Guillaume Henchoz

Le film sur Hannah Arendt rouvre le débat

Hannah Arendt, de la réalisatrice allemande Margarethe von Trotta, sort sur les écrans romands cette semaine. Assistant au procès du criminel nazi Eichmann, Arendt développe un concept qui continue de susciter la polémique de nos jours: la banalité du mal.

L’homme est aux abois. Dans son lit, il attend la mort, alors que son amie de toujours, Hannah Arendt, cherche à se réconcilier avec lui avant la fin. Peine perdue. Comme beaucoup de proches de la philosophe, le sioniste Kurt Blumenfeld ne lui pardonne pas ses propos tenus dans son dernier ouvrage et se détourne dédaigneusement. La caméra s’arrête un instant sur le visage déconfit d’Arendt. La polémique l’a emporté sur l’amitié. Fin du plan.

Le dernier film de la réalisatrice allemande Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt, revient sur un moment particulier de la vie de cette intellectuelle juive allemande qui a fui l’Europe pour les Etats-Unis pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. En 1961, Arendt obtient du mensuel New Yorker la possibilité de couvrir le procès d’Adolf Eichmann qui est sur le point de s’ouvrir à Jérusalem. Ce criminel nazi, pièce maîtresse du processus d’élimination des juifs pendant la guerre, a été capturé en Argentine l’année précédente et ramené en Israël. L’ouvrage Eichmann à Jérusalem, que Hannah Arendt consacre à l’affaire, va susciter une violente polémique qui ne s’est pas encore éteinte cinquante ans après sa parution. Cette dernière porte notamment sur l’utilisation d’un terme qui va devenir un concept: la «banalité» du mal.

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Stephen Lendman

On October 1, French newspaper Le Monde headlined "France in the NSA's crosshair: phone networks under surveillance." More on that below.

Previous articles explained. NSA operates lawlessly. It does so by rules it invents. It spies globally. Enormous amounts of data are collected. It's longstanding. It's been ongoing for decades.

Post-9/11, it intensified. It's out-of-control today. It doesn't matter. NSA is a rogue agency. It's a power unto itself. Congressional leaders support it. So does Obama.

Spying domestically isn't for national security. Nor is monitoring allies. It's old-fashioned espionage using state-of-the-art technology. It's about control. It's for economic advantage.

It's to be one up on foreign competitors. It's for information used advantageously in trade, political, and military relations. Foreign embassies, consulates and missions are bugged. NSA calls them "targets."

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John W. Whitehead

“Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.” ~Winston Churchill

It’s 3 a.m. You’ve been asleep for hours when suddenly you hear a loud “Crash! Bang! Boom!” Based on the yelling, shouting and mayhem, it sounds as if someone—or several someones—are breaking through your front door. With your heart racing and your stomach churning, all you can think about is keeping your family safe from the intruders who have invaded your home. You have mere seconds before the intruders make their way to your bedroom. Desperate to protect your loved ones, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, your son’s baseball bat, or that still unloaded gun you thought you’d never need. In a matter of seconds, the intruders are at your bedroom door. You brace for the confrontation, a shaky grip on your weapon. In the moments before you go down for the count, shot multiple times by the strangers who have invaded your home, you get a good look at your accosters. — It’s the police.

Before I go any further, let me start by saying this: the problem is not that all police are bad. The problem, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, is that increasing numbers of police officers are badly trained, illiterate when it comes to the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, and, in some cases, willfully ignorant about the fact that they are supposed to be peacekeepers working for us, the taxpayer.

Unfortunately, with every passing week, we are hearing more and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals. Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to a government agent. Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.

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