A woman's influence
THIS WEEK, TIME MAGAZINE named Samantha Power, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "`A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide," one of the 100 most influential people in the world. This may seem like a strange honor to bestow on a writer whose work points up the failure of human-rights advocates like herself to influence US policy.
But when I telephoned Power at her Cambridge office last week, I didn't ask for her thoughts on fellow Time honorees George W. Bush, Mel Gibson, and "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell. Instead, we discussed the influence of Hannah Arendt, the German-born postwar intellectual who died in 1975. While researching the introduction to a new edition of Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schocken) published this month, Power says she was struck by the relevance of that classic 1951 study of the Nazi and Soviet regimes to today's debates over ethnic conflicts, genocide, human rights, and terrorism.
IDEAS: No state in the past half-century has met all of Arendt's criteria to qualify as "totalitarian" -- a form of governance that eliminates the very possibility of political action. Yet you claim that a wide range of regimes, from the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s to the Hutu extremists responsible for the massacre of 800,000 Tutsi in 1994, have adopted totalitarian tactics.
POWER: One distinct quality of totalitarian states, according to Arendt, is the way they target "objective enemies" -- entire classes of people who must be eliminated simply because of their group membership. If you were a Jew under the Nazis, or a member of the former ruling classes under Stalin, there was nothing you could do to evoke a shared sense of humanity.
The same thing goes on today, but despite the fact that we have the benefit of learning about Hitlerism and Stalinism, we still find it impossible to wrap our minds around programs of outright extermination. In Rwanda, for example, it stretched credulity for us to imagine that paramilitary and regular armed forces, as well as ordinary citizens, were trying to kill every last Tutsi. We told ourselves it must be civil war -- that the Tutsi must have done something to provoke such violence.
IDEAS: You seem to suggest that totalitarian "solutions" have outlived totalitarian regimes. Was Rwanda really comparable to the Holocaust?
POWER: No genocide since the Holocaust has been so mechanized, so holistic in intent -- which may be one reason we have a difficult time recognizing genocide today. But when Arendt writes, of her belated realization that the Holocaust was different from earlier, unsystematic pogroms against Jews, that it was "as if an abyss had opened," those of us who didn't recognize what was happening in Rwanda at the time should be able to relate.
IDEAS: Arendt also details the process by which totalitarian regimes deny members of targeted groups not only their legal rights, but their very right to have rights at all, thus rendering them a "superfluous" section of humanity.
POWER: The rightless are still with us. One thinks, for example, of those Tutsi who before the massacre began were excluded from positions of power, universities, and certain jobs, and forbidden to run for political office. There are also large refugee populations -- whether Bosnians scattered across Europe, Palestinian refugees being denied the right of return, or people leaving Cuba or Haiti on rafts -- who fall through the cracks, because international laws intended to protect them are not being enforced, and because the countries they've left see them as outside the realm of legal obligation.
IDEAS: Although she wrote "Origins" before the advent of international human rights law, Arendt predicted that such laws would be unenforceable.
POWER: Arendt recognized that states could never be trusted to respect and enforce human rights at home or abroad. Even here in America, it's recently been argued that rights once thought of as inalienable to all humans are instead contingent on citizenship -- the internees at Guantanamo, for example, are rightless. . .. Yet she also predicted that efforts to establish international human rights laws would leave the same untrustworthy states in charge of enforcing those laws. She was ahead of the curve there. I don't have much faith, for example, that the United States will take the lead in imbuing institutions like the United Nations or the International Criminal Courtwith the authority they need to work.
IDEAS: It's been argued that Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are fascistic, even totalitarian movements. How would Arendt suggest we counter such movements today?
POWER: She'd likely insist that we have no chance of stymieing the terrorist threat simply by suppressing it -- that we have to examine its "hidden mechanics." But I don't think she'd take refuge in wishful leftist thinking that anti-American terrorism would subside if, for example, the US gave more foreign aid or stood up to Ariel Sharon -- she was far too hardheaded for that. Nor would she forgive the straying we've done from the essence of our constitutional tradition. Arendt would probably suggest we do three things simultaneously -- study the deepest motivating factors of anti-American movements, meet the threat abroad, and preserve essential freedoms at home.
Joshua Glenn writes the Examined Life column for Ideas. 