Hannah Arendt’s Prognostication of Political Animus in America: Social Platforms, Asymmetric Conflict, and an Offset Strategy

Abstract

In her book, On Violence, Hannah Arendt addresses the events she was witness to in the 1960s. Arendt presents theories on violence through a historical context and explores the links between power, war, politics and violence. She informs the reader that power and violence are not the same; where one is absolute, the other cannot exist. Our research aim was to demonstrate how prescient her views were regarding the prognostication of the political animus that has occurred in America, especially through the evolution of technology. Our method in the the evaluation of this discourse was a line by line examination of the text of On Violence and assessing this evaluation against how the increasing attacks utilizing social platforms and cyber capabilities by U.S. competitors (foreign or domestic) are resulting in political vulnerability of the U.S. and the generally defined Western world. The public health security of American democracy is at risk through an inability, as individuals, to properly evaluate information, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation from bad actors at home and abroad. Here we develop a perspective in which the political animus that started in the late 1960s becomes the foundation for our competitors' development of sophisticated methods of cyber subversion, and effective use of asymmetric conflict through manipulation of our own social media platforms in order to divide Americans and subvert effective government.

Introductory Chapter: Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare – Where Do We Go from Here?

“…For example, what would be required to stop a malignant governmental and/or regulatory entity that possesses powerful AI /ML tools, combined with omnipresent social media platforms, from abusing the tremendous power to misinform, manipulate, and eventually subdue entire populations? [17][18][19][20][21][22]. Such concerns have been highlighted by Elon Musk and associates in their open letter, "Pause Giant AI Experiments," which now has nearly 6000 signatories from all walks of life [23].…”

Introductory Chapter: International Health Security in the Era of COVID-19

“…As the pandemic continues beyond 2020 the world will likely see an imbalance between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, the 'pro-maskers' and the 'antimaskers,' the believers of science and the non-believers of science, the true warriors (health workers on the ground) and the media warriors (the speakers in media), the false news mongerers and the seekers of truth [11,26,27]. As we battled to save lives, the pandemic tested our resilience at an individual level and also tested our values as a global society.…”

The concepts and laws applicable to hybrid threats, with a special focus on Europe

“…Hybrid threats are poorly defined Hybrid threats pose a real risk to states because their objective is to destabilise the adversary through ever-increasing means and tactics, which are not easy to detect, let alone attribute to a perpetrator, whether it be a state or not (Lonardo, 2021(Lonardo, , p. 1075. This is why some authors argue that rather than seeking a consensus in defining hybrid threats, it might be better to analyse when state vulnerabilities tend to appear and determine how to combat them (Hickman et al, 2018, p. 6;Papadimos and Stawicki, 2021). Nevertheless, it is difficult to confront threats if we do not know what these phenomenon are or anything about their configurations.…”