you have to leave behind who you are.
00:18:21Rahel's struggle above all against the fact of having been born a Jew very rapidly became a struggle against herself.
00:18:31It's pretty obvious that assimilation was a big failure because she was sitting there in Berlin and you just could sense every single day that antisemitism was growing, growing, growing, growing.
00:18:50And I think pretty early on she knew that something would happen, that the history of Jewish assimilation in Germany would come to an end.
00:19:00Suddenly, we have hyperinflation. The unemployment, which is already a problem, turns in to a crisis.
00:19:25crisis the world is not only wobbling it's shaking violently the deutschmark loses all of its value
00:19:34and people are angry they feel like they have been lied to and they're looking for someone to blame
00:19:55the most efficient fiction of nazi propaganda was the story of a jewish world conspiracy
00:20:11the nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the jews
00:20:16and needed a counter conspiracy to defend itself
00:20:25by 1931 i was firmly convinced that the nazis would take the helm
00:20:38there were federal and regional elections at the time
00:20:42and if you look at hitler's speeches during the campaigns he would say things like
00:20:50we are a majority he was never a majority and he would come up with some argument that they want
00:20:59he was giving them a coherent narrative we are winning we are going to change germany we are
00:21:05going to change the world and the movement is growing and it's stronger because of you and
00:21:10your undying loyalty to me the nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a
00:21:18functioning reality the ideal subject was not the convinced nazi but people for whom the distinction
00:21:26between fact and fiction no longer existed a most cherished virtue is loyalty to the leader who like a
00:21:36talisman assures that ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality
00:21:45aren't saw this she was there she was living there and so many of her friends said oh well he's just
00:21:55crazy he's just making things up and don't worry about him he can't win he's just creating fantasies
00:22:01fantasies but fantasies are sometimes what we want and especially at times of economic cultural
00:22:10social and political despair people they were lonely they were needy of meaning and belonging and that's
00:22:19what hitler was giving people the nazi movement recruited their members from this mass of indifferent
00:22:27people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention
00:22:34the result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people
00:22:39who never before had appeared on the political scene
00:22:47i think she came up with this ideas when she was looking at what this mass society would provide people
00:22:54it would provide them with the impression that they're not alone anymore and there is a party giving
00:23:02them an idea that they are part of something really big
00:23:14all the major german conservative politicians are on record over and over again saying we cannot let
00:23:22out of hitler become chancellor and yet because they wanted to recruit the followers of hitler to
00:23:30their side they didn't just exclude hitler when they could they tried to control him and he was able to
00:23:38then play them all against each other until they had to make him chancellor
00:23:59is there a definite event in your memory that dates your turn to the political
00:24:05i would say february 27th 1933 the burning of the reichstag and the illegal arrests that followed the same night
00:24:20what happened next was atrocious right after the reichstag fire the nazis blame the communists and declare
00:24:31martial law police start arresting communists and her husband gunther stern is forced to flee
00:24:42i think she knew that the life she had was over and i think from that point on it became a question
00:24:49of how to fight people were taken to gestapo sellers or to concentration camps this was an immediate shock for me
00:24:58and from that moment on i felt responsible i was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander
00:25:11it's at this point that hannah arendt decides to turn her apartment into a safe space for communists
00:25:21who have to flee germany and find safety and refuge outside
00:25:31hitler becomes dictator of what is now called the third reich i mean it's a profound power grab
00:25:39and it happens in the blink of an eye literally you go to bed one morning and you have one set of laws you
00:25:45wake up in the morning and your friends are being put into camps you don't know whether you're going to
00:25:48be the next one you don't know who's going to be shot down on the street suddenly it's the takeover
00:25:55that deutsche volk is glücklich in the bewusstsein that the elige flucht
00:26:01start to be shot down on the street today's
00:26:05endgültig abgelehnt wurde von einem ruhenden boe
00:26:08LEGEND ARLISTER
00:26:25UNDEPLARENT SOUTHERN
00:26:34Prof. Martin Heidegger declares
00:26:36that his university must now sign up to Nazi ideologies
00:26:41and become a university of the Reich.
00:26:45He signed the memos that drove out Jewish students,
00:26:48that drove out Jewish faculty.
00:26:51He was an active ideological Nazi.
00:26:58When Arendt finds out that Martin Heidegger
00:27:00has joined the Nazi party,
00:27:03she cuts off all contact with him.
00:27:11The problem, the personal problem,
00:27:14was not really what our enemies did,
00:27:17but what our friends did.
00:27:21At least not yet under the pressure of terror.
00:27:24Cooperation among intellectuals was the rule.
00:27:28And I never forgot that.
00:27:29Arendt starts working for an old friend of hers,
00:27:36Kurt Blumenfeld,
00:27:37the head of the World Zionist Organization in Germany.
00:27:42Blumenfeld said,
00:27:46We want to put together a collection of all anti-Semitic statements
00:27:50made in everyday circumstances.
00:27:53For example, in teacher associations,
00:27:55professional journals,
00:27:57it's the sort of thing that wasn't known abroad.
00:28:01No member of the Zionist Organization could do this,
00:28:03because if he were found out,
00:28:05the whole organization would be exposed.
00:28:08Will you do it?
00:28:09I said, of course.
00:28:11I was happy.
00:28:12It gave me the feeling that something could be done after all.
00:28:18One day, a librarian reported her to the Gestapo
00:28:22for reading too many newspapers.
00:28:26What use does an academic have with so many newspapers?
00:28:29And walking out of the library,
00:28:32she is arrested and imprisoned at Alexanderplatz,
00:28:36the Gestapo headquarters.
00:28:37She sat in a prison cell
00:28:43while the Gestapo searched her apartment.
00:28:48The only thing they could find
00:28:50was a collection of notebooks,
00:28:53which had funny writing in them.
00:28:54And when they question Arendt about them,
00:28:57she said,
00:28:57Those are my Greek notebooks.
00:28:59It's Greek.
00:29:02I had to lie to the official who arrested me.
00:29:05I couldn't let the Zionist Organization
00:29:07be exposed.
00:29:09I told him tall tales,
00:29:11and he said,
00:29:12I got you in.
00:29:13I shall get you out again.
00:29:16I was very lucky.
00:29:20It was clear to her
00:29:21that she couldn't stay longer in Germany.
00:29:24I think her passport
00:29:25had been confiscated.
00:29:28So overnight,
00:29:29she crossed the frontier
00:29:30into Czechoslovakia.
00:29:31On foot,
00:29:33walking,
00:29:34she reached the other side.
00:29:35when Hannah Arendt arrives in France,
00:29:41there are massive waves of refugees arriving from Germany daily.
00:29:45and this generated mass anti-immigrant attitudes in France.
00:29:50France, too, was in depression.
00:29:51France, too, had to find its scapegoats.
00:29:52France, too, had to find its scapegoats.
00:29:54So the very fascism that she escaped from
00:29:55was also there in her refuge.
00:29:56France, too, had to find its scapegoats.
00:29:57France, too, had to find its scapegoats.
00:30:00So the very fascism that she escaped from
00:30:02was also there in her refuge.
00:30:03When you left Germany in 1933,
00:30:04when you left Germany in 1933,
00:30:06you went to Paris,
00:30:07where you worked in an organization
00:30:08that tried to provide for Jewish youngsters in Palestine.
00:30:12And the United States had to find its own
00:30:13that they had to find its scapegoats.
00:30:15France, too, had to find its scapegoats.
00:30:16France, too, had to find its scapegoats.
00:30:18So the very fascism that she escaped from
00:30:20was also there in her refuge.
00:30:26When you left Germany in 1933,
00:30:30you went to Paris,
00:30:31There were Jewish youngsters in Palestine. Can you tell me something about that?
00:30:35That was Youth Aliyah.
00:30:39This organization brought Jewish youngsters from Germany to Palestine.
00:30:43Most of the children were not yet damaged,
00:30:47but they were in despair. But why did I take this on?
00:30:51I expressed it then, time and again.
00:30:55If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend
00:30:59oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world
00:31:03citizen, not as an upholder of the rights of man, but very
00:31:07specifically, what can I do?
00:31:11I wanted to go into practical work,
00:31:15exclusively and only Jewish work. In pursuit of this work
00:31:19I spent three months in Palestine.
00:31:23Arendt saw the existence of being Jewish
00:31:27as a starting point. This is what her book on Rahela talked about.
00:31:31This is what National Socialism was teaching her.
00:31:33You cannot escape Jewishness.
00:31:35So the only way is to be Jewish.
00:31:39It's not safe to be Jewish in Europe.
00:31:43The Jews need a homeland.
00:31:45Palestine
00:31:47offered one such homeland.
00:31:49And what she had in mind was a bi-national, federated state
00:31:55where Jews and Arabs would together make Palestine a homeland.
00:31:59So that journey itself was very significant to her.
00:32:05When Hannah returns to Paris,
00:32:15there's some sense in the German refugees community
00:32:19that this is a way of continuing to have a kind of social life.
00:32:23She's separated from her husband, Gunther Stern,
00:32:29and has made the acquaintance of Heinrich Lücher.
00:32:33He was this dashing, charismatic man who,
00:32:38unlike Stern, had no formal education,
00:32:41came from a poor family and was not Jewish.
00:32:44Heinrich was a Marxist, an activist.
00:32:50He had been a street-fighting man in the revolution.
00:32:53He was a cabaret performer.
00:32:55He was a talker.
00:32:57He had very, very sparkling eyes.
00:33:00He was captivating.
00:33:05But what she really loved was the way he saw her.
00:33:08And that never stopped.
00:33:10You see, dearest, I always knew, even as a kid,
00:33:17that I can only ever truly exist in love.
00:33:21And that is why I was so frightened that I might simply get lost.
00:33:25And so I made myself independent.
00:33:28And about the love of others who might have branded me as cold-hearted,
00:33:32I always thought, if only you knew how dangerous love would be.
00:33:37And when I first met you, suddenly I was no longer afraid.
00:33:42It seems incredible that I managed to get both things,
00:33:45the love of my life and the oneness with myself.
00:33:49And yet, I only got the one thing when I got the other.
00:33:54But finally, I know what happiness is.
00:33:58In March 1938, Germany invades and annexes Austria.
00:34:16This triggers a flood of Jewish refugees desperate to escape.
00:34:23But most countries, including the United States, refuse to take them in.
00:34:34Hannah becomes a person without a country.
00:34:37A person without a home.
00:34:39Suddenly, there was no place on Earth where migrants could go without the severest restrictions.
00:34:47No country where they would be assimilated.
00:34:50No territory where they could find a new community of their own.
00:34:54The calamity of the Rightlesses,
00:34:57that they no longer belong to any community.
00:35:00Whatsoever.
00:35:02Adolf Hitler's all-out attack on Poland makes the long-dreaded European war a certainty.
00:35:21Alarms sound over Farrin.
00:35:23Nazi bombers attack in earnest.
00:35:26So in January 1940, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher marry.
00:35:30And a couple of months later, Germany invades France.
00:35:38Soon after, France requires all Germans to register as enemy aliens
00:35:43and to be sent to a detention camp.
00:35:48Heinrich and Hannah are separated.
00:35:52And she's sent down to Gurs' camp in southwest France.
00:36:03What Gurs was known for was the terrible soil.
00:36:07You would sink in deeper and deeper and deeper.
00:36:12As time went on, the rations got smaller and smaller.
00:36:16People all had dysentery and people died like flies.
00:36:22Every day, they would throw one loaf of bread into the barrack.
00:36:27When we became hungrier and hungrier, things became worse and worse.
00:36:33These women, who had been ladies, turned into animals just to have a little bit more bread.
00:36:40Arendt later said, it was the one time in my life when I thought about committing suicide.
00:36:50Thinking about despair, I posed the question to myself in earnest.
00:36:54And I answered somewhat jokingly, if only world history were not so awful, it would be a joy to live.
00:37:04June 1940 happens.
00:37:08France falls.
00:37:10It's chaos.
00:37:12No one knows quite what's going to happen.
00:37:14Arendt and a few others make the decision to leave the camp.
00:37:18When the German front approached, the order inside the camp fell apart and the women forged exit papers.
00:37:28Camp discipline seemed to fall apart.
00:37:32The sentries were confused and distraught.
00:37:35And we started to distribute certificates to escape from the camp.
00:37:41Someone said, don't forget Hannah Arendt in the next block.
00:37:46She wants to get out with us, but wants to go on her own.
00:37:50None of us could describe what lay in store for those who remained behind.
00:37:59All we could do was to tell them what we expected would happen.
00:38:04That the camp would be handed over to the victorious Germans.
00:38:08Three thousand women were left inside the camp after Hannah Arendt escaped.
00:38:16And a couple of months later, Adolf Eichmann sent all of the prisoners to Auschwitz.
00:38:23After walking for weeks, she gets word that refugees who have escaped are gathering in Montaubon.
00:38:43The place was flooded with Jewish refugees.
00:38:46One day, she's walking around Montaubon and she thinks, I recognize that gate.
00:38:56I recognize the swagger.
00:38:59She looks again and it's Heinrich.
00:39:03He had managed to be released from the camp that he was in.
00:39:06And I can't imagine the sense of joy at having found each other again.
00:39:10The situation in France is getting more and more difficult.
00:39:21There are very few exit visas that are going to be issued.
00:39:27And the word is that people who want to get out of France need to get to Marseille and get one of these visas.
00:39:33Arendt goes to petition to hustle, to queue, and fortunately she scrapes in.
00:39:43She's not that well known, Hannah, but she has friends.
00:39:46She scrapes in and gets a permit.
00:39:49You're not that well known, and they have a permit.
00:39:50That'll be nice to meet you.
00:39:51It's a permit.
00:40:07You're not that well known, Hannah.
00:40:10That's a permit.
00:40:11We're saved.
00:40:29We are here and living at 317 West 95th Street.
00:40:41In the first place, we don't like to be called refugees.
00:40:47We ourselves call each other newcomers or immigrants.
00:40:51And as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler persecuted
00:40:57people whose name indicated that its members were refugees.
00:41:03We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life.
00:41:08We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world.
00:41:14We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures,
00:41:21the unaffected expression of feelings.
00:41:25We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends in concentration camps.
00:41:32I don't know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams, but sometimes
00:41:37I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead, or we remember the poems we once loved.
00:41:46Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher go about trying to build a new life.
00:41:56Her first impressions of America are really of awe.
00:42:01She reads Alexis de Tocqueville.
00:42:03She reads The Founding Fathers.
00:42:05She comes to believe the American creed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:42:11And that this is a country that's not a Christian country, not a male country, not a white country.
00:42:18What a country for everyone.
00:42:21You can't imagine how foreign and strange this social life is for us here.
00:42:26With all that, we're doing well.
00:42:28Monsieur works as a sort of expert on all possible book and research projects.
00:42:34I'm writing my things on antisemitism and publishing them piecemeal in Jewish publications.
00:42:40On the side, I'm a rather regular contributor to Aufbau.
00:42:44Offbau was a German paper that was established for immigrants so that they could keep up with
00:42:52news, culture, politics.
00:42:55She's trying to raise awareness in the United States about what is happening in Europe.
00:43:01It's Saturday, December 13, 1942.
00:43:05Here is the latest news.
00:43:08Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency
00:43:13and murdered.
00:43:15The phrase concentration camp is obsolete.
00:43:18It is now possible to speak only of extermination camps.
00:43:26What was decisive was the day we learned of Auschwitz.
00:43:31And at first, we didn't believe it.
00:43:33My husband said, don't be gullible.
00:43:35Don't take these stories at face value.
00:43:37They cannot go that far.
00:43:40And then, half a year later, we believed it, after all, because we had the proof.
00:43:46That was the real shock.
00:43:50Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves.
00:43:54None of us ever can.
00:43:56What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production
00:44:12of corpses?
00:44:15She said, this is why we broke at this point, because we could not find the words or imagination
00:44:22to conceive what was happening.
00:44:26Hannah first left Germany in 1933.
00:44:29She lived the experience of totalitarianism, and she's trying to understand it.
00:44:33Finally, we get to 43, and she starts to see a pattern.
00:44:39She starts to see a book.
00:44:44Propaganda provided the foundation for building totalitarian power.
00:44:49The Nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a functioning reality.
00:44:54Totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talents with crackpots and fools, whose lack of intelligence
00:45:00and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
00:45:04The Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews, and needed a counter-conspiracy
00:45:10to defend itself.
00:45:34The line she uses, and she actually repeats it many times in her arguments with totalitarianism,
00:45:39is to comprehend what's going on.
00:45:42And she says, comprehension is the unpremeditated and attentive facing up to and resisting of
00:45:51reality, whatever it may be.
00:45:53Unpremeditated.
00:45:55You can't come at it with your theories.
00:45:57You can't come at it thinking you know it.
00:45:58You have to face up to reality if you're going to resist it.
00:46:04While it may not happen again in the same way that it happened in Germany, it's likely
00:46:08that totalitarianism is going to come back.
00:46:11And it may come back in every form, but we have to be prepared for it, we have to understand
00:46:15it.
00:46:16At the end of the origins of totalitarianism, she brings us back to Augustine, and gives
00:46:23us that passage, that man be born, a beginning was made.
00:46:28Which means that even though totalitarianism has come into existence, even though this horrifying
00:46:37political reality shapes the world that we live in, it doesn't have to be this way.
00:46:44We have the ability to act to make the world anew.
00:46:59The forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.
00:47:04The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.
00:47:13After the war, Hannah Arendt starts working for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization,
00:47:21and she goes back to Germany to find the lost archives of the Jewish communities.
00:47:29She was going back to reclaim stolen goods, to find books, to find the manuscripts, to find
00:47:34the Torahs, and getting the things back.
00:47:42It appears that the German synagogue Silver was carefully preserved for the purpose of establishing
00:47:47an anti-Jewish museum.
00:47:50The people who worked under the Gestapo told me that they had seen silver from all over
00:47:55Germany and many items from abroad.
00:47:59For instance, a Torah scroll from Thessaloniki, which was 500 years old.
00:48:04This is a pretty sad report.
00:48:07What she also discovers in post-Nazi Germany is a sense of unreality.
00:48:14It's like walking through a vandalized museum.
00:48:19And there's a sense that people did not understand the crime that had been committed.
00:48:27The sight of Germany's destroyed cities and the knowledge of German extermination camps have
00:48:36covered Europe with a cloud of melancholy.
00:48:40But nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about
00:48:46than in Germany itself.
00:48:49And it is difficult to say whether this signifies a half-conscious refusal to yield to grief or
00:48:56a genuine inability to feel.
00:48:59And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence
00:49:05of mourning for the dead.
00:49:10Dear Heinrich, do you know how right you were never to want to come back here again?
00:49:18At the end of her trip, she ends up in Freiburg, near where Martin Heidegger is living.
00:49:27And she calls her friend, the American writer, Mary McCarthy, who's in Paris.
00:49:32And she says, I don't know, should I write to him?
00:49:34Should I not?
00:49:35Should I see him?
00:49:36Should I not?
00:49:37And Mary McCarthy says, the very fact that you're going crazy, you're still in love with
00:49:42him like a schoolgirl, you've got to see him.
00:49:45So she writes him and says, I'm at this hotel.
00:49:49There was a knock on her hotel room door, and there stood Heidegger, saying, I've come
00:49:56to turn myself in.
00:49:58Both of them, as she told me freely, were overwhelmed by their feelings.
00:50:05Dear Heinrich, I went to Freiburg and Heidegger soon appeared at the hotel.
00:50:10The two of us had a real talk, I think for the first time in our lives.
00:50:16He who always, at every opportunity, has been such a notorious liar, evidently, never in
00:50:24all those 25 years refuted that I had been the passion of his life.
00:50:30For God's sakes, Heinrich, I wish you were here.
00:50:35Hannah.
00:50:37Her good Heinrich had no choice but to accept the situation.
00:50:42More so since he himself took ample advantage of the modern notion of an open marriage.
00:50:48Hannah basically didn't approve of Blücher's libertine ways, for she was a faithful soul.
00:50:55Heidegger being the only exception.
00:51:01Heidegger, by that point, is a diminished man.
00:51:03He was put through denazification committees, found guilty temporarily, stopped from teaching.
00:51:10He was poor.
00:51:12They became friends again and she helped his work be translated into English.
00:51:16Martin Heidegger is, to this day, widely regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.
00:51:25And he became an ardent Nazi, worse than people thought.
00:51:32And people say, well, how is it possible that she defended him and maintained a relationship with him?
00:51:39And the answer is so simple that it is amazing that it doesn't stick.
00:51:45Martin Heidegger was the love of Hannah Arendt's life.
00:51:52In that sense, friendship and that intimacy triumphed over politics.
00:51:58Martin Heidegger, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951.
00:52:07It's well read and reviewed.
00:52:11No one can ignore it.
00:52:13It's too important.
00:52:15So she begins to get a place in intellectual life.
00:52:19At the same time, she becomes an American citizen.
00:52:23It's something she takes really seriously.
00:52:24There's much I could say about America.
00:52:29There really is such a thing as freedom here.
00:52:32The Republic is not a vapid illusion.
00:52:35And the fact that there is no national state and no truly national tradition
00:52:40creates an atmosphere of freedom.
00:52:43Or at least one not pervaded by fanaticism.
00:52:45This country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin.
00:52:55The natives were the Indians.
00:52:58Everyone else is a citizen.
00:53:01And these citizens are united only by one thing.
00:53:05By simple consent to the Constitution.
00:53:09Over time, the Riverside Drive apartment becomes a kind of New World Salon.
00:53:20It's a kind of friendship circle that discussed ideas and politics and the events of the day.
00:53:32Every year on New Year's Eve,
00:53:34he gave one big party,
00:53:37at which the Germans arriving promptly at 9.30 would congregate in one room with the marzipan and liqueurs,
00:53:44while the Americans filing in around midnight would gather in another with the bourbon and the scotch.
00:53:52Hannah Arendt loved fun.
00:53:54She had a good sense of humor.
00:53:57She had a wonderful smile that would just light up every now and then.
00:54:02She might get up and sing or do something like that.
00:54:06The woman was intensely alive.
00:54:09You can't be intensely alive and not have fun.
00:54:13Hannah's husband was quite eccentric and absolutely adorable.
00:54:20A very peppery little Prussian.
00:54:22And when people came, he'd sit down in the center of the room and listen to the conversation.
00:54:27And if somebody said something that he disapproved of, he'd explode like a little artillery piece.
00:54:36Heinrich was the one who brought her down to earth.
00:54:38He was the Marxist who taught her about real politics.
00:54:41A lot of their thinking was a two-in-one dialogue.
00:54:46Hannah wrote the bonds and threads of friendship that, as it were, keep us in a place, keep us together.
00:54:55So if you've been a stateless refugee, if everything else has failed, what you have is what she'll call the hazards of friendships and the incalculable grace of love.
00:55:07And you get a sense for Arendt that the first lines of defense against totalitarianism were love and friendship.
00:55:18Ask me if I knew him and various other people.
00:55:21I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party.
00:55:30No sooner has Arendt found a place in the world, no sooner has she unleashed her understanding of totalitarianism in the world.
00:55:38McCarthyism takes hold in the United States.
00:55:41It's very familiar what is going on.
00:55:45One communist on the faculty.
00:55:47Of one university is one communist too many.
00:55:52Arendt was actually teaching at Berkeley and she talks about how the academic environment on campus was chilled.
00:56:00How people were afraid to laugh in public or to make jokes or just to speak freely.
00:56:06Can you see how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred and up to now hardly any resistance.
00:56:17The whole entertainment industry and to a lesser extent the universities have been dragged into it.
00:56:23It all functions without any force, without any terror.
00:56:27They are introducing police methods, they name names and in this way the informant system is being integrated into the society.
00:56:40One element that she sees unfolding is the threat to denaturalized, naturalized citizens.
00:56:48Heiner Kluger, who had been a communist in Germany, was quite worried as well.
00:56:53It seems that one can now deprive someone of citizenship with a simple denunciation.
00:57:00And in my case, absolutely nothing could stop it.
00:57:04American citizenship could, it seems to me, become the most worthless in the world at a stroke.
00:57:11Whether they're American or alien born.
00:57:14What's always in common is the conviction that you are right and there are enemies and the enemies must be found and the enemies must be destroyed and they must be relinquished.
00:57:21If you allow this, then you're actually going to undermine foundations of America.
00:57:29If you try to make America more American, you only destroy it.
00:57:35Your methods are the justified methods of the police and only of the police.
00:57:39Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
00:57:52McCarthy is finished.
00:57:54The historians will no doubt busy themselves someday writing about what has happened here.
00:57:58What I see in it is totalitarian elements springing from the womb of society, without a movement or clear ideology.
00:58:08The McCarthy years were more frightening to German-Jewish refugees than a Native American could imagine.
00:58:17For Hannah and many of her friends, the original trust she had had in the protection of this country for her right of free thought vanished on the spot and was never fully restored.
00:58:32In Jerusalem, the trial of Adolf Eichmann begins.
00:58:50The building in this compound was originally designed as a theater. It has been rushed to completion in order to serve as the temporary courthouse in which the State of Israel will bring Adolf Eichmann to trial.
00:59:02Dearest Mary, I decided that I wanted to attend the Eichmann trial and wrote to the New Yorker.
00:59:11Your passport, please.
00:59:13William Schorn called me and seemed to agree to let me go for them, with the understanding that he does not have to print whatever I may produce.
00:59:24Adolf Eichmann had been Hitler's chief logician.
00:59:27He took Art in the final solution and was in charge of liquidating the internment camp where Arendt herself had been held captive.
00:59:40So the horror of the Holocaust, 15 years later, walks into this courtroom. It's beamed across the world. It's on American TV every night.
01:00:01Here with me at this moment, stand six million prosecutors.
01:00:12But alas, they cannot rise to level the finger of accusation in the direction of the glass dock and try out jacuzze against the man who sits there.
01:00:28This is the opportunity to try and understand this new crime, a crime against humanity itself.
01:00:38No.
01:00:39No.
01:00:40I had to establish these forbidden transport plans in Berlin in a relationship with the Reichsverkehrsministerium.
01:00:49That was my task.
01:00:50It was my task.
01:00:51I had the command.
01:00:52I had to do if they were killed or not.
01:00:57It had to be done through.
01:00:59I had only to take a part of it.
01:01:01The other parts that were not necessary until the transport was ran away from other parts.
01:01:09Eichmann tried a number of times to explain that during the Third Reich,
01:01:13the Führer's words had the force of law. He did his duty, as he told the court over and over again.
01:01:19He not only obeyed orders, but he also obeyed the law. He was perfectly sure that he was not what
01:01:26he called an inner Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart. And as for his
01:01:32conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had
01:01:38not done what he had been ordered to do, to ship millions of men, women, and children to their
01:01:43death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. He left no doubt that he would have
01:01:49killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect.
01:02:08And so I was also surprised to have in such a way in such a way in such a way.
01:02:15I never obeyed it. And I obeyed it not.
01:02:17You say that you were not a normal rule.
01:02:21But you have thought about it.
01:02:24Have you said that?
01:02:26No, that can I not imagine.
01:02:28No, you have not thought about it.
01:02:30Bitte?
01:02:31You have not thought about it.
01:02:33You were a liar.
01:02:35You have not thought about it.
01:02:37You thought about it?
01:02:38Yes.
01:02:38You thought about it, I understand.
01:02:40You were not a liar.
01:02:42No, you were an idealist.
01:02:44You were an idealist?
01:02:45That's right, what it says.
01:02:47No, but I was not a...
01:02:49I was a commandment.
01:02:52Banality was a phenomenon that really couldn't be overlooked.
01:02:56The more one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak
01:03:01was closely connected with his inability to think.
01:03:04Namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else.
01:03:08There's nothing deep about it.
01:03:10Nothing demonic.
01:03:13There's simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.
01:03:19That is the banality of evil.
01:03:21So Hanna came up with this idea that what really happened was that something that was radically evil
01:03:32had become normalized through the use of law and the bureaucratic organization of work.
01:03:40Killing Jews became like herding cattle or boxing cereal, that the utter horror of it
01:03:52was not the work of a bunch of devils, but ordinary people like you and me.
01:03:58It was your neighbor who had a nice family and mowed the lawn.
01:04:04And that person was part of an elaborate, huge mechanism, nearly industrial, of killing people.
01:04:14Crimes against humanity involve a lot of people.
01:04:16That's why they're atrocious and major.
01:04:20And what she wants to say about Nazi totalitarianism is it corrupted everybody.
01:04:27Her example was of Jewish leaders in Jewish communities
01:04:31who collaborated with the Nazis.
01:04:55Eichmann's modus operandi is that he would come to a city,
01:04:59find the Jews who wanted to work with him and make them the Jewish leaders, the Judenreiter.
01:05:04And then they would do what he asked in return for favors.
01:05:10They would organize the Jews.
01:05:11They would make people wear the yellow star.
01:05:14They would then decide who gets deported and they would decide who gets saved.
01:05:18Now, Fruniger, have you been engaged in Budapest with Adolf Eichmann?
01:05:23Yes.
01:05:24How long have you given information on the situation on the streets, to the people, to the people?
01:05:34We believe that what it is,
01:05:37300,000 men were already forced.
01:05:41What would be able to do it?
01:05:43What would be able to do it?
01:05:45What would be able to do it?
01:05:46The Jews, the Jews, the Jews, the Jews!
01:05:49We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder, like captains
01:06:01whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard
01:06:07a great part of their precious cargo.
01:06:10Like saviors who with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand, ten thousand
01:06:16victims.
01:06:18To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly
01:06:24the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.
01:06:32When her report on the banality of evil was published in 1963, she was told that what
01:06:39she had seen was wrong.
01:06:47There were highly personal attacks, highly emotional response.
01:06:53A lot of pain and fury and confusion was being poured on her.
01:06:59What she didn't see was the effect of the testimony of Holocaust survivors from that trial on everybody
01:07:12else.
01:07:13So some people, especially in America and Europe, were hearing this stuff the first time.
01:07:17And so the world was not ready to hear about the banality of evil, and she totally misjudged
01:07:23the banality of evil, and she was not ready to hear about the banality of evil.
01:07:30I immediately phoned Hannah to talk to her about the article.
01:07:35I was shocked by the manner in which she gave Jews responsibility for the Shoah.
01:07:41Instead of describing the tragic, terrible state of affairs as forced cooperation by the Jews
01:07:47in their own destruction, Hannah made herself judge over the behavior of people caught in
01:07:53this terrible situation.
01:07:55I could forgive her even less when she advocated the thesis of the banality of evil.
01:08:01As if Eichmann were, strictly speaking, an innocent who simply and faithfully fulfilled what he
01:08:08was instructed to do.
01:08:11Hannah painted a terribly distorted image of both the Jewish and the Nazi side.
01:08:17I had to break off our relationship because the foundation of our friendship had been destroyed
01:08:23by her Eichmann book.
01:08:36When I wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of my main intentions was to destroy the legend
01:08:41of the greatness of evil.
01:08:45To take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like Richard III.
01:08:53I found in Bertolt Brecht the following remark.
01:08:56The great political criminals must be exposed, and exposed especially to laughter.
01:09:04They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes,
01:09:10which is something entirely different.
01:09:13above all, people were offended by the question you raised of the extent to which Jews are
01:09:20to blame for their passive acceptance of the German mass murders, or to what extent the
01:09:25collaboration of certain Jewish councils almost constitutes a kind of guilt of their own.
01:09:31first of all, I must in all friendliness state that you yourself have become a victim of this campaign.
01:09:39Nowhere in my book did I reproach the Jewish people with non-resistance.
01:09:48I have read the book, I know that, but some of the criticisms made of you are based on the tone in which many passages are written.
01:10:02That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true.
01:10:08Look, there are people who take it amiss, and I can understand that in a sense.
01:10:14When people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people, that is a malignant lie, and propaganda, and nothing else.
01:10:23The tone of voice, however, is an objection against me personally, and I cannot do anything about that.
01:10:31I mean, she'd never backtrack. She knows something's gone wrong, and I think it broke her. She stopped writing poetry after Eichmann.
01:10:43In New York, the whole apartment was literally filled with unopened mail. Almost all of it about the Eichmann business.
01:10:51People are resorting to any means to destroy my reputation.
01:10:57If I had known this would happen, I probably would have done precisely what I did do.
01:11:09Hannah Arendt returns to America from the Eichmann trial, and then begins a pretty awful time in her life.
01:11:19She has a course to teach on Machiavelli, of all things.
01:11:23Halfway through teaching the course, her beloved Heinrich falls ill.
01:11:28She rushes back.
01:11:30She's in a car in Central Park.
01:11:32A truck comes, smashes into the taxi.
01:11:35Hannah Arendt is pulverized, faces smashed to the beach.
01:11:39She's broken nine ribs.
01:11:40She's practically lost an eye socket.
01:11:42She is an absolute mess.
01:11:44I awoke in the car and became conscious of what had happened.
01:11:48I tried out my limbs, saw that I was not paralyzed and could see with both eyes.
01:11:54Then tried out my memory, very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English.
01:12:02Then telephone numbers, everything all right.
01:12:04The point was, that for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me, whether I wanted to live or die.
01:12:13And though I did not think that death was terrible, I also thought that life was quite beautiful, and that I'd rather take it.
01:12:22Dear Mary,
01:12:27Dear Mary, we acquired a television set and use it very infrequently for news and presidential
01:12:50announcements.
01:12:52The more I see of Johnson, the less do I like him.
01:12:56I'm worried and have no confidence in LBJ.
01:13:03What troubles me more than anything else is the sort of lying we have begun to practice.
01:13:10In the 1960s, she reinvented herself as a voice of American politics.
01:13:16And what she witnessed in the Vietnam War was the success of the resistance to the government,
01:13:22the exposure of its lies, and to the protections of civil liberties and civil rights.
01:13:29We had just come from a student protest meeting against our policy in Vietnam.
01:13:33The whole thing was extremely reasonable and unfanatical, so crowded that one could hardly get through.
01:13:39This generation seems characterized by sheer courage, an astounding will to action, and
01:13:46by a no less astounding confidence in the possibility of social change.
01:13:50She really loved the civil disobedience movement.
01:13:57At the same time, there was violence.
01:13:59The rise of political violence.
01:14:01You start to see a real challenge, not just to freedom, but to civil freedom.
01:14:11There's no doubt that someone of her background and experience would see harbinger of a possible bad outcome of authoritarianism.
01:14:22Take your hands off of me.
01:14:23Unless you intend to arrest me.
01:14:24Don't push me, please.
01:14:25This is the kind of thing that can threaten the norms and the institutions that she thinks ground and preserve freedom in the United States.
01:14:40I'm working on an essay on power and violence.
01:14:44I'm trying to understand the experiences of recent years here.
01:14:50Power and violence are not the same.
01:14:53The power of the laws or the constitution rests on the consent and support of the people.
01:14:58Martin Luther King dedicated his life.
01:15:01Wherever this power is intact, violence is unnecessary.
01:15:06The hand is frozen.
01:15:07What she saw towards the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, was the acceptance of violence as a way of doing politics.
01:15:16That terrified her because she thought it kind of meant that totalitarianism had won.
01:15:23Dear Mary.
01:15:36I'm now sitting in Heinrich's room and using his typewriter.
01:15:40Gives me something to hold on to.
01:15:43I don't think I told you that for 10 long years I had been constantly afraid
01:15:48that just a sudden death would happen.
01:15:51This frequently bordered on real panic.
01:15:54Where the fear was and the panic, there's now sheer emptiness.
01:16:06There were two things working at the same time.
01:16:10One was despair, but the other was resilience.
01:16:14Being alone with your thoughts, but being in the world at the same time.
01:16:23I sit here much worried.
01:16:25Things are in an extremely dangerous state here.
01:16:29But I sometimes think this is the only country where a republic at least still has a chance.
01:16:33I have no great desire to watch another republic go to the dogs.
01:16:42Daniel Ellsberg, ex-Pentagon employee, made history by leaking to the New York Times the Pentagon Papers.
01:16:49So the Pentagon Papers breaks and reveals that the government have been lying about Vietnam War.
01:16:54I felt that the concealment of this information for 25 years has now led to the death of 50,000 Americans and several hundred thousand Vietnamese in the last few years.
01:17:06A couple of million over 20 years of this involvement.
01:17:09They knew the war was being lost.
01:17:12They knew that they were killing people at a much higher rate than they were telling us.
01:17:15They knew the costs were much worse.
01:17:18The lie was told to serve a purpose.
01:17:22To help justify the war in Vietnam and pursue the anti-communist agenda.
01:17:26If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
01:17:38And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind.
01:17:43It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge.
01:17:49And with such a people, you can then do what you please.
01:17:56Two former White House A's with electronic receiving devices were in the room of the Watergate Hotel on the early morning of June 17th,
01:18:04when five men with bugging gear were found in Democratic headquarters here in the Watergate building.
01:18:10Watergate has eaten rather deeply into my time and attention.
01:18:15The overwhelming number of scandals that have come to light is in a way self-defeating.
01:18:22Well, I think there was no question that the cover-up began that Saturday when we realized it was a break-in.
01:18:28I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency.
01:18:32Mr. Nixon was asked about break-ins and burglaries and wiretappings.
01:18:36He said a Supreme Court decision has indicated inherent power to the president to protect the country.
01:18:41Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
01:18:46Dearest Hannah, Nixon's appeal to national security expresses, I think, his true political aim of a police state.
01:18:56I immediately thought of the origins of totalitarianism.
01:18:59Dear Mary, everybody, so it must seem, did more or less what Nixon did.
01:19:06And where all are guilty, no one is.
01:19:09Since Nixon actually behaved like a tyrant, his downfall would be a kind of revolution.
01:19:15Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
01:19:19It was obvious that during Watergate crimes had been committed.
01:19:26Big crimes.
01:19:28But what's amazing is how many people who knew better weren't willing to stand up and stop it.
01:19:35So many people cared more about power than they did about the health of the Republic and doing what was right.
01:19:44Watergate has revealed perhaps one of the deepest constitutional crisis this country has ever known.
01:19:56It's the whole fabric of government which is actually at stake.
01:20:00The founding fathers never believed that tyranny could arise out of the executive office.
01:20:05However, we know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is, of course, from the executive.
01:20:17Suddenly the very idea of the United States itself as a constitutional republic was called into question.
01:20:26And this scared Arend.
01:20:27Not only is the republic itself in danger, but if fascism is going to emerge in America, it's going to come from the executive branch.
01:20:38From the liberties the executive feels free to take.
01:20:41The last major speech she gives in the United States is for the bicentennial anniversary of America.
01:20:55We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history, which separate whole eras from each other.
01:21:08At such moments in history, when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life with its unchanging pressing demands.
01:21:19One of the discoveries of totalitarian governments was the method of digging giant holes in which to bury unwelcome facts and events.
01:21:30For the past was condemned to be forgotten, as though it never had been.
01:21:36But I rather believe with Faulkner, who wrote the past is never dead, it is not even past.
01:21:43And this for the simple reason that the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past.
01:21:54When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome.
01:21:59Let us try not to escape into utopias, images, theories or sheer follies.
01:22:05For it was the greatness of this republic to give due account for the sake of freedom, to the best in man, and to the worst.
01:22:18The подписывайтесь and bellies, with such reasons, at the bottom line are no longer in the festival.
Recomendado
1:46
|
A Seguir
59:28
59:30
1:36:38
54:33
1:34:42
1:27:53
57:50
1:14:51
5:45
44:03
1:29:42
1:25:29