Philosophy and the bomb

Blätter observes the eightieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an article by Hans Joas entitled ‘Peace or Freedom?’. In it the social philosopher discusses the ethical and political implications of the age of nuclear weapons through the prism of Karl Jaspers and Günther Anders.

Both philosophers wrestled with the question of how to square the existence of the bomb with the age of universal human dignity as enshrined in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What, they asked, does such a guarantee mean in the shadow of global annihilation?

In his 1949 book The Origin and Goal of History, Jaspers wrote that humanity was at an inflection point owing to the unique threat posed by atomic weapons: ‘Either the entire human race will physically perish, or humanity will undergo a moral and political transformation’. This transformation could have one of two outcomes: the ‘nightmare’ of ‘global empire’, which ‘shapes the uniform masses through total planning and terror’, or a rules-based ‘global order’, a sort of global federalism emerging out of ‘joint decision-making’.

The Manichaeanism of the Cold War was a natural fit for a thinker of such stark political dualities, Joas observes. Jaspers’s fundamental contention that ‘throughout history, all those who “made constructive history” valued freedom more than life’ meant that his book, ironically, ‘must be read as a clear plea for the nuclear armament of the West’.

Günther Anders, in his book The Obsolescence of Man (1956), agreed with Jaspers that the bomb had inaugurated a ‘completely new situation’, insofar as every morally serious individual had now to reckon with the existential dread the bomb conjured. Anders rejected, however, what he called Jaspers’s ‘two-hells axiom’, i.e. that ‘one must choose between the extinguishing of humanity and the extinguishing of freedom’.

The corollary imperative of Jasper’s preference, Anders recognized, was to support western military alliances such as NATO as a bulwark against the totalitarian threat. Anders accused Jaspers of maintaining a bogus ‘aristocratic reserve’ toward all forms of collective protest and held out hope in the form of ‘actions of solidarity that, if undertaken by millions, would change the world’.

Iran and Israel

In her article ‘Ceasefire and repression: How the West abandoned the Iranian opposition’, Katajun Amirpur criticizes Israel and its allies the US and Germany for leaving domestic opponents of the Iranian regime in the lurch during the recent Iran–Israel war.

Prominent voices associated with the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement were killed in the Israeli bombardment, such as the popular young poet Parnia Abbassi. Not only that: the war unleashed a wave of internal repression targeting ethnic and religious minorities – Kurds, Balochis, Baha’is, and of course Jews – suspected of spying for Israel. In all, around nine hundred people were rounded up in the aftermath of the ceasefire.

The war is proof, writes Amirpur, of a failure of imagination on the part of Israel and its allies. The Israeli attack may not have had the anticipated rally-around-the-flag effect, but ‘as much as people might hate their own government, they hate arrogant outside interference even more’.

The Iranian novelist Amir Hassan Cheheltan even claimed that, by attacking Iran, ‘Israel has lost its only friend in the region’. Many oppositional Iranians had felt a certain solidarity with Israel in the wake of 7 October, given that Hamas is a prime client of the hated regime of the ayatollahs.

Amirpur doesn’t want to go that far and finds a shred of solace in the two nations’ shared history. For all the tragic stupidity of the war, the ties that bind Iran and Israel are both too ancient (the 6^th century BCE Persian king Cyrus the Great supposedly repatriated the Jews after the Babylonian Captivity) and too contemporary (there are now around 250,000 Israelis of Iranian descent) to be dissolved.

‘Wir schaffen das’

On the tenth anniversary of Germany’s ‘migration summer’, during which then-chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country’s borders to asylum seekers, Bernd Kasparek and Vassilis Tsianos take stock of the state of the EU asylum policy after a decade of populist, right-wing backlash.

The new German chancellor Friedrich Merz may have ridden to electoral victory on the back of promises to crack down on immigration, but according to the letter of EU law, his options are limited: Germany is beholden to the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and must honour ‘the obligations arising from fundamental and human rights’, one of which is the right to an asylum hearing.

Such constraints have led Merz and other conservative European heads of state, such as Italy’s Georgia Meloni and the Netherlands’ Dick Schoof, to search for ‘innovative ideas’. Kasparek and Tsianos focus on three such strategies.

The first is either to disregard international law or to distort it into irrelevance. Earlier this year, for example, nine EU member states ‘called for a “new and open dialogue” on the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights’, claiming that ‘what was once right may not be the answer for tomorrow’. Less subtly, Merz’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has instructed border police simply to turn away asylum seekers, a clear contravention of CEAS’s Dublin Regulation.

The second strategy is the so-called third-state solution, in which asylum seekers are offloaded onto non-EU states while awaiting the outcome of their application – ideally, then to be deported whence they came. Not only are such schemes legally dubious but ‘they have proven to be impractical, unsustainable and, above all, expensive’.

The third and, in the eyes of the authors, most dangerous strategy is ‘migration instrumentalization’: the attempt to frame refugees as having been foisted on the member state by a ‘third country or hostile non-state actor’. Perversely, refugees are classed as manipulated victims in order that they may be victimised a second time by being denied asylum.

But the chickens will come home to roost, warn Kasparek and Tsianos: ‘The violation of fundamental constitutional norms … would cause profound damage to the rule of law and democracy in Europe.’

Also to look out for: The text of a talk given by the Russian writer Sergei Lebedev at the Helsinki Debate on Europe conference in May, in which he weighs the extent of the complicity of Russian society in the war on Ukraine and the role of imperialism in Russian history. The full-length English original is published in VoxEurop.

Review by Nick Sywak