Thoughts on Arendt so far

So I only read Hannah Arendt's Imperialism section and have just started into Totalitarianism, skipped the first part. So these are what my questions are drawing on...

1) Ok so this totally might seem random but there is something interesting when Arendt says

"When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and 'thought in continents,' these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs." (138)

What arrests me here is the arrangement of imperialism and the phrase "thinking in continents." It's said that Cecil Rhodes "thought in continents," in keeping with his "expansion is everything" (124), so I want to ask why continents? Even for Robert Young (who we read in Chris Connery's class a few weeks ago) wants to call postcolonial thought "tricontinental thought" because it was born out of the Tricontinental Conference in 1966. The irony of this is that it was held in Havana, in Cuba, an island, and we might suppose that islands feel so closely to one continent or another that they are subsumed with it. And we also might suppose that continents are the ones with superior power of any kind in comparison to islands. However, islands are a bit trickier than that and hard to claim or incorporate into any one territory.
Perhaps the mistake with imperialism and expansion was that they were thinking in continents and thus not sustainably, but with the "insanity" of unlimited expansion.  I still don't think we've gotten outta this mindset...

2) Was bothered by some statements made by Arendt and wasn't sure how to take them?

"Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans" (186)

"The word 'race' has a precise meaning only when and where peoples are confronted with such tribes of which they have no historical record and which do not know any history of their own. [. . .] races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was particularly hostile. What made them different from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality--compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder." (192)

These are two examples of things that bothered me... what are Arendt's politics? From these two statements which at least appear to take things seriously and aren't trying to be ironic or anything, she casts judgement and apparently erases the indigenous from America and Australia, and then seems to call for civilized human vs. barbarian discourse. Some of her other statements seem helpful and profound, so a bit difficult to reconcile them....

3) Some of her interesting and useful stuff is here. For example, for racism Arendt says: "no matter whether racism appears as the natural result of a catastrophe or as the conscious instrument for bringing it about, it is always closely tied to contempt for labor, hatred of territorial limitation, general rootlessness, and an activistic faith in one's own divine chosenness" (197). I think this is really useful in thinking about the origins of racism and what the idea of another race threatens.
Then there's what Arendt says about human rights:

"From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an 'abstract' human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of social order. If a tribal or other 'backward' community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was opposed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one's own people, seemed to be able to ensure them." (291)

"The calamity of the rightless is . . . that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever." (295) 

Again, there is this savage/barbarian and civilized dichotomy, but Arendt has a point about these human rights that are somehow unenforceable, which she says on page 293. Moreover, her discussion in the chapter talks about how certain ideas obscure the fact that we ignore groups of people and do not take responsibility for humanity as a whole, particularly by breaking ourselves up into smaller, divided groups. This a) seems related to China Mieville and his discussion on the failures of international law and self-determination and b) We just read Octavia Butler in my TAship and perhaps one solution to human rights or the universal human is NOT about each of us finding a complete and total sense of agency but seeing ourselves in mutual symbiosis with each other, mutually dependent, which we are anyway and what i'm sure green peace and the like have been saying all along. But it's more useful to think about it in the way that maybe we should switch our formulations and think not necessarily that the first step is self-determination or complete agency, but agency with compromises and mutual symbiosis.

Working through ideas on Arendt and undocumented people in the U.S….

I hope this isn't too tangential for a response, but Arendt’s chapter on “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” has me thinking a lot about what human rights groups are saying and doing about undocumented workers and undocumented people in the U.S.  Her critique is spot on in its discussion of the ineffectual nature of human rights groups, and it seems productive to think through current issues in tandem with her insights.

First, I was thinking about the U.N. and the role of human rights in the immigration issue in the U.S.  For example, the U.N. admonished the U.S. in 2010 because of Arizona’s immigration laws – but this posting on Judicial Watch points out that such an admonition borders on comedy.  What is comedic, of course, is the fact that U.S. does not—and does not have to—listen to the U.N. because there are no real consequences for not adhering those warnings.  So, this section has me thinking about undocumented people outside of a human rights framework, which I guess is the framework I’ve always looked at it through.  The stages that Arendt outlines are: first losing your home, then your citizenship, and finally, your rights because human rights are really “citizen rights” rather than human rights and explains that “the real situation of those whom the twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that those are rights of citizens who loss does not entail absolute rightlessness” (375). 

We know that these conditions led to the Nazi’s expulsion and elimination of the Jews.  And the German state had the power to strip Jews of citizenship or give them second-class citizenship, which is different from the condition of illegal immigrants in the U.S. who never had U.S. citizenship to be stripped.  (and this gets complicated for me to think through since some have citizenship in the country they immigrated from...this is something I’m unfamiliar with and couldn’t readily find information about: are there undocumented people in the U.S. who do not have citizenship in another country?).  But perhaps the U.S. can be seen as stripping people of citizenship in its treatment of undocumented workers, who it is clear that the country relies on for labor.

The U.S. in this regard is a state apparatus that not only tolerates, but encourages the exploitation of undocumented peoples.  Obviously, the sentiment is nothing new, but I had not thought of it in these exact terms before because it seems to me that Arendt’s argument would place the state in a position of blame in this scenario.  The narrative of immigration in the news and from what I know about the courts is about the state being a strange kind of victim of people who enter the country that it is now meant to provide basic rights to…and the state doesn’t want to do it.  Until this discourse is changed, there is no logical (juridical?) argument that one can make about how the state is oppressing these people, is there?

In keeping with this train of thought, Arendt explains that “their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them,” and further down the page: “no country would claim these people” (375).  But if we agree that the U.S. does in fact want to oppress them, then what is the role of their home country to "claim them"? I hadn’t previously thought about how US/China and US/Mexico relationships handle this issue, for example.  Does each country see it as a specific state issue?  If thinking about how the worst atrocities are created under condition in which people are not “claimed’ by a country, how can the U.S.’s role be understood?

I fear that I’m way oversimplifying this discussion, but I hope it will be received in the spirit of me trying to enter into and learn more about a major issue with many arguments of which I’m fairly ignorant.