Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Bauer, by positing that anti-Semitism was ‘the only motivation’ for the Holocaust, separated the extermination of the Jews from all other victims of the Holocaust...Bauer refused to see the connections between the Jewish holocaust and that of the Disabled and Gypsies. ... Zionism turned its back on all other victims of the Holocaust.”

“When German fascism turned eastwards, the search for ‘purity of the race’ became genocidal as German imperialism sought to define itself in terms of racial and ethnic homogeneity.”

“These bureaucrats ‘could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desks.’ The Holocaust developed ‘blow by blow.’ It was not simply a product of orders from above but an interplay between the centre and periphery. It was the bureaucratic destruction process that in its step-by-step manner finally led to the annihilation of five million victims.”

“The momentum of war helped provide the solution to the ‘Jewish Question’. Hilberg explored how the various bureaucracies co-operated and conflicted with each other, including the Church, which furnished records for the determination of descent and the German railroads which billed the Security Police a one-way fare per kilometre of track.”

“Step One: Naming and Owning Harm ... There is no repentance process without the naming of harm, without owning it. Which means, of course, that the person doing this work has to actually comprehend the harm that they have caused.”

“The work of repentance demands curiosity, care, and a willingness to face hard things with bravery and honesty. While we can't undo the past, we can address the present with integrity and endeavor to create a future that is much more whole than anything we can imagine from here. So let us begin.”

“And the next time unity and forgiveness are used as key words during a time of great national tension, we must again stop and ask: Unity at the expense of whose justice? Forgiveness without demanding what repentance?”

“Mekishana Pierre, a Black woman, wrote, "Why is it that the price of unity has always been at the cost of our freedom? Why is it the job of those who are constantly denied their humanity to compromise?" ”

“Douglass was saying, he could not and would not abide the...attempt to ignore or gloss over harm, to forgive without demanding repentance. That unity (of those with privilege) could not be more important than justice (for those without). That the way forward for the country must be in asking the enslavers and their defenders to repent for the sins of slavery.”

“I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant, but may my right hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted and bloody conflict.” (Frederick Douglass)

“Needless to say, those who wished to see deep systemic change after the Civil War weren't having it with this uncritical approach to forgiveness. Many who advocated for human and civil rights for all Americans—including Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, and other thinkers, both Black and white—argued that Christianity demanded repentance from former Confederates as a condition of forgiveness.”

“Calling for forgiveness and unity, without looking too hard at the atrocities in the South and those who committed them, enabled the white leaders of the North to move forward after the war without disrupting the status quo and the role they enjoyed within it." ”

“those who commit horrific wrongs can be forgiven with no effort on their part. Accountability… demanding the work of repentance fall by the wayside. This was a convenient way to reinscribe white supremacy… when it was in grave jeopardy, and it wasn't only the white southerners who benefited. True Reconstruction… repentance, and justice, and equality would have put white northerners' superior social status at risk”

“reunification was predicated not only on white northerners ignoring white southerners' violence against Black people, but on the assumption that the "we" who had been fighting were white, that the "we" who would kiss and make up were white, and that "we" would not ask anything of those so attached to the institution of slavery that they were willing to wage the bloodiest war in American history over it.”

“forgiveness and finding common ground between white southerners and northerners was part of the larger political project of thinking about the US as a union that was unbreakable. The stress that state-level autonomy placed on the federal identity of the US as a whole was seen as something that had to be managed... "Okay, we've had our fight and now we need to kiss and make up so we can be Americans again."”

“if harm is perpetrated by a person or an industry, or a state that possesses more power than the individual or communities harmed, denying ill intent can serve the interests of the more powerful party, allowing it to evade accountability and maintain the status quo.”

“When a harm is perpetrated, the "rugged individualism" of American culture...has the potential to leave people alone, nursing their wounds in solitude, without support. We lack a sense of collective responsibility, a communal ethos or process that might help hold victims' pain and urge perpetrators to hold themselves accountable.”

“The French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville warned, in his 1835 tome Democracy in America, that our country's extreme form of individualism would cause people to feel that they "owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine their whole destiny is in their own hands." ”

“Our lived experiences, in themselves, [are] a source of authority”

“Would he be disappointed in me? The answer isn’t important. But the question really is, and that is the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He made the act of assuming personal responsibility for alleviating social harm ordinary, habitual, and irresistible. My tribute to him is the profound gratitude I feel for the gift that his life truly was.”

“[MLK's] confidence that we were finer than we thought, that there were moral grounds we would not abandon, lines of civil behavior we simply would not cross. That there were things we would gladly give up for the public good, that a comfortable life, resting on the shoulders of other people’s misery, was an abomination this country, especially, among all nations, found offensive.”

“I know that literature no longer holds a key place among valued systems of knowledge; that it has been shoved to the edge of social debate; is of minimal or purely cosmetic use in scientific, economic discourse. But it is precisely there, at the heart of that form, where the serious ethical debates and probings are being conducted.”

“Gone, gone in the histories of so many nations mapping their geography with lines drawn through their neighbors’ mass graves; fertilizing their lawns and meadows with the nutrients of their citizens’ skeletons; supporting their architecture on the spines of women and children. No, it isn’t progress that interests me. I am interested in the future of time.”

“Winning funding and attention by revamping 1910 sociology to credit "innate" violence and so make imprisonment possible at birth? No wonder our imagination stumbles beyond 2030—when we may be regarded as monsters to the generations that follow us.”

“from the point of view of the weapons industry, the marketing is for protection, virility, but the product’s real value, whether it is a single bullet, a thousand tons of dynamite, or a fleet of missiles, is that it annihilates itself immediately and creates, thereby, the instant need for more. That it also annihilates life is actually a by-product.”

“Our everyday lives may be laced with tragedy, glazed with frustration and want, but they are also capable of fierce resistance to the dehumanization and trivialization that politico-cultural punditry and profit-driven media depend upon.”

“As an ethno-religious state Israel’s national identity is based on a racial definition of who is a Jew. Nazi Germany’s national identity was likewise based on a racial definition of who was an Aryan. Even the definition of a Jew under the Law of Return is similar to the definition of a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws.”

“When Shlomo Shmelzman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote a letter to the Israeli press announcing his hunger strike against the Lebanon War, he stated: "In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labor camps, to Buchenwald. Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the systematic destruction of cities, towns, and refugee camps…" ”

“Any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, can become racists and commit genocide. Jews are no exception. In so far as Zionism justifies Jewish exceptionalism by reference to the Nazis they can hardly complain that others do likewise.”

“Deputy Defence Minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan explained that ‘[Palestinians] are beasts, they are not human.’ ”