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Hypocrisy and Savagery

Marco D’Eramo is excellent as usual.

‘It’s been a good day; I never dine better, I never sleep so peacefully, as when I have sullied myself sufficiently with what idiots call crimes.’

—Marquis de Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir

  • We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them.
  • This is a close cousin of greenwashing: we supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing. [See, for instance, David Cameron’s and Emmanuel Macron’s tears]
  • It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical.
  • Denial is exercised when actions can only be performed if we deny to ourselves that we are doing them.
  • Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion, and has become an indispensable tool of politics.
  • Perhaps today Westerners, and not only Germans, should start asking themselves why on earth, almost 80 years later, it is the Palestinians who have to pay for Hitler’s crimes.

Denegation


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