Norman Geras

“Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.”
― Norman Geras, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq

“A woman, Erika S., who lived at Melk in Austria near the site of one of the subcamps of Mauthhausen, gives a frank account of the way she dealt with this physical proximity. She did sometimes see things, unavoidably. She tells of having felt pity in particular for the plight of one Jew she observed, though a pity, it has to be said, that was mixed with something darker, namely amusement at the incongruous gait---'like a circus horse'---forced upon this man by the pain in his bare feet and the whipping of the guards. Her general attitude, however, Erika S. characterizes as follows: 'I am happy when I hear nothing and see nothing of it. As far as I am concerned, they aren't interned. That's it. Over. It does not interest me at all”
― Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust