Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 4.76% Highlight: It was only a choice as to the manner of dying.
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 14.29% Highlight: Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, provisioned by Western democracies, inflicted this psychic ordeal for months on millions of people – involuntary witnesses to an act of political evil, who allowed themselves to occasionally think that it was good to be alive, and then heard the screams of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in yet another school bombed by Israel.
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 28.57% Highlight: And those who watched helplessly from afar the killing and maiming of tens of thousands on a narrow coastal strip, and witnessed, too, the applause or indifference of the powerful, will live with an inner wound, and a trauma that will not pass away for years.
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 33.33% Highlight: the puerility of evil
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 47.62% Highlight: Why did the West, while defending and sheltering Ukrainians from a venomous assault, so pointedly exclude Palestinians from the community of human obligation and responsibility
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 52.38% Highlight: [quoting James Baldwin (1967)] The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 71.43% Highlight: A global civil society once seemed possible around the transvaluation of the Shoah as the ultimate atrocity and antisemitism as the nastiest form of bigotry. Other groups now advance rival claims, attesting to historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism, and demanding recognition and reparation
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 80.95% Highlight: I am conscious of writing in a strange chasm, between an insufficiently understood past and a menacing future, whose most sinister signs must be quickly identified
Chapter 7: Prologue Highlight Chapter progress: 95.24% Highlight: Judging different kinds of post-war moral responsibility in 1945, the philosopher Karl Jaspers spoke of ‘metaphysical guilt’ – the affliction of those who become impotently aware of inconceivable barbarism in their midst. ‘There exists,’ Jaspers said, ‘a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 2.2% Highlight: The Limits of Solidarity
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 15.38% Highlight: Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, and a leading figure in Poland’s Solidarity movement, denounced what he called the ‘Israeli philosophy, which consists of believing that you can kill 20 Arabs as long as one Jew remains alive
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 32.97% Highlight: Even the Japanese militarists who had embraced the fabrications of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were appalled when the German SS arrived in Japan-occupied Shanghai with a plan to exterminate the city’s Jewish refugees. The American soldiers who liberated the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai in September 1945 braced themselves for the abominations seen by their compatriots in Nazi-occupied Europe. They found what the historian David Kranzler later called the ‘Miracle of Shanghai’: though the ghetto’s inhabitants had suffered from poverty and malnutrition, just about all of them had survived.
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 40.66% Highlight: capitalism, a system prone to periodic malfunction that, while promising wealth and social mobility to the uprooted, generated extreme inequality and profound feelings of humiliation and resentment.
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 49.45% Highlight: The many examples of genocides ignored in history, or justified Churchill-style as essential steps in national and racial progress, encouraged Hitler to think that he would get away with his own final solution.
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 50.55% Highlight: one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 56.04% Highlight: Into That Darkness (1974)
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 60.44% Highlight: probably the largest continuously persecuted group in history
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 64.84% Highlight: Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine (1993)
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 73.63% Highlight: Israel today is becoming Yad Vashem with an air force,
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 84.62% Highlight: He now hoped to educate the so-called Oriental Jews, some of whom were sprayed with insecticide when they arrived in the Promised Land, about the Shoah and European antisemitism (neither of which they were familiar with) and start binding them with Jews of European ancestry in what seemed all too clearly an imperfectly imagined community
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 89.01% Highlight: [quoting Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1986)] In that war the sympathy and backing of the entire world will be for the Arabs. Already today, the state of Israel, to which most of the world’s nations were once sympathetic, has earned contempt and hatred throughout the world. Its very existence has come to depend on a thin life-line stretching out to it from the White House. Above all, the state, which was to have been the pride and glory of the Jewish people, is rapidly becoming an embarrassment to it.
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 92.31% Highlight: More than four decades after Evron wrote this, it is clearer, too, that Israel’s Western patrons have turned out to be among the country’s worst enemies, ushering their ward deeper into hallucination
Chapter 9: Israel and the Incurable Offence Highlight Chapter progress: 95.6% Highlight: Muslim-majority Albania was an exception: sheltering refugees, it emerged from the war with a much greater Jewish population than it had in 1939.
Chapter 11: Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism Highlight Chapter progress: 63.64% Highlight: Bild likening Moshe Dayan to Erwin Rommel wasn’t a contradiction
Chapter 11: Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism Highlight Chapter progress: 69.7% Highlight: Yeshayahu Leibowitz remarked many years after Eichmann was hanged that his ‘trial was a total failure; Eichmann really was a small and insignificant cog in a big machine. I think it was a conspiracy by Adenauer and Ben-Gurion to clear the name of the German people. In exchange they paid us billions
Chapter 11: Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism Highlight Chapter progress: 90.91% Highlight: The ‘political culture of the West’, from which Hitler borrowed his racial conception of citizenship, does not inspire great admiration even within the West today.
Chapter 12: Americanising the Holocaust Highlight Chapter progress: 2.33% Highlight: The struggle of memory against forgetting in this instance was no simple struggle of people against authoritarian power. In almost every Western country, the obligation to remember and commemorate the Shoah suppressed, often deliberately, much awkward history, broadening the scope for authoritarian politics.
Chapter 12: Americanising the Holocaust Highlight Chapter progress: 46.51% Highlight: [quoting Robert Alter (1981)] we falsify our lives as Jews by setting them so dramatically in the shadow of the crematoria
Chapter 12: Americanising the Holocaust Highlight Chapter progress: 67.44% Highlight: In 1965, when public awareness of the Shoah was still negligible, Robert Alter was already warning against an overly self-conscious and sentimental Jewishness, and its deployment by people who were ‘culturally American in all important respects and only peripherally or vestigially Jewish
Chapter 12: Americanising the Holocaust Highlight Chapter progress: 88.37% Highlight: The terrorist attacks of 9/11 incited, exactly as their perpetrators had hoped, an enraged and catastrophically counterproductive response. Retaliating against what it deemed a new Pearl Harbor, the United States launched another heavily racialised global war: a war on terror that presumed a subhuman enemy (even when a Western citizen) who must be ‘smoked out’ at home and abroad and tortured and extrajudicially executed. This war that devastated the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa, ignited a bonfire of international laws and norms, brought the largest wave yet of terrorism to Western countries and eviscerated civil liberties in the West – finally ended in the humiliating Western retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. This fiasco, acts of self-harm such as the financial crisis of 2008, the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, and events such as the relentless rise of China have together exacerbated a psychology long accustomed to racial domination
Chapter 12: Americanising the Holocaust Highlight Chapter progress: 93.02% Highlight: But the old, seemingly irrepressible and righteous urge to exterminate the brutes must reckon in the twenty-first century with many new impediments: above all, a conviction commanding much moral and emotional appeal within as well as outside the West that decolonisation, or the physical and intellectual emancipation of the vast majority of the human population from the white man’s world, is an unstoppable revolution
Chapter 12: Americanising the Holocaust Highlight Chapter progress: 95.35% Highlight: So while a formal transfer of power occurred long ago, and national sovereignty has been gained (and often attenuated) in Asia and Africa, decolonisation remains a live global revolution across the world.
Chapter 14: The Clashing Narratives of the Shoah, Slavery and Colonialism Highlight Chapter progress: 66.67% Highlight: The globally resonant accusation of genocide against Israel by the heirs of Nelson Mandela attests to the spread of a mass, outrage-inflected awareness of the linked fates of the wretched of the earth
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 2.63% Highlight: [quoting Simone Weil] If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale. Although the weight may consist of evil, in handling it with this intention, perhaps we do not become defiled. But we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’.
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 6.82% Highlight: Scholarship over the last two decades has also clarified that Germany was no exception; all Western powers worked together to uphold a global racial order, in which it was entirely normal for Asians and Africans to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned and ostracised. Already
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 6.82% Highlight: Scholarship over the last two decades has also clarified that Germany was no exception; all Western powers worked together to uphold a global racial order, in which it was entirely normal for Asians and Africans to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned and ostracised.
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 15.91% Highlight: If a man can exterminate millions of his fellow men in a fraction of a second, a couple of thousand SS soldiers who could only murder millions peu à peu are harmless by comparison
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 56.82% Highlight: Historical contingencies destroyed at one stroke the many options of self-determination for the Hindus and Muslims of South Asia as well as the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, bringing forth nation states and permanent refugees under the shadow of the Shoah, the Nakba and the Partition
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 70.45% Highlight: Its fierce fortress mentalities were inflamed on 7 October 2023, when Hamas destroyed, permanently, Israel’s aura of invulnerability. The surprise assault by people presumed to have been crushed represents, after 9/11, the twenty-first century’s second Pearl Harbor to many shocked and horrified white majoritarians
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 72.73% Highlight: We have already witnessed in Gaza – after the millions of avoidable deaths in the pandemic – another stage of what the social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls ‘a vast worldwide Malthusian correction’ that is ‘geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalisation, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers’
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 88.64% Highlight: These affiliations that cut across politically defined borders are potential triggers of what Michael Rothberg calls ‘multidirectional memory’ – what brings previously separated histories together, uncovering a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity than the national or ethnic-racial community, and a greater range of modernity’s victims. They are mostly visible in ‘marginalised texts’, such as Kathrada’s annotations of Anne Frank’s diary, the above cable sent to Churchill by Warsaw’s Bundists, ‘or in marginal moments of well-known texts’.
Chapter 15: Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics Highlight Chapter progress: 97.73% Highlight: But he has survived, unlike Anne Frank, to know the time when Jews can be people again, and not just Jews; the time, also, when the victims of modernity are not primarily Jews. And, perhaps, in that survivor’s intuition of an indivisible suffering, we can begin to look for ways to reconcile the clashing narratives of the Shoah, slavery and colonialism.
Chapter 16: Epilogue Highlight Chapter progress: 33.33% Highlight: One could at least try to cling to the negative secular theology, ‘Never Again’ espoused in commemorations of the Shoah, even if it was frequently repudiated in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans
Chapter 16: Epilogue Highlight Chapter progress: 44.44% Highlight: In the East as well as the West, the Global North and the Global South, we have been called to fresh struggles for freedom, equality and dignity, and to create a world with less misery. But it is Gaza that has pushed many to a genuine reckoning with the deep malaise of their societies. It is Gaza that has quickened their understanding of a decrepit world which no longer has any belief in itself, and which, concerned merely with self-preservation, tramples freely on the rights and principles it once held sacred, repudiates all sense of dignity and honour, and rewards violence, lies, cruelty and servility. At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century – just as the First World War was for a generation in the West.
Chapter 16: Epilogue Highlight Chapter progress: 55.56% Highlight: Bystander Society (2023),
Chapter 16: Epilogue Highlight Chapter progress: 66.67% Highlight: But one does not have to endorse all of their positions and tactics, or condone their occasionally intolerant fringe, to appreciate the depth of their rejection of conventional power, or to recognise that their refusal to become collaborators in violence and injustice is truly rare.
Chapter 16: Epilogue Highlight Chapter progress: 77.78% Highlight: In their indifference to career advancement, and their challenge to the establishment either to reform itself or to crush them, the protesters have demonstrated an uncommon kind of courage. Refusing complicity with corrupted institutions, they have expressed a necessary faith in the human capacity to resist thuggish authority and to recognise and empathise with the powerless in any situation. They have dared to take some risks on behalf of freedom, dignity and equality
Chapter 16: Epilogue Highlight Chapter progress: 88.89% Highlight: As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well
Chapter 16: Epilogue Highlight Chapter progress: 100.0% Highlight: But then Améry himself, when he addressed the miserable conscience of his time, was ‘not at all speaking with the intention to convince; I just blindly throw my word onto the scale, whatever it may weigh’. Feeling deceived and abandoned by the free world, he kept speaking ‘in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity’.