Word: arendt
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...book's final chapter, Miss Arendt emphasizes the price Americans are paying for having forgotten and having allowed others to forget their revolutionary heritage. "The point is unpleasantly driven home when even revolutions on the American continent speak and act as though they knew by heart the texts of revolutions in France, in Russia, and in China, but had never heard of such a thing as an American Revolution. Less spectacular, perhaps but certainly no less real, are the consequences of the ... American failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States...
...failure to remember is responsible for immense fear Americans have of revolution today, and the fear in turn attests to the rest of the world how right they are "to think of revolution only in terms of the French Revolution," Mis Arendt says. In another quote you won't see in Time she calls "fear of revolution the hidden leitmotif of postwar American foreign policy in its desperate attempt at stabilization of the status quo, with the result that American power and prestige were used and misused to support obsolete and corrupt political regimes that long since had become...
Some of the solutions Miss Arendt proposes to the problems she has raised do not seem very helpful, notably her proposal that thousands of little grass-roots councils be started to revitalize political life in the United States. But in the context of the book, where the problems the author has chosen to examine are delineated with great clarity, the answers seem of secondary importance...
...Miss Arendt's most frequent observations concerns the basis of disagreement between the free world and the Soviet bloc. Repeatedly she insists that "we should remind our opponents that serious conflicts would not arise out of the disparity of economic systems but only out of the conflict between freedom and tyranny, born out of the triumphant victory of a revolution and the various forms of domination which came in the aftermath of a revolutionary defeat...
...flaw in On Revolution is contained in the author's premise that the disappearance of world war leaves only revolution. Neither the "bush wars" which Kennedy Administration is presently fighting nor the small-scale wars of nationalistic expansion like Sukarno's venture can be included in either of Miss Arendt's categories. As for the new pattern of military coup d'etats in Latin America, the appearance in Egypt of tactical nuclear weapons, the modern armies of the newly independent states--all factors which seem to signal the end of the epoch of popular revolutions--Miss Arendt ignores their existence...