Why does Arendt sound like breaking news now?
Re-reading Arendt this weekend, she sounded damn current. Almost terrifying, almost absurd. Like a history puzzle from the 20th century that looks like the present, like the videos we now see in the feed.
Arendt says that violence targets first those without history, those whose lives have already been considered politically irrelevant, people who do not count. Violence on an ordinary street, in plain sight, people crawling on the ground surrounded by a dozen agents. People asking 'why? why?' terrified. That 'why?' that receives no answer because it has none. The uniforms act like the judge and the executioner.
Legality is slowly reduced to appearance, fear becomes damn efficient. Enough to teach people that rights exist in theory, but are unavailable in practice. Anyone can be the subject of it, even those who enforce it. In such a regime, the figure that makes it work is the reasonable person who no longer asks what their actions mean.
We already know that when a state uses violence as policy, even against its own citizens, and justifies that violence by blaming the victims, without any due process and used as a tool of terror, it says more about the regime of power than about those subjected to it.
It's how the authority reacts to violence, that justifies it, that somehow makes it coherent in its own logic. It’s how it normalises ‘of course they did it'. Everything about it is explained and told as necessity. Violence is enforcement as the unfortunate but rational outcome of some 'rules' being applied.
Once violence is seen as necessity, disagreement becomes suspect. To question it, to ask why, it comes with the argument of being misinformed or as a refusal to understand it. In the end, power that expresses through violence needs enough people to stop asking what it means.