How to feed a dictator

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/09/how-to-feed-a-dictator-film

156 45 1 month ago

“It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”

That’s not at all what Arendt was writing about. She was writing about those who do evil things are rarely the “evil” monsters we imagine but rather bureaucrats motivated by things like promotions. Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.

namuol• 1 month ago

Later:

By most measures, theirs was a great gig – logic that can excuse almost anything. “Saddam’s chef got a car every year,” Neel says. “That phrase, ‘it was a great gig,’ I think, actually runs the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’”

I’d say they understood the meaning.

ashalhashim4• 1 month ago

No, they did not. Arendt’s point about evil being banal is that the perpetrator’s behavior is motivated by the banal. A chef isn’t the perp. They’re adjacent to the monsters and they might be motivated by and fixated on the banality of doing great work.at most this is juxtaposition of evil and banality.

raincole• 1 month ago

Perhaps they understand the meaning, but this:

“It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”

Is still a misquote/misrepresentation. People can understand a subject but still say wrong things about it.

mc32• 1 month ago

Perhaps but using that quote to describe that relationship seemed very forced and ill-fitting. They tried to make it work but came up short because it wasn't an apt application of the quote.

danparsonson• 1 month ago

I don't see a misrepresentation there - the need to eat and the love of good food is common to most of humanity and points to the fact that even dictators are also just people. Banal humans rather than cartoon villians.

Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.

I think it's unfortunate to be so dismissive of an article over one quote from one person that you disagree with. You can still get something out of the piece if you open your mind a bit.

whartung2• 1 month ago

I really, really want to cite Joe Franks "The Dictator" here, notably the scene where he's eating the vegetables that have grown on himself (if I'm remembering correctly), but...I really doubt anyone will get the reference.

LastTrain• 1 month ago

I think your interpretation is a little rigid. And did you read the rest of the article?

ashalhashim4• 1 month ago

I ended up going back and reading the article. It’s not bad that it’s bad writing, it’s that the opening is sloppy and turned me off from reading the article instead of pulling me in the way a good lede should.

The subject is interesting, which is why I clicked the link in the first place. I might check out the documentary. But the misunderstanding/loose invocation of Arendt is a turnoff imo

jdw643• 1 month ago

Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil,' as I understand it, refers to human beings who are incapable of thinking. Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it. (In other words, the individual is not morally evil, but the system is designed to break things down so thoroughly that it renders those parts mindless, and that is the truly frightening part.)

In that sense, I can understand part of what the article is claiming. The phrase 'it was a great gig' seems to be the core of what it was trying to say. The high salary, the Mercedes, the abundant food supplies all point to the fact that the source of that funding came from the dictatorship.

An individual can be moral, but the system numbs them. That is why evil is not interesting; its desires are too simple. Wanting to earn more money, wanting to beat someone else, becoming consumed by such things. But in that regard, good is interesting. Because it means overcoming one's own contradictions, striving for the greater good, or even sacrificing one's life for the sake of everyone.

harrall• 1 month ago

But I think that is overly presumptuous though.

Some people have a different moral framework. Some people think Saddam’s brutal dictatorship was for the better because it finally brought stability. When forced to choose between stability and freedom, they choose stability.

There are also just simply amoral people too who just don’t care.

So I wouldn’t automatically assume someone working in an “evil” regime as “trapped as a cog” — they might frankly be OK with it. This is why sometimes just cutting off the head doesn’t enact change.

thelastgallon• 1 month ago

Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it. (In other words, the individual is not morally evil, but the system is designed to break things down so thoroughly that it renders those parts mindless, and that is the truly frightening part.)

Spot on!

Your comment explains why massive bureaucracies can get nearly anything done, because people are just following orders. For example Jallianwala Bagh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh), the people shooting were just following orders. Nearly all atrocities can be explain by the design of bureaucracies to eliminate moral friction.

Reminds me of Vogons[1] and Nobody cares[2]

[1] Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders—signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon

[2] https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707238

hn_throwaway_99• 1 month ago

Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil,' as I understand it, refers to human beings who are incapable of thinking. Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it.

While I fully accept that "the banality of evil" has become such a well-known aphorism that it's meaning may have shifted, this is not how Hannah Arendt introduced the saying. She was specifically talking about Adolf Eichmann and what motivated him. Eichmann wasn't some low-level cog "numbed by the system" - he was the logistical architect of the Holocaust, and he knew his actions would lead to the deaths of millions of people.

What Arendt meant by "the banality of evil" was that Eichmann wasn't motivated by a rabid hatred of Jews. He just wanted to get his promotion, move ahead, make money, etc. But, again, he knew his actions would murder millions, he just didn't care. He wasn't "broken down by the system", he was the system.

"The banality of evil" really is talking about motivation in Arendt's use of it. Often times we think of "evil" as needing to be motivated by fanatical hatred, but a lot of the time it's just motivated by a desire for a nicer car.

vkou• 1 month ago

"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

But, uh, I don't think I'll necessarily assign that level of moral gravity to chef.

zerobees• 1 month ago

This is an interesting article backed by months of hard work. It offers perspectives we probably won't find anywhere else. The quote is pretty tangential.

I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.

mathisfun123• 1 month ago

Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.

Clearly there are - the comment is like first or second most upvoted here.

dinfinity• 1 month ago

I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why?

It's to heuristically filter content on quality to optimize information consumption, i.e. concluding early: "This is probably not going to be worth my time, because this author seems to make fairly trivial easily avoidable mistakes (or something similar)". I appreciate the signal from other people here, even if it is not always accurate.

There is a lot of content to filter through nowadays.

altmanaltman• 1 month ago

Tangential point but just to be clear, Ardent's book is a journalistic work not something that is proven or widely accepted. There are many who disagree with this idea that Einchman was just a simple person who took orders since there are several documented events where it's clear that he was a piece of shit nazi and fully embraced the role.

In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him besides the banal, seemingly apolitical man, who was just acting like any other ‘ordinary’ career-oriented bureaucrat. Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat. Far from being ‘thoughtless’, Eichmann had plenty of thoughts – thoughts of genocide, carried out on behalf of his beloved Nazi Party. On the tapes, Eichmann admitted to a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism:

I, ‘[t]he cautious bureaucrat,’ that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright… Arendt completely missed this radically evil side of Eichmann when she wrote 10 years after the trial that there was ‘no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives’. This only underscores the banality – and falsity – of the banality-of-evil thesis. And though Arendt never said that Eichmann was just an innocent ‘cog’ in the Nazi bureaucracy, nor defended Eichmann as ‘just following orders’ – both common misunderstandings of her findings on Eichmann – her critics, including Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...

dfxm12• 1 month ago

Why? It seems like you take umbrage with a particular quote, but you understand that the author of the article didn't make this statement, right?

neya2• 1 month ago

Also I have to wonder why this made to the front page of a tech forum. One of the things I used to love about HN was that it was free of politics. These days it seems like there's just political propaganda everywhere in the guise of being relevant to tech. Hope HN doesn't become another political echo chamber like Reddit.

watwut• 1 month ago

HN was never free of politics. Politics was present here literally whole time I know the site - which can be like 14 years.

dash2• 1 month ago

That’s exactly his point about the motivations of the chefs. It’s not identical, but close enough.

sublinear• 1 month ago

Not the original title

dang• 1 month ago

In the case of book reviews (and film reviews, I guess) we often change the title to that of the book/film being reviewed.

We started doing this years ago after realizing that book review titles often do pirouettes on top of the book being reviewed; it's kind of a minor art form (a very minor art form!) but it doesn't serve the reader who just wants to know what-is-this.

I wouldn't call the OP title a pirouette, but the pattern of following HN's original-title rule through an extra hop (from the review to the thing being reviewed) has held up so well that we do it pretty consistently now.

It's amazing how many sub-cases like this there are. Who would have thought that reviews need to be handled differently from non-reviews, but it actually does work better.

esafak• 1 month ago

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President's_Cake , which is nominally about cooking.

okaleniuk• 1 month ago

This is one of the most unexpected ecranisations ever. The book is great on its own, but I would never assumed it could become a film. The topic itself is a bit heavy, and I somehow assumed that most of the people pan Szablovski interviewed at one point or another are already dead. This is going to be a fascinating watch.

mbmbn• 1 month ago

To spare the ones that still didn’t lose all their good sense to have to go through the all article. It ends with trying to put Trump in the same bucket as Pol Pot and Sadam Hussein (this is all so tiresome).

So, it seems clear this film does have a side to pick and will be of dubious accuracy.

“Neel did give some thought to including Donald Trump in his film – even though, “to be clear, he is not a dictator,” he says. “He wants to be one, but he’s not. I did find a chef who cooked for him before he got elected.”

brettermeier• 1 month ago

But maybe he belongs in this bucket, tiresome or not.

How to feed a dictator

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