Ian Buruma > Quotes

“Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome.”
― Ian Buruma, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq

“Citizenship of a democratic state means living by the laws of the country. A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes that divine laws trump those made by man.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theatres, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“after all that, after the concentration camps in Germany, after we stated definitely that our former home was changed into a mass grave, we can only grope and clasp with our finger tips the shadows of our dearest and painfully cry: I can never more see my home. The victorious nations that in the 20th century removed the black plague from Europe must understand once and for all the specific Jewish problem. No, we are not Polish when we are born in Poland; we are not Lithuanians even though we once passed through Lithuania; and we are neither Roumanians though we have seen the first time in our life the sunshine in Roumenia. We are Jews!!”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945

“The solution to the Muslim problem is a Muslim Voltaire, a Muslim Nietzsche—that”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future... And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don't, we cannot understand our own times.”
― Ian Buruma

“On May 7 crowds had gathered on Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam in front of the Royal Palace, cheering, dancing, singing, waving the orange flag of the Dutch royal family, in anticipation of the triumphant British and Canadian troops whose arrival was imminent. Watching the happy throng from the windows of a gentlemen’s club on the square, German naval officers decided in a last-minute fit of pique to fire into the crowd with a machine gun mounted on the roof. Twenty-two people died, and more than a hundred were badly injured. Even that was not the very last violent act of the war.”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945

“The sacred icons of Dutch society were broken in the 1960s, as elsewhere in the Western world, when the churches lost their grip on people’s lives, when government authority was something to challenge, not obey, when sexual taboos were publicly and privately breached, and when—rather in line with the original Enlightenment—people opened their eyes and ears to civilizations outside the West. The rebellions of the 1960s contained irrational, indeed antirational, and sometimes violent strains, and the fashion for such far-flung exotica as Maoism sometimes turned into a revolt against liberalism and democracy. One by one the religious and political pillars that supported the established order of the Netherlands were cut away. The tolerance of other cultures, often barely understood, that spread with new waves of immigration, was sometimes just that—tolerance—and sometimes sheer indifference, bred by a lack of confidence in values and institutions that needed to be defended.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“Without ideology, and with nothing but jobs for the boys at stake, party politics was losing its raison d’être, and trust in the old democratic order could no longer be taken for granted.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“LIBERATION IS PERHAPS not the right word to describe the end of the war in colonial societies. Most Asians were more than happy to be rid of the Japanese, whose “Asian liberation” had turned out to be worse than the Western imperialism it temporarily replaced. But liberation is not quite what the Dutch had in mind for the Dutch East Indies in 1945, or the French for Indochina, or the British for Malaya.”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945

“did not see much of Kara after we returned to Tokyo. My honorary position in the Situation Theater had come to an end. Kara was right, of course: I was just an ordinary gaijin after all. It was as though I had flunked an important test; my immersion in a Japanese gang had run into an insurmountable barrier. That last night in Kyoto had been the moment of truth that all foreigners face in Japan at one point or another. No matter how much you might behave as a Japanese, you never will be Japanese. Some foreigners find this painful. But you cannot blame the Japanese for failing to comply with the illusions of foreigners. Just as Kara faced his Japaneseness in the Chelsea Hotel, every gaijin in Japan must realize that a gaijin he or she will always remain, no matter how well a person speaks Japanese or has mastered the etiquette of Japanese social life.”
― Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance

“Gerçekle yüz yüze gelmeyi, çoğu kez hayal kırıklığı izler. Beauvoir'nın anlattığına göre, Sartre ABD'den "bütün gördükleri biraz afallamış" olarak döndü. İnsanlardan elbette hoşlanmış ve Roosevelt'e hayran kalmıştı; ama Beauvoir'nın ifadesiyle "Batı yarıkürenin uygarlığında ekonomik sistem, ayrımcılık ve ırkçılık dışında onu şoka uğratan birçok şey vardı - Amerikalıların tutuculuğu, değerler ölçeği, efsaneleri, iyimserlikleri, her türlü trajik şeyden kaçınışları.”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945

“Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theaters, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion. How Europeans, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, cope with this is the question that will decide our future. And what better place to watch the drama unfold than the Netherlands, where freedom came from a revolt against Catholic Spain, where ideals of tolerance and diversity became a badge of national honor, and where political Islam struck its first blow against a man whose deepest conviction was that freedom of speech included the freedom to insult.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“In a sense, the gaijin is offered a sojourn in a fool's paradise. For some lucky fools the sojourn might stretch to a lifetime.”
― Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance

“And yet to reach for examples from the Holocaust, or the Jewish diaspora, has become a natural reflex when the question of ethnic or religious minorities comes up. It is a moral yardstick, yet at the same time an evasion. To be reminded of past crimes, of negligence or complicity, is never a bad thing. But it can confuse the issues at hand, or worse, bring all discussion to a halt by tarring opponents with the brush of mass murder.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“Years of officially promoted European idealism and denigration of national sentiment added to a growing sense of unease. What was it, in a world of multinational business and pan-European bureaucracy, to be Dutch, or French, or German?”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“[The city] somehow managed to wear its decadence with a certain amount of grace; the anomaly of high culture in the midst of squalor is a kind of dandyism.”
― Ian Buruma, The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West

“It is always easier, particularly in what was once a deeply religious country, to erect memorials and deliver sermons than to look the angel of history directly in the face.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“The fact that both killers arrived on bikes added a peculiarly Dutch flavor to their murders.”
― Ian Buruma

“Yahudi intikamı siyasal destek görmediği için, hiçbir zaman uygulanamadı. Siyonist liderler savaşla kana bulanmış Avrupa ülkelerinden uzakta, çöl arazisini işleyen ve gururlu yurttaş-askerler olarak düşmanlarıyla çarpışan yiğit İsrailoğulları teması üzerine kurulu farklı türden bir normallik yaratmaya çalıştılar. İçe kapanık bir yaklaşımla geleceğe baktılar. Gerçi o gelecek de katliamla, etnik ve dinsel çatışmayla dolu olacaktı ama dökülen Alman kanı olmayacaktı.”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945

“I think that Ryu Chishu, or Tanaka Kinuyo, or to be more precise, the imaginary characters they portrayed, were more real to the film buffs than any existing human being. This is why cinephiles are spookier, on the whole, than music lovers or balletomanes. For they are creatures of the dark, getting off on the lives of others.”
― Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir

“The Japanese have an expression for human relations that are sticky with the mutual obligations and dependencies of the collective life. They use the English word “wet.” Traditional Japanese family relations are “wet.” Yakuza gangs are “wet.” Behavior that is more detached, more individualistic, often associated with a Western way of life, is “dry.” Terayama Shuji was “dry.” Kara was most definitely “wet.”
― Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir

“But the death wish in the name of a higher cause, a god, or great leader is something that has appealed to confused and resentful young men through the ages and is certainly not unique to Islam.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“The whole point of liberal democracy, its greatest strength, especially in the Netherlands, is that conflicting faiths, interests, and views can be resolved only through negotiation. The only thing that cannot be negotiated is the use of violence.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“The fact that many Europeans, including Fortuyn, were less liberated from religious yearnings than they might have imagined, made the confrontation with Islam all the more painful. This was especially true of those who considered themselves to be people of the Left. Some swapped the faiths of their parents for Marxist illusions, until they too ended in disillusion. The religious zeal of immigrants was a mirror image of what they themselves once had been.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“Even though I decided to leave Japan, I knew that Japan would never leave me. I arrived in Tokyo when I was still unformed, callow and eager for experience. I can only hope that this eagerness will never be entirely dissipated. To be fully formed is to be dead. But Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet.”
― Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir

“Perhaps Western civilization, with the Amsterdam red-light district as its fetid symbol, does have something to answer for. Maybe these streets are typical of a society without modesty, morally unhinged.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China's man-made famines or the Soviet gulag solely by invoking the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point. Messianic violence can attach itself to any creed.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“one quality has stood out to serve Japan better than any other: the grace to make the best of defeat.”
― Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan: 1853-1964

“The young Moroccan-Dutch youth downloading English translations of Arabic texts from the Internet is also looking for a universal cause, severed from cultural and tribal specificities. The promised purity of modern Islamism, which is after all a revolutionary creed, has been disconnected from cultural tradition. That is why it appeals to those who feel displaced, in the suburbs of Paris no less than in Amsterdam. They are stuck between cultures they find equally alienating. The war between Ellian’s Enlightenment and Bouyeri’s jihad is not a straightforward clash between culture and universalism, but between two different visions of the universal, one radically secular, the other radically religious.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance