What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …
– From
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt
‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. After the publication of
The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life. She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each. She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five
photo credit: Bigstock
This week the ruling class will install Mumbly Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States and symbolic ruler of the empire. This will take place in a scene out of a Hollywood movie. The Imperial Capital looks like a war zone, with 25,000 troops patrolling the streets and the core of the city closed off entirely. Biden will take the oath of office behind layers of razor wire fencing and heavily armed soldiers.
The grandees of official Washington, of course, will be celebrating. Their long nightmare has finally come to an end. Donald Trump has been evicted from their presence. For four long years in defense of our democracy, of course they have labored to get the rightfully elected president removed from office. That day has finally arrived. To put it another way, they will not have Donald Trump to kick around anymore.
Carvings at the San Francisco de la Montaña Church in Veraguas, said to be the work of the first generation of indigenous artists to become Christians. Was the church built atop a pre-Columbian religious site? What did the process of the sculptors’ conversion entail? Obscure questions here, but they might be answered in recently opened Vatican archives. Photo by Editorpana.
History projects to bring two nations together
In Panama we just celebrated The Day of the Martyrs, versions of which are taught to every student in the Panamanian public schools. But an academic turf battle, certain Panamanian politicians’ fawning desire to curry favor with the United States and a bizarre court decision bar any national educational policy to teach the history of Panamanian – US relations. It gets worse when one considers that with the separation from Colombia and its incessant Liberal versus Conservative civil warfare, Panama decided to just forget one of the major issues in that, whethe
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