The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

Abstract

THE LEAST OF ALL POSSIBLE EVILS: HUMANITARIAN VIOLENCE FROM ARENDT TO GAZA by Eyal Weizman New York: Verso, 2011 (218 pages, index, illustrations) $26.95 (cloth)In that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the use of torture, and even some conflicted torture opponents, affirmed the consensus view that torture is unequivocally bad. But, they opined, if torture was necessary to elicit vital information to keep Americans safe, it would be a justiflable lesser evil in the service of national security. Nowadays, drone strikes have supplanted torture as the popular lesser evil.Eyal Weizman begins The Least of All Possible Evils with a history of lesser-evil thinking. "The principle of the lesser evil," he explains,is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. ... Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is taken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds. (6)Weizman's work is a profound and empirically rich engagement with developments in contemporary "humanitarianism," which, he argues, has evolved into various technocratic collusions among those who work to aid the vulnerable and those who mete out state violence in the name of security. He names this lesser-evil collusion "the humanitarian present."Weizman dates the start of the humanitarian present to the 1980s, specifically the "humanitarian crisis" in Ethiopia and the role Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) played there. The "crisis" was not the devastating famine in East Africa. It was rather the ways in which Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime co-opted MSF's relief work to seize and relocate starving people who came from rebel-controlled regions to the food distribution centers, ultimately leading to thousands of deaths.Weizman traces the contemporary history of humanitarianism to French left-radical politics in the late 1960s and the influence of Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. Anti-totalitarianism supplanted revolutionary leftism, and activism shifted from proletariats and capitalists to the "passive quasi-religious dialectics of victims and perpetrators" (37). This elevation of victims as the focus of humanitarian concern and action congealed as a politics of compassion and a practice oriented to the humanitarian culture of emergency. The humanitarian ethic, in the words of Bernard-Henri Levy, was the utilitarian objective to "make the world a little more livable for the greatest number of people" (38). The nexus of compassion and practice found its infrastructure in humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, such as MSF.The logic of principled compromises can be seen in MSF's promotion of "humanitarianism in its minimalist form, ... as the practice of 'lesser evils' ... [to sustain] life without seeking to govern or manage populations, [or to make] political claims on their behalf, [or to seek] to resolve root causes of conflicts" (54). Weizman compares this willingness to compromise for the goal of keeping people alive to that of the world's most preeminent humani- tarian organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, where access to prisoners is traded for the promise not to publicize what is learned.Such political agnosticism involved a three-part move: creating humani- tarian spaces separate from the political spheres of armies or regimes, adhering to a logic of humanitarian minimalism to sustain life, and believing that the people whose lives were saved would create their own politics, someday. …