In this collection, Judt concentrates on the ‘role of ideas,’ bewails our culture of forgetting, and condemns
self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar American moment, the ineluctable march of globalisation and the free market
— as if all these mean something if you bothered to consider them. We are on a path, he suggests, to a
moral memory palace, with way stations labelled ‘Munich’, ‘Pearl Harbor’, ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Gulag’, ‘Bosnia’, ‘Rwanda’ . . . with ‘9-11’ as a bloody postscript for those who would forget the lessons of the century [the 20th] or who have never properly learned them.
To these markers cling what he calls ‘separate pasts’, assertions of victimhood, for example, by Jews, Armenians, German-Americans, the Irish and homosexuals.
This mosaic, Judt argues, ‘does not bind us to a shared past; it separates us from it. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.’ One of the losses, he underlines, is the intellectual — ‘free-thinking or politically committed, detached or engaged, a defining glory of the 20th century’. He does not mean left-leaning ‘progressives’ like Sartre, Grass, Sontag and op-ed writers. He praises those courageous individuals ‘writing for the desk drawer’, many of them Jews, exiles or rootless, from places like Cernovitz, Vilna, Sarajevo, Alexandria, Calcutta or Algiers. He quotes Edward Said, an Episcopalian Palestinian, born in Cairo to a Baptist mother, long resident at Columbia University, remarking, ‘I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country.’ No doughtier champion of the Palestinians lived until his recent death. He was accused by some of being ‘the professor of terror’, but he also condemned the corruption and irrationality of Palestinian leaders and added that as losers of everything they have nothing with which to negotiate.
Edward Said had three big goals, Judt explains:
To tell the world [above all Americans] the truth about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians; the parallel urgency of getting Palestinians and other Arabs to recognise and accept the reality of Israel and engage with Israelis, especially the Israeli opposition; and the duty to speak openly about the failings of Arab leadership.
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