Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN
Eyal Weizman
665/The Lesser Evil
A few months ago a friend sent me the following lines by the Italian comedian Beppe
Grillo: “For a long time Italians have been in a [political] coma. We are always in search
of the lesser evil. In fact, we should construct a monument for the ‘lesser evil’. A huge
monument in the middle of Rome”.
If anyone ever asked me to build such a monument, in Rome or elsewhere, I would probably
look for a high hill and place the digits 665 (like giant Hollywood letters) overlooking
the city centre – a notch less than evil, a counter displaying the fact that our society
has become a calculating machine.
Indeed the principle of the “lesser evil” has become so prominently identified with the
ethico-political foundations of liberal capitalism (and its political system that we like
to call democracy) and so firmly naturalized in common speech that it seem to have
become the ‘new good’. Commenting upon the comparative merits of democracy shortly
after the end of World War II, Winston Churchill may have inaugurated this trend when
he sardonically noted that “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government
except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Since then
and increasingly since Soviet (and Third World) horrors began to be exposed a decade
into the Cold War, the projection of totalitarian horrors has been mobilized, beyond a
frank concern for individual rights, to stop all search for a different form of politics. It
was ultimately the mediated spectre of these atrocities that compelled the public to constantly
weigh liberal disorder against the worse evils of totalitarian tyranny in favour of
the former. In comparison to the horrors of totalitarianism, this inegalitarian and unjust
regime was presented as a responsible “lesser evil”, “the best of all worlds possible”, and
as a necessary barrier against regress to bloody dictatorships. 1 This multifaceted political
shift within the left was largely promoted by post-1968 Western ‘radicals’ who switched
the focus of their political engagement to criticizing left-totalitarian regimes across the
Second and Third worlds, while arguing for the autonomy of civil society at home. The
notions espoused by these largely French nouveaux philosophes – “Let’s hold on to what
we have, because there is worse elsewhere” – demonstrated that for liberals “evil” was
always somewhere else, lurking behind any attempt at political transformation. 2
Hannah Arendt, the thinker who has done most to analyze and compare the political
systems of totalitarianism, and whose work The Origins of Totalitarianism was most often
mobilized in relation to this ‘anti-totalitarian’ shift in the left, saw the principle of the
“lesser evil” strongly at work, not only in the ‘making-do’ of liberal capitalism but in the
way the totalitarian system tended to camouflage its radical actions from those yet to
be initiated – the majority of bourgeois subjects needed to run things until a ‘new man’
was created. Writing about the collaboration and cooperation of ordinary Germans with
the Nazi regime, mainly by those employed in the Civil Service (but also by the Jewish