Uncategorized
Hannah Arendt could have anticipated the Trump administration’s lies in Minnesota — and elsewhere
During the last half-dozen years of Hannah Arendt’s life, the celebrated political and moral philosopher, who died in 1975, was shaken by a series of personal and political crises. Not only was she still dealing with the fallout from her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil, but Arendt lost two of her closest friends: her husband Heinrich Blücher and her mentor Karl Jaspers. Moreover, she was increasingly alarmed by the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the churn of student antiwar protests, and mounting police violence.
“For the first time,” Arendt told her friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy, in 1968, “I meet middle-aged, native-born Americans (colleagues, quite respectable) who think of emigration.”
One affair during this period that struck Arendt with great force was the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. These papers, commissioned by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, documented in despairing detail America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Leaked to the Times by the RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the papers quickly led to a series of crises — constitutional, political, nearly existential — that led both to the landmark decision by the Supreme Court to allow their publication and, of course, Richard Nixon’s decision to draft a team of plumbers to burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
Arendt was of course shocked by the blood-soaked futility and consequences, for civilians no less than soldiers, of American military strategy. But she was also staggered by how successive governments packaged this deadly madness for public consumption. It was nothing less, she declared in her essay “Lying in Politics,” a “quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions,” one which will engulf any reader intent on making sense of our government’s actions.
First published in the New York Review of Books more than a half-century ago — and subsequently included in Arendt’s collection of essays Crises of the Republic — the piece is hauntingly prophetic, anticipating the salvo of crises now roiling our country. These dangers most often issue from a single source — namely, the embattled status of what Arendt calls our “common world,” one structured by the existence of truth and fact. Were we to undermine these, we would undo that very same world.
The history of political lying is, in a sense, little more than a series of footnotes to Plato’s notion of the “noble lie” — lies the powerful tell the weak in their quest for power and, if they succeed, hold on to it.
“Truthfulness,” Arendt drily notes, “has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.”
But there is lying and lying. For a prince or president to maintain power, Machiavelli famously declared, “it is necessary to know how to do wrong.” While the use of deception and deceit is among these necessary wrongs, it is important for the ruler to use them sparingly and surgically. Yet this was hardly the case for the succession of presidents who presided over the military and moral debacle in Vietnam. Instead, they and their officials lied with great but also systematic abandon over the reasons for the war — which evolved over time — as well as its human cost and progress. That these lies, Arendt writes, “became the chief issues of the Pentagon Papers, rather than the illusion, error, miscalculation, and the like, is mainly due to the strange fact that the mistaken decisions and lying statements consistently violated the astoundingly accurate factual reports of the intelligence community.”
This deliberate dissonance between facts and claims, in turn, feeds a kind of rot that eats away at the epistemological and ethical foundations of our world and lives. And this is no small matter, for it goes to the heart of Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. She argues that factual truths, unlike rational truths, are never compellingly true. That 2+2 will always equal 4 needs no witnesses; that a violent mob stormed out Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020 does, however, require witnesses and factual evidence.
“Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs,” she wrote. This web of truths is as intricate and fragile as a spider’s web; just as a swat of a stick can collapse the latter, so too can the constant swatting of lies by groups or peoples destroy the former.
The path to the Nazi destruction of European Jewry was paved by the deconstruction of factual truth, the obliteration of moral judgment, and the contagion of state lies. This was no less the case with those Arendt called the “problem-solvers” at RAND — the club of the best and brightest which Ellsberg decided to quit — than with the architects of the Final Solution. In both instances, Arendt writes, “defactualization and problem-solving were welcomed because disregard of reality was inherent in the policies and goals themselves.”
But the rot runs broader and deeper. Eventually, it destroys not just common sense and a common past, but the world we hold in common. If everybody always lies to you, Arendt observes, the consequence is that you will no longer believe anything at all. The next step, quite simply, is the unmaking of reality.
As Arendt wrote in “Truth and Politics,” a companion piece to “Lying in Politics,” the “result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is being destroyed.”
Of course, this is the existential threat posed by our nation’s current management, one dedicated to the destruction of factual truth and the world it undergirds. Yet the still provisional success of the citizens of Minneapolis who, in their relentless attention to factual truths — truths they have witnessed and share not only amongst themselves but also the world beyond their city — reminds us that this enterprise in nihilism is hardly predestined.
Arendt would not have been surprised, I believe, by this insurgency on behalf of not just factual but also moral truth in our glacial Midwest. Yet another reason, as this new chapter to the crises of the republic unfolds, Arendt shall remain our indispensable guide.
The post Hannah Arendt could have anticipated the Trump administration’s lies in Minnesota — and elsewhere appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Marty Supreme’ and everything else Jewish at this year’s Academy Awards
At last year’s Academy Awards, Anora — a frenetic, somewhat ambiguously Jewish look at a Jewish enclave of New York, took home best picture, original screenplay, director and actress for its Jewish lead Mikey Madison. This year, we have a film that feels, in some ways, quite parallel, while cranking the Yiddishkeit to 11: Josh Safdie’s breathless picaresque Marty Supreme, set on the Lower East Side, is up for best picture and its star, Timothée Chalamet is a favorite for best actor.
There’s also Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s portrait of Jewish lyricist Lorenz Hart’s breakup with composer Richard Rodgers (Ethan Hawke is up for best actor). And One Battle After Another, a campy and absurdist satire about the infiltration of white supremacists in the U.S. government, is poised to have a massive night, with the blockbuster Sinners serving as its main competition.
That all goes to say that it’s another great year for Jewish stories at the Oscars, with some really compelling fodder for discussion about the place that Jews occupy today in arts and media. What stories are we telling and how are they received?
Here, as ever, the Forward culture team is here to break it all down for you, live as it unfolds. Of course, we cover Jewish movies all year. But at the Academy Awards, we get to see how the rest of the world feels about these movies. We will be updating this story with our thoughts throughout the ceremony.
Traditionally, as we begin these Oscars roundtables, we discuss what we’re all wearing and eating. What’ve we got?
Olivia: brown sweater and jeans; no food but aggressively chewing mint gum. I will later be drinking some of the seltzer I got from Brooklyn’s Seltzer Fest today.
Mira: I did a bunch of cooking for the week so I have vegetarian avgolemono soup and Alison Roman’s fennel salad. (I’m obsessed with this salad.) I am proudly wearing hard pants.
PJ: I am reheating some chicken from last night. Wearing a blue sweater with a little toggle and jeans. How many of Stellan Skarsgård’s large adult sons are here? In other l’dor v’dor news, Bill Pullman just mentioned how they filmed the Spaceballs sequel with his son Lewis.
Talya: I believe I’m wearing the exact same sweater I donned for this event last year — where’s my award for consistency? And, as always, sweatpants; I cannot comprehend suffering through this event in jeans.
Discussion of Israeli-Palestinian protests on the red carpet
Mira: Love a toggle. Speaking of outfits, anyone have thoughts on Odessa A’zion’s spangled red carpet set? She is one of the only people who styles herself on the red carpet, which I do respect.
Olivia: A’Zion’s outfit kind of looks like she forgot to tie whatever was supposed to be holding it up. I don’t think it looks bad, just like it’s falling down.
PJ: It wouldn’t look out of place hanging from the window of a VW van with shag carpet and some Tibetan prayer flags.
Mira: Of note, the past several years have seen protesters approaching people on their way into the ceremony, and a lot of pins on the red carpet taking a stance on the Israel-Hamas war, largely pro-Palestinian ones. We’re seeing less of that this year — though not none. Javier Bardem posted a photo of him wearing a pin reading “no to the war” in Spanish, along with another pin featuring Handala, a cartoon boy considered a symbol of Palestinians. The team of The Voice of Hind Rajab, nominated for best foreign film, are also wearing red pins with a white dove.
PJ: Those have replaced the red hand ArtistsforCeasefire pins, which some said recalled the bloody palms of Palestinians who killed IDF soldiers in 2000.
Olivia: A reporter for ABC in a pre-recorded segment asked executive producers and showrunners for the ceremony Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan if anything would get bleeped, such as mentions of Trump, Israel and Palestine. Recently, the BBC removed director Akinola Davies Jr’s call for a “Free Palestine” from their BAFTA stream. Kapoor asserted that the night’s production team supports free speech, but we’ll see what transpires over the course of the night.
The post ‘Marty Supreme’ and everything else Jewish at this year’s Academy Awards appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
US Sends Additional Arms to Israel to Sustain Iran Operations
The first of two Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors is launched during a successful intercept test. Photo: US Army.
i24 News – The United States has recently increased shipments of munitions to Israel to support ongoing Israeli air operations against Iran.
According to reports broadcast by the public radio network Kan Reshet Bet, several weapons deliveries have arrived in Israel in recent days as part of what officials describe as an ongoing airlift aimed at sustaining the pace of military strikes.
Since the start of the campaign, Israeli forces are believed to have dropped more than 11,000 bombs on targets across Iran.
The shipments come as reports emerge about a potential shortage of ballistic missile interceptors in Israel. US officials told the news outlet Semafor that Israel’s interceptor stockpiles have been heavily used during the conflict.
According to those sources, Washington had already been aware for months that supplies could become strained, though it remains unclear whether the United States would be willing to share its own interceptor reserves. Israeli officials have since rejected claims that such a shortage exists.
Unlike the Iron Dome, which is designed to intercept short-range rockets and projectiles, ballistic missile interceptors serve as Israel’s primary defense against long-range missile threats. Fighter jets can also be used to attempt interceptions, though this method is considered a supplementary measure to missile defense systems.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has taken additional budgetary steps to support the war effort. During an overnight vote between Saturday and Sunday, ministers approved a roughly 1 billion shekel reduction across various ministry budgets to help finance classified military purchases linked to Operation “Roar of the Lion.”
The government had already approved a 3 percent cut in ministry budgets, a move expected to increase the defense budget by approximately 30 billion shekels as the conflict continues.
Uncategorized
Pope Leo Decries ‘Atrocious Violence’ in Iran War, Urges Ceasefire
Pope Leo XIV leads the Angelus prayer from a window of the Apostolic Palace, at the Vatican, March 15, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Matteo Minnella
Pope Leo made an impassioned plea on Sunday for an immediate ceasefire in the expanding Iran war, lamenting “atrocious violence” that he said had killed thousands of non-combatants and caused suffering across the region.
As the US-Israeli war on Iran enters its third week, the first US pope warned that violence would not bring the justice, stability and peace that the peoples of the region long for.
“For two weeks, the peoples of the Middle East have been suffering the atrocious violence of war,” the pope said at his weekly Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square.
“In the name of Christians in the Middle East and of all women and men of good will, I appeal to those responsible for this conflict: Cease fire!” Pope Leo said.
IDEA THAT WAR SOLVES PROBLEMS IS ‘ABSURD’
Leo added that the situation in Lebanon – ravaged by a war between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah – was also a cause of “great concern.”
“I hope for paths of dialogue that can support the country’s authorities in implementing lasting solutions to the serious crisis currently underway, for the common good of all the Lebanese people,” the pope said.
During a visit to a Rome parish later, the pope said war could never resolve problems and hit out at people who invoke God to justify killings.
“Today many of our brothers and sisters in the world are suffering because of violent conflicts, caused by the absurd claim that problems and disagreements can be resolved through war, when instead we must engage in unceasing dialogue for peace,” he said during his homily.
“Some even go so far as to invoke the name of God to justify these choices of death, but God cannot be enlisted by darkness. Rather, He always comes to bring light, hope and peace to humanity.”