The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.

Tony Judt

Categorized in : War Achievement Irony

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

leaving space self

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. by Tony Judt

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

cost knows ideas

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

disenchantment memories world

I worry that we have forgotten that the de-ideologized, de-politicized, uncontentious public space of the last 50 years as Europeans have experienced it is not the normal human condition. We shall be sorry to have abandoned a little too quickly the institutions that were set up by our parents and grandparents to protect themselves against a return of the bad old world. Because the bad old world can still come back to haunt you.

grandparent sorry worry

Israel today is bad for the Jews. by Tony Judt

Israel today is bad for the Jews.

jew israel today

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not... by Tony Judt

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

democracy doe past

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

progress behaviour law

Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.

men war country

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.

space responsibility ideas

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most cont... by Tony Judt

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

conditions oneself seems

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

self-questioning responsibility past

It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.

important war world

As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.

our-world citizens thinking

Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.

ghetto goal identity

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting. by Tony Judt

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.

uplifting

The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.

betrayal leader country

If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

improvement answers perfect

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

forfeit mediocre citizens

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

boundaries opposites people

The American financial and military commitment really only kicks in with Korea. Not that Korea was the real game for the Americans; their real fear was that this was just the prelude to a second Korea in Germany. We now know from the Soviet archives that the last thing Stalin was going to do was start a war in Central Europe. The Americans didn't know that, and it was the fear that he might which transformed NATO from a sort of shell game into a real military alliance. That total commitment basically transformed the Marshal Plan into military aid.

real military war