BOO KS
723
century seriously debated the proposal "to enterprise the hole exterpation
and destruction of all the Irishmen of the land" and regretfully sur–
rendered the project because the expense of the slaughter was too great.
Perhaps Hitler did better simply because technological progress had
supplied him with the mechanical means of lowering the cost.
What is new, I think Miss Arendt would agree, is the implication
of the masses, an implication so thorough that they become accomplices
in the terrorism that the fuehrer will, sooner or later, direct against them
all. Yet it
is
the history of the masses that
is
least clear in this volume.
Miss Arendt refers in general terms to the process of atomization,
by which large sectors of the population through unemployment or
displacement find themselves rootless and are overwhelmed with feel–
ings of superfluity. The process itself is enormously complicated and one
which I think we do not yet understand. Nevertheless it is clear that
those who suffer from the process do not always throw themselves into
the destructive totalitarian communion. Rootlessness and displacement
have been characteristic of all of Western society for perhaps a century,
concomitants of the disintegration of the old structure of economic,
family, and religious life. But at some times and in some places the
mass of people have not allowed themselves to be dragged into the ranks
of the masses; they have found alternative modes of relief from the
oppressive burdens of the sense of superfluity and have resisted the
fatal attractions of totalitarianism. It is one of the pressing intellectual
problems of our times to uncover the conditions under which such
resistance is and is not effective.
In a penetrating observation quoted by Miss Arendt, David Rous–
set speaks of the "brotherhood of abjection" to which totalitarianism
subjects victims and executioners alike. We do not know enough yet to
understand the profound changes in the human condition that brother–
hood involved. And we have not much time to learn.
Oscar Handlin
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
H
A Begioning on the Short Story"
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