Word: arendt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...addition to the dispute about taking the company public, there were clear personality differences between the hard-charging Middelhoff and the more restrained culture at Bertelsmann. Middelhoff tried to force the company to centralize. But Bertelsmann executives "didn't want to give up their independence," said Dan Arendt, head of the technology, media and telecom practice at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. "There's a strong culture of entrepreneurship...
...cannot watch the tape without thinking of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase "the banality of evil." Because 9/11 has caused such reverberations in the world, people have subconsciously endowed bin Laden with the size and force, the diabolical cunning, of a supervillain or, in some parts of the world, of a superhero. The video produces a severely diminishing effect--something like listening to the Nixon Oval Office tapes (though radically different orders of crime are under discussion). The grainy video brings down the image of bin Laden in something of the way that the Taliban blew up the giant statues...
...Arendt coined the term banality of evil in order to try to define the (terrifying) ordinariness of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who helped manage Hitler's killing machine. Each age, it may be, gets its own appropriate evil. A centerless bureaucrat, for example, to run the Nazi regime's program of industrial extermination. In the videotape, bin Laden seems to radiate--if that is the word--a different sort of banality: the unexpected ordinariness of his awfulness...
...have seen a version of this same political scenario before. Antisemitism was the common coin of Europe from the end of the 19th century to the end of World War II, reaching from France in the west, through Germany and Central Europe, to Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Hannah Arendt identified antisemitism as the common denominator of fascism and communism, but it also inspired many nationalist parties, until Hitler channeled its energy to consolidate the Third Reich. The use of the Jews as a political target was symptomatic of a fear of democracy in all its aspectsindividual rights, a competitive economy...
...Arendt was talking about how the relentless push-and-pull of organizations and bureaucracies can create a way to blame the system rather than oneself. "I was just following orders" - that was the mantra of the German officers at the Nuremberg Trials. It's not a completely illegitimate defense. But I don't think Andrea Yates will say she was "just following orders...