Reflection: Concept of the Political

I had a dream last night where I was explaining certain aspects of The Concept of the Political to a high school class, and struggling with the dynamics, some of which are slightly horrible, of what I was saying. A lot of the ideas that Schmitt proposes have real-world applications that, we have seen, can be extremely dangerous--if every war has a political justification, there is no stopping a certain tertiary Reich from politicizing anti-Semitism to the point of the systematic execution of an entire people. Anti-Semitism reached the point of politics at the instant Jews were blamed for the economic destruction of antebellum Germany (by which I mean pre-WWII), and targeted as a group by Adolf Hitler. The state sovereignty that Schmitt proposes enables people like Hitler to exist, because there is someone who makes the ultimate decisions on the friend-enemy distinction. If you can legitimately excuse (at least to a significant population) genocide--or, in the case of Ender's Game, xenocide--then there are virtually no limits on the kind of horrors a single sovereign person can inflict, and that is terrifying.

I apologize for having begun this reflection with something fundamentally a-scifi, but it was brooding at the forefront of my mind for almost, if not the entirety of the class. It also made me think about what classifies a human being. If we say that humanity cannot, by definition, really fight itself--and I believe Schmitt does make that contention--then humanity as a political entity can exist by defining other groups as being outside of the realm of humanity. I won't go back to the example of Nazi Germany here; instead I'll choose to focus on something like Dune, where, by identifying the Fremen as subhuman, the Emperor and the Harkonnen can excuse what is essentially an economic takeover. But, remember, most just wars are entirely political machinations. Everything can be justified politically--and this is something we will definitely see in a more extreme context in Speaker for the Dead.