In 2018, when I was last here, this had been the recent target of right-wing arsonists, and I am glad to see it restored.

„The killers were Nazis and their collaborators“: and their collaborators is language used at VABAMU as well, and is quite unusual in my experience. All over Poland it used to be „the Nazis“ who killed Jews and Poles, until the PiS era and today in Poland it’s always „the Germans“, very rarely „Nazis“. In France and the Netherlands the criminals were the Nazis, except in historical photographs when it is almost always the French and Dutch police involved in rounding up Jews.

I think it is common for children to imagine their adult future selves as heroes – this seems natural. The reality of how difficult, how dangerous it may be personally to avoid murderous collaboration with the state, indeed how difficult it may be to even recognize that one is collaborating, or to have the courage to recognize that one has a choice, was not something my peers were much exposed to.

GAZA SEEN FROM THE GROUND – Seymour Hersh

Link

This essay proposes an interpretation of the transformation in Western Enlightenment civilization between the founding political events of modern times, the French Revolution and the creation of the American Republic, and our twentieth- and twenty-first-century experience of extreme ideological violence.

It is primarily addressed to Americans, as the United States is the most influential, as well as the most powerful contemporary nation and is committed to a secular utopian ideology of universal democracy: an intellectually unsustainable idea as well as politically impossible to achieve, hence a cause for global concern. As Kenneth Minogue, the Australian political philosopher, has observed, a political ideology is implicitly a project to control the world.

—William Pfaff, The Irony of Manifest Destiny, (New York: Walker & Company, 2010), xi.