@MassimoFaggioli end/ Genocide incubates organically—it accretes by embedding in mediating infrastructures that train people to inhabit violence as architecture, not choice. ICE’s mask culture doesn’t merely authorize atrocity; it engineers selves able to enact evil without inner division.
@trippfuller 🧵1/12 'Opening up a revolutionary chance.' A question. Did Benjamin's messianic/revolutionary thesis ultimately succumb to a Franco-Vichy-Nazi storm uncannily paralleling the global, fascist surge of our time? The gas chambers were, of course, but a year ahead. Context, then.
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Only in the posthumously published letters of Gershom Scholem have I come across the same note of helpless clear-sightedness and warning. Over and over, even prior to 1933, my father labored to warn, to alert, to awaken to refuge not only those whom he and my mother had left behind in Prague or in Vienna, but the French political-military establishment with which his international dealings had brought him into contact. His “pessimism,” his “alarmist prognostications” elicited only officious dismissal or hostility. Family and friends refused to move. One could come to reasonable terms with Herr Hitler. The unpleasantness would soon pass. The age of pogroms was over. In diplomatic and ministerial circles, my father was regarded as a tedious Cassandra, prone to well-known traits of Jewish hysteria. Papa lived those rancid 1930s like a man trapped in cobwebs, lashing out and sick at heart. There was also, however, a more private and constant regret. George Steiner