Indifference Kills: Roger Cohen

2015/10/10 Leave a comment

Good and strong reminder:

There is no direct analogy between the situation of millions of refugees today and the Jews who were deported from Milan’s Platform 21 (as the memorial is also known). The refugees are fleeing war — not, in general, targeted annihilation. They are victims of weak states, not an all-powerful one. Their plight often reflects the crisis of a religion, Islam — its uneasy adaptation to modernity — not the depredations of a single murderous ideology.

Still, there are echoes, not least in that word, indifference.

The indifference of Hungary, with its self-appointed little exercise in bigotry: the defense of Europe as Christian Club. The indifference of Britain, where the prime minister speaks of “swarms,” the foreign secretary of “desperate migrants marauding,” and the home secretary of threats “to a cohesive society.” The indifference of a Europe that cannot rouse itself to establish adequate legal routes to refugee status that would stem trafficking that has left about 3,000 people dead this year in the Mediterranean.

Then there is the indifference of an America that seems to have forgotten its role as haven for refugees of every stripe. The indifference of a world unready to acknowledge that more than 4 million Syrian refugees absorbed by Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon need a massive program of economic and educational aid over the next decade to confront the crisis. “It’s a trend and not a blip,” David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, told me.

If the counter-indifference gesture of Milan’s Holocaust memorial were repeated myriad times across a European Union of more than half a billion people, the impact would be dramatic. One quarter of Lebanon’s population is now composed of Syrian refugees; the numbers reaching the E.U. constitute less than 0.5 percent of its population.

Another echo, for Jews, lies in their own situation in Europe a little over a century ago. They were often marginalized. As Rabbi Julia Neuberger pointed out in a recent sermon at the West London Synagogue, around 150,000 Jews, often fleeing pogroms, arrived in Britain between 1881 and 1914. An anti-immigrant group called the British Brothers’ League declared then that Britain could not become “the dumping ground for the scum of Europe.”

Sound familiar?

Yesterday’s “scum” often proves to be the invigorating lifeblood of renewal. Churchill opposed the Aliens’ Act of 1905, designed to control Jewish immigration, on the grounds that “free entry and asylum” were practices from which Britain “has so greatly gained.”

Europe is awash in small-mindedness, prejudice and amnesia. On Syria, the United States is not far behind.

Jarach, whose Jewish family arrived in Milan in the late 19th century, is assisted by Adhil Rabhi, a Moroccan immigrant. They showed me around the memorial, explained how each boxcar was filled with Jews and then shunted to an elevator that took them up to the platform.

Nobody saw the Jews. Nobody wanted to see them. Indifference kills. As Syria demonstrates.

Filed under Refugees Tagged with , ,

Roger Cohen Sees Hitler In The Desert « The Dish

2014/10/03 Leave a comment

The debate between Andrew Sullivan and Roger Cohen, starting with Sullivan:

Well, we all see mirages, I guess. But it says something about the hysteria about the latest incarnation of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that we’re suddenly comparing them to Nazis and to non-humans. Even as Cohen himself acknowledges that “the Nazi death machine was unique. Facile invocation of it is too frequent, belittling the phenomenon and its victims.

”So why break Godwin’s Law so egregiously? Cohen wants us to believe, channeling Martin Amis and Primo Levi, that there was no “why” in the unconscionable unique act of the Holocaust.

And yet, mountains of evidence explain exactly why: it was a function of a vile racism that regarded the Jewish people as vermin that needed to be exterminated in order to allow the master race to flourish. It was not some random act of mass murder; it had a grotesque but clear and constantly trumpeted rationale. Then Cohen seems to endorse the idea that the Nazis were somehow unhumans or “counter-humans”, in Levi’s words. But that too, it seems to me, lets them off the hook. The Holocaust was a deeply human act – a function of humankind’s capacity, revealed throughout history, of extraordinary levels of hatred and violence, brought to new and unfathomable evil in the age of the industrialized state.

And equally, it is absurd to argue that “there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS.”This is after Cohen actually produces a long litany of reasons for ISIS’s brutality and evil, mind you, none of which he deems sufficient to explain the ISIS propaganda beheadings he watched on video. But why should we not take the Islamists’ word for it? They are committing slaughter and rape and attempted genocide for one core reason: because God demands that they slaughter infidels. Their mandate is beyond any human one but results in so-very-human evil.

Roger Cohen Sees Hitler In The Desert « The Dish.

From Cohen:

It is human to seek for reasons. Perhaps the rise of ISIS may be seen as the culmination of decades of Arab resentment at perceived Western domination, drawing support from the same anger as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda before it; or as an expression of the abject failure of Arab societies; or as an armed Sunni response to the Shia-bolstering American invasion of Iraq; or as brutal payback for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo (where, it must be said, there was scant “why” for prisoners detained for years and guilty of no crime); or as a well-funded offshoot of Saudi Wahhabism interpreted in its most literal form; or as a heady alternative for disaffected young Muslims to the moral void of Western civilization; or as evidence of the crisis of Islam and the inevitable Thirty Years War of its Sunni and Shia branches; or simply as a call to arms to drive out the United States the way the infidel Crusaders were ousted from the Levant.

Yet, in the end, there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS. There is no why in Raqqa. Evil may adduce reasons; they fall short. The Nazi death machine was unique. Facile invocation of it is too frequent, belittling the phenomenon and its victims. But I was given pause by Martin Amis’ afterword to his powerful new novel, The Zone of Interest, where he probes the “why” of Hitler and quotes both the icicle passage and another from Levi:

“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘Understanding’ a proposal or human behavior means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him.” Levi, referring to Hitler, Himmler and the rest, goes on: “Perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human.”

Roger Cohen: For ISIS, slaughter is an end in itself

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , , , ,

ICYMI: Capitalism Eating Its Children – Mark Carney

2014/06/10 1 Comment

Stronger than his statements while Bank of Canada Governor:

…..Mark Carney, the Canadian governor of the Bank of England, lays into unfettered capitalism. “Just as any revolution eats its children,” he says, “unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself.”

All ideologies, he continues, are prone to extremes. Belief in the power of the market entered “the realm of faith” before the 2008 meltdown. Market economies became market societies. They were characterized by “light-touch regulation” and “the belief that bubbles cannot be identified.”

Carney pulls no punches. Big banks were too big to fail, operating in a “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose bubble.” Benchmarks were rigged for personal gain. Equity markets blatantly favored “the technologically empowered over the retail investor.” Mistrust grew — and persists.

“Prosperity requires not just investment in economic capital, but investment in social capital,” Carney argues, having defined social capital as “the links, shared values and beliefs in a society which encourage individuals not only to take responsibility for themselves and their families but also to trust each other and work collaboratively to support each other.”

Capitalism Eating Its Children – NYTimes.com.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,