In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argues that for all the incontestable novelty of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, its essential message lies in what it tells us about modernity and its peculiar mindset, rationality and institutions, thus about something general, to be found in other places and nations, within other political movements and therefore facilitating that something like it will happen again.

—Arne Johan Vetlesen, “Reassessing Modernity and the Holocaust in the light of genocide in Bosnia”,  in Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust, eds. Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński, (London: Routledge, 2022), 111.

Wolfgang Streeck, Jacobin:

Noch grundsätzlicher ließe sich fragen, was ein Staat seinen Bürgern, die auf seinen Befehl hin ihr Leben lassen sollen, an Bemühungen schuldet, den Krieg, dem sie zum Opfer fallen könnten, gar nicht erst stattfinden zu lassen. Hier könnten gegenseitige Pflichten von Staaten aus dem Völkerrecht ins Spiel kommen, die man auch, zumal in Demokratien, als Pflichten gegenüber ihren Bürgern lesen könnte. Kann ein Staat einen moralischen Anspruch darauf erheben, dass von ihm ausgewählte Bürger auf seinen Befehl hin bereit sind zu sterben oder sich lebenslang verstümmeln zu lassen, wenn er nicht vorher alles getan hat, um ihnen dies zu ersparen? Zu denken wäre hier beispielsweise an Artikel 33 (1) der Charta der Vereinten Nationen:

Ω Ω Ω

In Deutschland könnte für die Frage der Legitimität einer Wehrpflicht des Weiteren auch der Umstand ins Gewicht fallen, dass es wohl kaum ein anderes Land gibt, in dem so wenig an strategischer Diskussion über nationale Interessen und nationale Sicherheit stattfindet wie hier. Seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs ist das deutsche Militär und sind die deutschen »Verteidigungspolitiker« nicht deutsch, sondern atlantisch orientiert, mit gelegentlichen gaullistischen Ausbruchsversuchen, die aber immer frühzeitig beendet wurden.

This morning I felt like I was reading something in a sort of a fantasyland. The idea that this German state, busily producing weapons for the Israelis to use in massacring Palestinian civilians, is going to consider its duty to German citizens because of some obligation under international law, because of the Charter of the United Nations? It just reads as unreal, a voice from a previous era.

Streeck rings true, of course. I look for, and fail to find, public debate of German national interests, just as I used to try to engage German coworkers in any sort of discussion. Topics such as Israel and Ukraine are quite clearly beyond question. I’ve been impressed several times when I simply tried to raise the idea of talking about the background to the Russian invasion, or the causes for the Palestinian break-out from Gaza, and gotten the very explicit response that these points were not up for discussion.

Peter Hitchens, The Spectator:

the era’s greatest reporter of US government secrets, from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib prison disgrace, Seymour Hersh, has lengthily and credibly explained how the US did indeed plant and detonate the enormous bombs needed. But it’s no use. It’s too tedious and ordinary.

I, for one, am certainly exercising increased caution today, as the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation. Foreseen escalation I’m o.k. with, but it’s this potential for unforeseen escalation which concerns me. 😬

Rima Hassan, +972 Magazine:

I met with the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, who confirmed that no member of the European Parliament had ever previously been placed in police custody over a tweet.

…

They geolocated me and monitored my movements for three months. They mobilized [the French national railway operator] SNCF, Air France, and Europol to trace all my activities. It was completely disproportionate and abusive. It resembles the procedures of a police state. All of this over a tweet.

…

Figures on the French right and far right have called for you to be stripped of your French citizenship. What does that reveal about the particular place Palestine occupies in French politics?

The way I think about it is that Palestine is a test for Western democracies. It produces Kafkaesque situations, in which states proclaim their commitment to the rule of law and moral standards, only to find themselves in complete moral and political failure when confronted with the genocide in Gaza. [Faced with that contradiction], they go so far as to turn against their own citizens and elected representatives in order to preserve their political, material, economic, geostrategic, or even ideological support for Israel.

One of the first albums I ever bought. Liked it a lot. Going to have to say when I was eleven “Come rub it upon my belly like guava jelly” didn’t have the same meaning it would ten years later.

Guardian:

Trump appears to be flirting with electoral disaster in re-stoking a war that is already unpopular with voters – not least for its inflationary impact on fuel and living costs.

“There’s basically no timeline in which this makes any sense for preserving [Republicans’] midterm performance,” said Curt Mills, executive editor of the American Conservative, a magazine promoting isolationist foreign policy goals favored by Trump’s “American first” supporters.

“I think it’s a total loser. It’s evidence that Trump doesn’t really care about the midterms. He’s like Icarus with the sun with this stuff – it seems to be a personal vendetta with the Iranians.”

The Guardian uses phrases like “flirting with electoral disaster” and “personal vendetta” to describe the United States bombing Iranian schools, bridges, and water treatment plants.

Wikipedia:

Elisabeth and her husband Sergei Alexandrovich

That night the prisoners were awakened and driven in carts on a road leading to the village of Siniachikha, some 18 kilometres (11 miles) from Alapayevsk, where there was an abandoned iron mine with a pit 20 metres (66 feet) deep.^[82][83] Here they halted. The Cheka beat all the prisoners before throwing their victims into this pit, Elisabeth being the first.^[82] Ryabov tossed in a grenade after them and grenades were then hurled down the shaft.^[82][84]

Following the explosion, Ryabov claimed to have heard Elisabeth and the others singing an Orthodox hymn from the bottom of the shaft.^[85] Unnerved, Ryabov threw down a second grenade, but the singing continued. Finally a large quantity of brushwood was shoved into the opening and set alight, upon which Ryabov posted a guard over the site and departed.

I found myself watching this scene a number of times and thinking about the ARA in Minsk only a few years later.

Shortly after there is a wall in another scene with a decree from this body. Until recently I’ve just been glancing over this sort of thing. Realize the years between the events in the film and 1965, when the film was made, was about the same timespan separating today from the governments of Yuri Andropov and Ronald Reagan. I remember those years.

It occurred to me this morning that there are several aspects of Dr. Zhivago which make it a sort of time capsule showing 1960s social/political thought was opposed to late 1970s and after: Kinski’s cameo as anarchist is one. Another is Alec Guinness as Yevgraf, Zhivago’s Bolshevik half-brother. Today’s younger generations know Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the film there are very brief, but very salient summations of significant events and issues of Russia 1905 to after the revolution, while Star Wars is escapist fantasy starring robots and futuristic weaponry.

Abdaljawad Omar, equator:

The facts of Palestine are spoken, and increasingly by Palestinians themselves, but they are met by a refusal to listen, by ears that prefer the drone of implausible denial to the unbearable weight of fact.

This structure of disavowal is deeper than mere propaganda, and recognising it as such redefines the Palestinian predicament. If the issue were simply censorship, the solution would be more documentation or more insistent testimony. But when evidence proliferates, and visibility increases, while political evasion persists, we face a different obstacle entirely. The facts are out there, but their implications are repeatedly refused. It is a cultivated imperviousness to what is already known.

…

What accumulated across generations of Palestinian intellectuals was a structure of feeling that I would call exhausted vigilance. Not despair; despair would have been simple. This was the permanent, draining alertness of those who must translate themselves into a language designed not to recognise their words.

Entering the Western public square required that you suppress your own grief and fury. Palestinian suffering was admissible only when abstracted from its own content – drained of the names of villages, the mechanics of land seizure, the grammar of permit and curfew and demolition order – and repackaged in the universalist idiom of human rights, the vocabulary of the very order that had sanctioned the dispossession in the first place.

…

Settler violence across the West Bank accelerates with total impunity, administered in daylight, documented in real time, and met with statements of concern from capitals that simultaneously approve the weapons transfers. European leaders pose for photographs with Israeli war criminals. The narrative has been won, one might say. The argument has been accepted and confirmed. And very little – almost nothing that matters – has changed.

Two years on, this grotesque convergence – total narrative victory coexisting with the unhindered erasure of Palestinian life – reveals that the issue was never a lack of facts or a failure of empathy. The reality of Palestine induces a special form of disavowal, because its implications threaten too much of what the West believes about itself. To truly accept what is happening in Palestine requires acknowledging that the international order is a fiction, and that Western prosperity remains tethered to a brutal, selective inhumanity. Confronted with a truth that would shatter their own moral and ideological self-conception, Western liberals retreat into moral paralysis: they validate the trauma and permit the genocide to continue anyway.

…

In November 2023, during the initial siege of Al-Shifa hospital, US president Joe Biden declared at a press conference that Hamas had their headquarters beneath the facility. “And that’s a fact,” he insisted. When a reporter pressed him for evidence, he simply refused: “No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.” Though it was subsequently established that the charge was entirely baseless, military disinformation had become official state truth. Two years later, Western leaders still routinely broadcast Israeli propaganda, no matter how absurd or easily disproven.

…

For Western institutions, the excess of evidence has produced the opposite of a crisis of conscience. Instead there is a saturation that enables the desire to put this all behind us. Bearing witness to everything, registering the horror as it passes through the digital feed, creates a comforting illusion of a debt discharged, of a crisis already dealt with. This is why more evidence fails to move the needle. The Western subject already has the facts; what they require is a disruption that prevents this sense of closure. Even when the evidence compels an admission that genocide is taking place, what follows is too often a passive resignation: an assumption that nothing can be done about this truth, or that naming it is all that is required, while Israel carries on killing and dispossessing. The structure of moral stupidity functions by converting raw evidence into the mere performance of its own absorption. Witnessing is revealed to be an insufficient means of preventing a genocide.

Military disinformation as state truth seems largely the rule of the day in 2026.