Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments in the early 1960s were widely regarded as laboratory proof of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Ordinary, unremarkable people will commit terrible acts of violence and cruelty under orders.
My earlier post about Avraham Burg has generated some sharp exchanges in the comments. One contributor feels that I unfairly compared Burg with Norman Finkelstein. But I stand by that comparison and I will now make one more.
There’s a certain irony about the title of Avraham Burg’s forthcoming book, “The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes.” Those very same words could be the motto of the State of Israel itself, given its emergence just three years after the defeat of Nazism.
On her consistently excellent blog, Petra Marquardt-Bigman takes aim at the activists of London University’s Goldsmith’s college who draw a seamless line between the Warsaw Ghetto and what they describe as the Gaza “Ghetto.”
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
Flushed with its success in September’s elections, the right-wing extremist Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) is urging moves to scrap the Austrian law that bans Nazi activity and attempts to revive Nazism. Norbert Hofer, an FPÖ MP, has suggested a referendum to test public opinion on abolition of the law. He is supported by his party’s leader Heinz-Christian Strache.
Continue reading ‘Austria’s Far Right and Selective Free Speech’
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
Martin Graf, a member of the extreme right “Olympia” organization, has been elected as the third president of the Austrian parliament with 109 votes (out of a total of 182).
Continue reading ‘Austria: Right Wing Extremist Elected Parliament President’
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
UPDATE, OCTOBER 16: Haider’s successor has confirmed that Haider was drunk - very drunk - when he crashed his car.
The Austrian papers are full of pictures of the suntanned politician Jörg Haider, who was a man for all seasons and who learned the lesson from American politicians to always smile and to shake hands with everybody. If one could believe some newspapers and some declarations of the Austrian political elite, a sort of Austrian Mother Teresa has passed away. The former Social Democrat Heinz Fischer, who is now President of Austria, described Haider’s death as a “human tragedy.”
Continue reading ‘Jörg Haider: A Leader Who Died As He Lived’
The Mennonite Central Committee, one of the religious groups which broke bread with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his recent visit to New York, has issued a statement about that encounter.
UPDATE: The text of Ahmadinejad’s address to the UN, in which he claimed that “Zionists…have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries,” can be read here.
Perched in a suite at New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in town for the UN General Assembly, has been making nice with the press.
There is an extremely interesting essay by Perry Anderson here about contemporary Turkish history. It deals at length with the similarities and differences between the genocides of the Jews and Armenians and the different degrees of recognition that they have received since they occurred.
This is a guest post by Contentious Centrist
Here is an article by Patrick West from the website “Spiked”, which describes itself as “an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.”
Subscribe to the Z Word blog via RSS - click on the orange button below. For more information on using RSS, please read this helpful guide.
RSS