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Showing posts from November 8, 2015
“We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.”  ― Bertolt Brecht How to Politicize a Tragedy
On barbarism "Under these circumstances of social and political disintegration, we should expect a decline in civility in any case, and a growth in barbarism. And yet what has made things worse, what will undoubtedly make them worse in future, is that steady dismantling of the defences which the civilization of the Enlightenment had erected against barbarism... For the worst of it is that we have got used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable. "Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money. "Barbarity is a by-product of life in a particular social and historical context." Eric Hobsbawm, On History, 2013 .
"Those to whom evil is done / do evil in return". W. H. Auden Paris Attacks Highlights Western Vulnerability " What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish." W. H. Auden