Hannah Arendt's Pessimistic Views

Some six million people were murdered by the Nazis considering themselves a "superior" race, and killing people merely because they were Jews, or homosexuals, gypsies, or physically handicapped. Is it any wonder then that Ms. Arendt, a German Jew who left her homeland before the Holocaust, considers that one of the greatest evils perpetrated by men against other men is "the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective" (p. 296). She explains that there seems to be a limit to the existence of rights. There seems to have been an abridgment of "a right to belong to some kind of organized community" (p. 297) And that abridgment was made manifest by the Holocaust, obviously. She is pessimistic because, as she says (p. 297) this is not due to a lack of civilization, since there is no uncivilized place left on earth. Again, it is obvious that she is referring to the Nazis (and all Germans who believed in what the Nazis were doing) in excluding individuals from the right to belong to a community. She equates this "outsider" status to Aristotle's time and the slaves of Athens, who were not considered humans. And, incidentally, we don't need to look any further than our own Constitution which equated a Negro and Negro slaves as being about three-fifths the value of a white American. What isa disturbing to her (and should be to all of us) is that one can do without the principles proclaimed in The Rights of Man as long as one can retain one's dignity. She is prominently concerned with "the dignity of man (p. 298)

She objects to Burke's opinions that the rights of man were an "abstraction" and that one should rely more on an "entailed inheritance" (p. 2999) Where she and Burke part company is in her defiant refusal to agree that the rights we enjoy "spring from within the nation". This seems to mean that unless you are a citizen of some country, you literally have no right to have "Rights". She uses the example of the state of Israel to pound home that point. "The restoration of human rights has been achieved... so far only through the restoration of national rights" (p. 299).