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Norman Geras

Norman Geras Biography

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“Perhaps it is this attitude, this mental turning away, or perhaps the combination of all these responses to calamity brought upon others, that one of Saul Bellow's characters, Artur Sammler, a survivor of the shooting pits in Poland, has in mind when he says: 'I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door”

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Book:The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust
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“Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.”

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Book:A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
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“A woman, Erika S., who lived at Melk in Austria near the site of one of the subcamps of Mauthhausen, gives a frank account of the way she dealt with this physical proximity. She did sometimes see things, unavoidably. She tells of having felt pity in particular for the plight of one Jew she observed, though a pity, it has to be said, that was mixed with something darker, namely amusement at the incongruous gait---'like a circus horse'---forced upon this man by the pain in his bare feet and the whipping of the guards. Her general attitude, however, Erika S. characterizes as follows: 'I am happy when I hear nothing and see nothing of it. As far as I am concerned, they aren't interned. That's it. Over. It does not interest me at all”

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Book:The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust
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“A crucial question for them, indeed, one challenging their humanity, is the question addressed to the spectator at the scene of evil. How continue life as normal after having seen that? How, if you are not a stone or a pile of dead wood or a cadaver? How, in other terms, without disappearing into the insentient natural cosmos? The victim and survivor of the Holocaust thus puts his question, embodied in literary form, so to say, of a prayer. To be indifferent is to stand condemned.”

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Book:The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust
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