In his Antigone, Jean Anouilh portays civil disobedience as essentially hopeless in a totalitarian world which can erase memory and thus render the act of resistance pointless. In a similar vein, Huxley's Brave New World presents a totalitarianism which absorbs and neuters, rather than crushes, its opposition. These and other works reflect a sense that in the modern world, the tyrant's power is so awesome that it can be hopeless to resist. To that, Hannah Arendt replies in Eichmann in Jerusalem,
It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis' feverish attempts, from June 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres--through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flamethrowers and bone-crushing machinery--were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents "disappear in silent anonymity" were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be "practically useless," at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today, not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can be reasonably asked, for this planet to remain a fit place for human habitation.
I would like to believe her. Not sure I do.
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