230
LIONEL
A BEL
tarian state are, as Miss Arendt claimed long ago, quite
irrelevan~
her only critique of it had to be of its victims, and could only
be
couched by her in aesthetic terms. Miss Arendt of course cannot today
propose a recipe for living through the hell of Nazi Europe to these
European Jews who are already dead; but she does suggest that
the manner in which they died was not very beautiful.
As
for
Eichmann's moral ugliness, this is not something we now have to
be
concerned with; in fact, Eichmann is aesthetically palatable, while
his victims are aesthetically repulsive.
In
all this, I hear beneath the
hate-paean to totalitarianism Miss Arendt's praise of her own theory
about it, a theory which I believe is now invalidated.
