Column | Our century has its own monsters

Fire brigade humor. My father, then nearly thirty, stood on the ladder during the big fire of Schiedam, March 1943. American bombers put half residential areas in Rotterdam-West in ruins in an attack on the port. Hundreds of deaths. While extinguishing the burning ruins, father was suddenly called by a number of broadly smiling colleagues at the bottom of the ladder. They had a collegial suggestion. « Wouldn’t you first extinguish your own house, De Jong? »

Indeed, that too was. As a precaution, mother was – there was more often a bomb – left for family. He sent her a telegram: « Our house in ruins. Himself unharmed. »

Well, I also had my little personal commemoration. From the countless other of recent times – and now that of the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 – a almost desperate need for ‘connection’ speaks. And yet the flow of pious words and moralizing opinions about man and its history made everything together an uncertain, obligatory and steering impression.

No wonder, because our century has its own monsters in its twenties. We stare into the mouth every day. Genocide in Gaza, war and scorched earth in Ukraine, warlike parades in Moscow, and an America that is in the grip of authoritarian-revolutionary zeloten.

Genocide? Yes, even the prudent NIOD can not really escape from that weeding conclusion (the director speaks of « Genocidal violence »).

A rude objection, popular with loudly right, is that Genocide would no longer be left to Gazans. It’s Vileine Kletskoek, it’s not just about numbers. Also in the descriptions of the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), who came up with the term, extermination is not a sine qua non. Native Americans, Armenians, Bosnian Muslims – they were not completely murdered. That was rarely black and white the ‘intention’, and yet we speak of genocide.

The core of the concept is that with a combination of means of violence – mass murder, destruction of politics, economic and cultural life, starvation – the survival of a people or group is made impossible. According to connoisseurs Is that now going on For the bloody stranglehold of Israel on Gaza – up to and including open plans for ethnic cleansing. It is now apparently even starting to penetrate the manic-introverted Catshuis of Marathon-Man Annex Day President.

Hatred of Jews? Yes, that’s there too. Of course, criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti -Semitic, as Netanyahu wants to talk to the world, but that does not mean that such criticism is never. It remains difficult to hear in a slogan like ‘Palestine Arabiyya’ purely ecumenical sense of law and not the call for destroying the ‘Zionist entity’. Just as it hurts your eyes to see members of extremely right -wing parties with anti -Semitic antecedents traveling to Israel for a conference about: anti -Semitism. Nietzsche would still be surprised by such a revolution of values.

Avishai Margalit The Shoah once called unique Because Jews were not even low in the racial hierarchy for the Nazis, but fell completely outside. They had none Racial But as parasites settled in ‘real’ peoples. That is why it was not enough to keep them under it, but they had to disappear from the planet. The madness can be recognized in all kinds of conspiracy theories.

The Apocalypse? That too is back, in the fever dreams of Christian nationalists and tech billionaires around Trump who yearn for the end of the secular-humanistic order. A euphoric crush -up thinking that is striking for Naomi « End -time fascism » calls.

With such monsters we go deeper into the century. Nothing to laugh so at the bottom of the ladder – continue to extinguish, and not just – or first – your own house.

Sjoerd de Jong is editor of NRC. He writes a column every other week at this place.

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