We expect that his­to­ries of famous fig­ures will prune their lives, sand down rough edges, rewrite and revise awk­ward and incon­ve­nient facts. What we may not expect – at least in the U.S. – is that decades of a famous person’s life will be redact­ed from the record. This is essen­tial­ly what hap­pened, how­ev­er, to the biog­ra­phy of Helen Keller even before her death in 1968. Per­haps the main offend­er remains play­wright William Gibson’s 1957 The Mir­a­cle Work­er, adapt­ed from the 1903 auto­bi­og­ra­phy she wrote at 23. Osten­si­bly about Keller, the sto­ry cen­ters instead, begin­ning with its title, on her teacher, Anne Sul­li­van.

The play (and 1962 film with Anne Ban­croft and Pat­ty Duke repris­ing their stage parts), por­trays Keller as a child, a role she was per­pet­u­al­ly assigned by her crit­ics through­out her adult life. She authored and pub­lished 14 books and dozens of essays dur­ing her 87 years, deliv­ered hun­dreds of speech­es, and main­tained a friend­ship and cor­re­spon­dence with many impor­tant fig­ures of the day. But in addi­tion to the usu­al sex­ism, she had to con­tend with those who thought her dis­abil­i­ty ren­dered her unfit to express opin­ions on mat­ters such as pol­i­tics. They asked that she “con­fine my activ­i­ties to social ser­vice and the blind,” she wrote in a sar­don­ic reply.

Keller’s polit­i­cal vision was writ­ten off as “a Utopi­an dream, and one who seri­ous­ly con­tem­plates its real­iza­tion indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.” What did she see in her mind that made crit­ics rush to belit­tle her? An end to war and Jim Crow; wom­en’s suf­frage, labor rights; an end to pover­ty and the pre­ventable child­hood ill­ness­es it engen­dered.… In a word, Helen Keller was a social­ist — and a pub­licly com­mit­ted one. “That we know so lit­tle of her avowed social­ism is aston­ish­ing, because she was an extro­vert­ed fire­brand who deliv­ered hun­dreds of rad­i­cal speech­es dur­ing” — writes Eileen Jones at Jacobin, quot­ing the 2020 doc­u­men­tary Her Social­ist Smile — “ ‘a fifty-year run on the lec­ture cir­cuit.’ ”

Keller pub­lished fre­quent arti­cles on the new­ly formed Sovi­et Union, Eugene Debs and the IWW (includ­ing “Why I Became an IWW” in 1916), and “Why Men Need Woman Suf­frage” (in 1913). “Turn­ing the yel­low­ing pages of rad­i­cal news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines from 1910 to the ear­ly 1920’s,” writes his­to­ri­an Philip Fon­er in an intro­duc­tion to her col­lect­ed social­ist writ­ings, “one fre­quent­ly finds the name Helen Keller beneath speech­es, arti­cles, and let­ters deal­ing with major social ques­tions of the era. The vision which runs through most of these writ­ings is the vision of social­ism.”

Mark Twain may have been the first to call Anne Sul­li­van a “mir­a­cle work­er” and Keller “a mir­a­cle,” but he treat­ed Keller “not as a freak,” she wrote, but as an equal and shared many of her views. He helped fund her edu­ca­tion at Rad­cliffe Col­lege (then a part of Har­vard ) and encour­aged her to speak and pub­lish. Keller joined the social­ist par­ty at age 29, in 1909, and in 1912, she pub­lished an arti­cle in The New York Call titled “How I Became a Social­ist.” The answer, she writes: “by read­ing.” As would be the case through­out her life, Keller felt the need to take a defen­sive pos­ture: crit­ics had accused John and Anne Macy (for­mer­ly Sul­li­van) of cor­rupt­ing her, to which she replied that she nei­ther shared Mr. Macy’s pro­pa­gan­dis­tic vari­ety of Marx­ism nor did Mrs. Macy share either of their views.

Keller’s polit­i­cal writ­ing is now wide­ly avail­able thanks to the inter­net, and can no longer be sup­pressed by edu­ca­tors who want to use her child­hood and dis­abil­i­ty but ignore most of her adult life. Even stu­dents watch­ing the PBS Amer­i­can Mas­ters doc­u­men­tary Becom­ing Helen Keller (see clip at the top) will learn that, gasp, yes, she was a social­ist. Dig deep­er, and they’ll find her views were unique and sig­nif­i­cant to the U.S. left: Kei­th Rosen­thal writes at Inter­na­tion­al Social­ist Review:

She was a seri­ous polit­i­cal thinker who made impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions in the fields of social­ist the­o­ry and prac­tice.… [S]he was a pio­neer in point­ing the way toward a Marx­ist under­stand­ing of dis­abil­i­ty oppres­sion and liberation—this real­i­ty has been over­looked and cen­sored. The mytho­log­i­cal Helen Keller that we are famil­iar with has apt­ly been described as a sort of “plas­ter saint;” a hol­low, emp­ty ves­sel who is lit­tle more than an apo­lit­i­cal sym­bol for per­se­ver­ance and per­son­al tri­umph.

Get to know the real Helen Keller — or a seri­ous­ly over­looked (at least) side of her life — in her polit­i­cal writ­ings here, here, and here and watch a video intro­duc­tion to her pol­i­tics by His­tor­i­cal­ly Fan­tas­tic fur­ther up.

via Jacobin

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A New Mas­sive Helen Keller Archive Gets Launched: Take a Dig­i­tal Look at Her Pho­tos, Let­ters, Speech­es, Polit­i­cal Writ­ings & More

Watch Helen Keller & Teacher Annie Sul­li­van Demon­strate How Helen Learned to Speak (1930)

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Spe­cial Friend­ship: He Treat­ed Me Not as a Freak, But as a Per­son Deal­ing with Great Dif­fi­cul­ties

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

As some­one who had mas­tered radio, film, and stage at such a young age, it shouldn’t be a sur­prise that Orson Welles once flirt­ed with the idea of run­ning for office. It nev­er hap­pened, but Welles got pret­ty close in 1944 by ghost-writ­ing speech­es for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s re-elec­tion cam­paign. This in-depth arti­cle at Smith­son­ian by Erick Trick­ey goes into greater detail about this mix of enter­tain­ment and pol­i­tics, and shows how both have always influ­enced each oth­er.

In the final four months of 1944, Amer­i­ca was still at war with Japan and Ger­many, and Roo­sevelt was seek­ing an unprece­dent­ed fourth term to bring the war to a close. Roosevelt’s Repub­li­can chal­lenger Thomas Dewey ques­tioned the ail­ing president’s sta­mi­na and well­ness for the job, along with accu­sa­tions of cor­rup­tion and incom­pe­tence.

Welles was still Hollywood’s gold­en boy, with a career that had tak­en off dur­ing Roosevelt’s sec­ond term with his infa­mous War of the Worlds radio play, pick­ing up on America’s pre-war para­noia. It had con­tin­ued through 1941’s Cit­i­zen Kane and its thin­ly veiled attack on William Ran­dolph Hearst and oth­er oli­garchs. Welles’ voice car­ried author­i­ty and grav­i­tas. He was also mar­ried to Rita Hay­worth at the time, and enjoy­ing the upside of Hol­ly­wood suc­cess.

Roo­sevelt engaged the left-wing Welles in the last month of the cam­paign and soon the actor was trav­el­ing the coun­try and deliv­er­ing speech­es at ral­lies for FDR. In one stop he called Repub­li­cans “the par­ti­sans of priv­i­lege, the cham­pi­ons of monop­oly, the old oppo­nents of lib­er­ty, the deter­mined adver­saries of the small busi­ness and the small farm.”

Welles also sup­plied ideas and jokes for FDR’s speech­es. When Dewey and oth­er Repub­li­cans attacked FDR’s dog Fala, Welles’ penned this: “Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my fam­i­ly doesn’t resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scot­tie, as soon as he learned that the Repub­li­can fic­tion writ­ers, in Con­gress and out, had con­coct­ed a sto­ry that I had left him behind on the Aleut­ian Islands and had sent a destroy­er back to find him — at a cost to the tax­pay­ers of 2 or 3 or 8 or $20 mil­lion — his Scotch soul was furi­ous. He has not been the same dog since.”

The Amer­i­can pub­lic seemed to agree that going after a pet was a bit too much. The nation­al­ly broad­cast speech turned FDR’s for­tunes around. And at FDR’s final ral­ly at Fen­way Park in Boston, the pres­i­dent intro­duced both Welles (“The Dra­mat­ic Voice”) and Frank Sina­tra (“The Voice”). Welles spoke out against GOP elit­ism: “By free enter­prise they want exclu­sive right to free­dom. They are stu­pid enough to think that a few can enjoy pros­per­i­ty at the expense of the rest.”

Days lat­er, FDR won 53 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote and took the elec­toral col­lege, 432–99. In one sense though, Dewey’s attacks on FDR’s health were found­ed: Roo­sevelt died five months lat­er on April 12, 1945.

FDR had writ­ten to Welles to thank him for the ral­ly, but also wrote about that April’s meet­ing of the Unit­ed Nations. The man had the weight of the free world upon his shoul­ders, and Welles felt it. The artist wrote a eulo­gy for FDR for the New York Post:

Des­per­ate­ly we need his courage and his skill and wis­dom and his great heart. He moved ahead of us show­ing a way into the future. If we lose that way, or fall beside it, we have lost him indeed. Our tears would mock him who nev­er wept except when he could do no more than weep. If we despair. because he’s gone — he who stood against despair — he had as well nev­er have lived, he who lived so great­ly.

You can read it online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Orson Welles’ Icon­ic War of the Worlds Broad­cast (1938)

Rare Video Shows FDR Walk­ing: Filmed at the 1937 All-Star Game

When Amer­i­can Financiers and Busi­ness Lead­ers Plot­ted to Over­throw Franklin D. Roo­sevelt and Install a Fas­cist Gov­ern­ment in the U.S. (1933)

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (RIP)

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Sur­re­al­ist First Film (1934)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

A man of var­i­ous accom­plish­ments, Theodor Adorno is per­haps most wide­ly known as the very image of the mid­cen­tu­ry Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­al in exile. After his Jew­ish back­ground got him forced out of Nazi Ger­many, he spent fif­teen years in Eng­land and the Unit­ed States. Despite his geo­graph­i­cal dis­tance from the trou­bles of the Con­ti­nent — and even after the end of the Sec­ond World War — he under­stand­ably remained very much con­cerned with the nature of not just Hitler him­self but all those who sup­port­ed him. This led to such stud­ies as his 1947 essay “Wag­n­er, Niet­zsche and Hitler” as well as (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Berke­ley researchers Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levin­son, and Nevitt San­ford) the 1950 book The Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty.

The Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty’s best-known tool to diag­nose the tit­u­lar per­son­al and social con­di­tion is a quan­ti­ta­tive sys­tem called the “Cal­i­for­nia F‑scale” — the F stands for fas­cism — which pro­duces a score based on a sub­jec­t’s response to a set of propo­si­tions. “To cre­ate a per­son­al­i­ty test that actu­al­ly revealed latent author­i­tar­i­an­ism, the researchers had to give up on the idea that there’s a strong link between anti-Semi­tism and author­i­tar­i­an­ism,” writes Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Annalee Newitz. “Though their expe­ri­ences with the Holo­caust sug­gest­ed a causal con­nec­tion between hatred of Jews and the rise of fas­cism, it turned out that peo­ple with author­i­tar­i­an ten­den­cies were more accu­rate­ly described as eth­no­cen­tric.”

These would-be author­i­tar­i­ans also, as Adorno and his col­lab­o­ra­tors’ research found, “tend­ed to dis­trust sci­ence and strong­ly dis­liked the idea of using imag­i­na­tion to solve prob­lems. They pre­ferred to stick to tried-and-true tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of orga­niz­ing soci­ety.” Oth­er ten­den­cies includ­ed “super­sti­tion, aggres­sion, cyn­i­cism, con­ser­vatism, and an inor­di­nate inter­est in the pri­vate sex lives of oth­ers.” All these find­ings informed an F‑scale test which con­sist­ed of the state­ments below. For each state­ment, par­tic­i­pants had to select one of the fol­low­ing options : “Dis­agree Strong­ly,” “Dis­agree Most­ly,” “Dis­agree Some­what,” “Agree Some­what,” “Agree,” or “MostlyA­gree.”

1. Obe­di­ence and respect for author­i­ty are the most impor­tant virtues chil­dren should learn.
2. A per­son who has bad man­ners, habits, and breed­ing can hard­ly expect to get along with decent peo­ple.
3. If peo­ple would talk less and work more, every­body would be bet­ter off.
4. The busi­ness man and the man­u­fac­tur­er are much more impor­tant to soci­ety than the artist and the pro­fes­sor.
5. Sci­ence has its place, but there are many impor­tant things that can nev­er be under­stood by the human mind.
6. Every per­son should have com­plete faith in some super­nat­ur­al pow­er whose deci­sions he obeys with­out ques­tion.
7. Young peo­ple some­times get rebel­lious ideas, but as they grow up they ought to get over them and set­tle down.
8. What this coun­try needs most, more than laws and polit­i­cal pro­grams, is a few coura­geous, tire­less, devot­ed lead­ers in whom the peo­ple can put their faith.
9. No sane, nor­mal, decent per­son could ever think of hurt­ing a close friend or rel­a­tive.
10. Nobody ever learned any­thing real­ly impor­tant except through suf­fer­ing.
11. What the youth needs most is strict dis­ci­pline, rugged deter­mi­na­tion, and the will to work and fight for fam­i­ly and coun­try.
12. An insult to our hon­or should always be pun­ished.
13. Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on chil­dren, deserve more than mere impris­on­ment; such crim­i­nals ought to be pub­licly whipped, or worse.
14. There is hard­ly any­thing low­er than a per­son who does not feel a great love, grat­i­tude, and respect for his par­ents.
15. Most of our social prob­lems would be solved if we could some­how get rid of the immoral, crooked, and fee­ble­mind­ed peo­ple.
16. Homo­sex­u­als are hard­ly bet­ter than crim­i­nals and ought to be severe­ly pun­ished.
17. When a per­son has a prob­lem or wor­ry, it is best for him not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheer­ful things.
18. Nowa­days more and more peo­ple are pry­ing into mat­ters that should remain per­son­al and pri­vate.
19. Some peo­ple are born with an urge to jump from high places.
20. Peo­ple can be divid­ed into two dis­tinct class­es: the weak and the strong.
21. Some day it will prob­a­bly be shown that astrol­o­gy can explain a lot of things.
22. Wars and social trou­bles may some­day be end­ed by an earth­quake or flood that will destroy the whole world.
23. No weak­ness or dif­fi­cul­ty can hold us back if we have enough will pow­er.
24. It is best to use some pre­war author­i­ties in Ger­many to keep order and pre­vent chaos.
25. Most peo­ple don’t real­ize how much our lives are con­trolled by plots hatched in secret places.
26. Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and con­flict.
27. Famil­iar­i­ty breeds con­tempt.
28. Nowa­days when so many dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple move around and mix togeth­er so much, a per­son has to pro­tect him­self espe­cial­ly care­ful­ly against catch­ing an infec­tion or dis­ease from them.
29. The wild sex life of the old Greeks and Romans was tame com­pared to some of the goings-on in this coun­try, even in places where peo­ple might least expect it.
30. The true Amer­i­can way of life is dis­ap­pear­ing so fast that force may be nec­es­sary to pre­serve it.

You can take the test your­self here. But don’t take it too seri­ous­ly: the F‑scale “has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cized by many psy­chol­o­gists because it is a bet­ter indi­ca­tor of con­ser­vatism, an old-fash­ioned out­look, and a ten­den­cy to say ‘yes’ to any­thing rather than as a mea­sure of author­i­tar­i­an­ism,” write Fer­di­nand A. Gul and John J. Ray in their 1989 paper “Pit­falls in Using the F Scale to Mea­sure Author­i­tar­i­an­ism in Account­ing Research.” That aside, any rea­son­ably intel­li­gent sub­ject can eas­i­ly fig­ure out the motives of the test itself. Nev­er­the­less, as Giz­mod­o’s Esther Inglis-Arkell writes, it offers an occa­sion to con­sid­er whether “you’re super­sti­tious, con­formist, or any oth­er awful thing that will cause you to go out one morn­ing and annex some­thing” — no less a con­cern now, it seems, than it was in Adorno’s day.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Theodor Adorno & His Cri­tique of Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

Theodor Adorno’s Phi­los­o­phy of Punc­tu­a­tion

Toni Mor­ri­son Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Coun­tries to Fas­cism (1995)

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to pow­er in the ear­ly 1930s. Para­mil­i­tary gangs ter­ror­iz­ing the oppo­si­tion, the incom­pe­tence and oppor­tunism of Ger­man con­ser­v­a­tives, the Reich­stag Fire. And we learned about the crit­i­cal impor­tance of pro­pa­gan­da, the delib­er­ate mis­in­form­ing of the pub­lic in order to sway opin­ions en masse and achieve pop­u­lar sup­port (or at least the appear­ance of it). While Min­is­ter of Pro­pa­gan­da Joseph Goebbels purged Jew­ish and left­ist artists and writ­ers, he built a mas­sive media infra­struc­ture that played, writes PBS, “prob­a­bly the most impor­tant role in cre­at­ing an atmos­phere in Ger­many that made it pos­si­ble for the Nazis to com­mit ter­ri­ble atroc­i­ties against Jews, homo­sex­u­als, and oth­er minori­ties.”

How did the minor­i­ty par­ty of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the Ger­man peo­ple so thor­ough­ly that they would allow and par­tic­i­pate in mass mur­der? Post-war schol­ars of total­i­tar­i­an­ism like Theodor Adorno and Han­nah Arendt asked that ques­tion over and over, for sev­er­al decades after­ward. Their ear­li­est stud­ies on the sub­ject looked at two sides of the equa­tion. Adorno con­tributed to a mas­sive vol­ume of social psy­chol­o­gy called The Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty, which stud­ied indi­vid­u­als pre­dis­posed to the appeals of total­i­tar­i­an­ism. He invent­ed what he called the F‑Scale (“F” for “fas­cism”), one of sev­er­al mea­sures he used to the­o­rize the Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Type.

Arendt, on the oth­er hand, looked close­ly at the regimes of Hitler and Stal­in and their func­tionar­ies, at the ide­ol­o­gy of sci­en­tif­ic racism, and at the mech­a­nism of pro­pa­gan­da in fos­ter­ing “a curi­ous­ly vary­ing mix­ture of gulli­bil­i­ty and cyn­i­cism with which each mem­ber… is expect­ed to react to the chang­ing lying state­ments of the lead­ers.” So she wrote in her 1951 Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, going on to elab­o­rate that this “mix­ture of gulli­bil­i­ty and cyn­i­cism… is preva­lent in all ranks of total­i­tar­i­an move­ments”:

In an ever-chang­ing, incom­pre­hen­si­ble world the mass­es had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe every­thing and noth­ing, think that every­thing was pos­si­ble and noth­ing was true… The total­i­tar­i­an mass lead­ers based their pro­pa­gan­da on the cor­rect psy­cho­log­i­cal assump­tion that, under such con­di­tions, one could make peo­ple believe the most fan­tas­tic state­ments one day, and trust that if the next day they were giv­en irrefutable proof of their false­hood, they would take refuge in cyn­i­cism; instead of desert­ing the lead­ers who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the state­ment was a lie and would admire the lead­ers for their supe­ri­or tac­ti­cal clev­er­ness.

Why the con­stant, often bla­tant lying? For one thing, it func­tioned as a means of ful­ly dom­i­nat­ing sub­or­di­nates, who would have to cast aside all their integri­ty to repeat out­ra­geous false­hoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and com­plic­i­ty. “The great ana­lysts of truth and lan­guage in pol­i­tics”—writes McGill Uni­ver­si­ty polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Jacob T. Levy—includ­ing “George Orwell, Han­nah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us rec­og­nize this kind of lie for what it is.… Say­ing some­thing obvi­ous­ly untrue, and mak­ing your sub­or­di­nates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly star­tling dis­play of pow­er over them. It’s some­thing that was endem­ic to total­i­tar­i­an­ism.”

Arendt and oth­ers rec­og­nized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvi­ous lie makes it clear that you’re pow­er­less.” She also rec­og­nized the func­tion of an avalanche of lies to ren­der a pop­u­lace pow­er­less to resist, the phe­nom­e­non we now refer to as “gaslight­ing”:

The result of a con­sis­tent and total sub­sti­tu­tion of lies for fac­tu­al truth is not that the lie will now be accept­ed as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bear­ings in the real world—and the cat­e­go­ry of truth ver­sus false­hood is among the men­tal means to this end—is being destroyed.

The epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on what­ev­er the leader said, no mat­ter its rela­tion to truth. “The essen­tial con­vic­tion shared by all ranks,” Arendt con­clud­ed, “from fel­low trav­el­er to leader, is that pol­i­tics is a game of cheat­ing and that the ‘first com­mand­ment’ of the move­ment: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as nec­es­sary for the pur­pos­es of world pol­i­tics, i.e., world-wide cheat­ing, as the rules of mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline are for the pur­pos­es of war.”

“We too,” writes Jef­frey Isaacs at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “live in dark times”—an allu­sion to anoth­er of Arendt’s sober­ing analy­ses—“even if they are dif­fer­ent and per­haps less dark.” Arendt wrote Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism from research and obser­va­tions gath­ered dur­ing the 1940s, a very spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal peri­od. Nonethe­less the book, Isaacs remarks, “rais­es a set of fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about how tyran­ny can arise and the dan­ger­ous forms of inhu­man­i­ty to which it can lead.” Arendt’s analy­sis of pro­pa­gan­da and the func­tion of lies seems par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant at this moment. The kinds of bla­tant lies she wrote of might become so com­mon­place as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrel­e­vant sideshow. This, she sug­gests, would be a mis­take.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins of the Word “Gaslight­ing”: Scenes from the 1944 Film Gaslight

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness