The Stateless and the Law
Arendt notes that the best way to tell if someone is stateless is to ask if they would benefit from committing a crime. Ironically, the only way for those who are doomed to live outside the pale of the law to find protection is to act against the law and harm the citizens of a nation. Committing a crime will, at the very least, give them a home in prison. Meanwhile, those who obey the laws and attempt to live peacefully might be deported to the countries from which they were fleeing.
The Stateless and Humanity
The further irony of the stateless person is that when he is cast out of his community and loses his rights he becomes, for the first time, a human “in general.” The rights of man are based on this idea of the human in general, rather than a group of nations that support the rights of different national communities. This is ironic because man only attains the quality imagined by the Rights of Man when he loses all his rights and all his protections.
Inalienable Human Rights
Like most of the irony in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the "poignant irony" of the "well-meaning idealists" who believe in the inalienable rights of man comes from the actual ironies that mark reality (279). Though these idealists claim that the rights of man cannot be taken away, their efforts to help the stateless people amount to ignoring the problem of their loss of rights rather than amending the situation. For example, it became popular to refer to stateless people as "displaced persons," thus ignoring that they had lost the protection of a state and therefore their rights. These idealists are unable to help the stateless regain their human rights precisely because they believe so naïvely in the "inalienable" quality of those rights.
Edmund Burke
Arendt calls the history of totalitarianism and imperialism the "belated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man" (299). In this argument, Burke posited that rights could only be derived from the stable body of the nation, not from humanity as a whole, because the latter is too abstract to ground political structures. The irony is that his argument was only confirmed after the final and complete destruction of the nation-state. The truth of his words, according to Arendt, are only understood when they cannot possibly be put into action.
Colonel Picquard
In the Dreyfus Affair, Picquard became the head of the Information Division of the General Staff and became convinced of Dreyfus' innocence. Upon his discovery, he quickly hurried to other ruling members of the government to tell them his discovery. His honest trust in the members of the judiciary system and the French Republic are ironic to those of us who are aware that it is precisely these people who knowingly framed Dreyfus in the first place. In the Dreyfus Affair, life takes on the quality of dramatic irony usually left to literature. His honest belief in a deeply cynical system is what creates this irony.
