Primo Levi Quotes
It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal, Summit Books, 1988, p. 53.
First Published American Indian Author. His last public speech. He was referring to a horrible massacre of Christian Indians and the polarizing effect that such conflicts had. Whosoever publicly castigated a massacre of whites or Indians would be met by accusations of condoning the massacres of the other side and ignoring the inevitable and natural seeking of retaliation for future protection and revenge.
See Ferdinand I for the Bulgarian denial {601322}.
The Belgian soldiers attempted to terrorize and intimidate the natives into working on the rubber plantations. The practice of cutting off hands thus leaving the victim to intimidate others which was so prevalent in Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa in 2000 was also practiced by the Whites at the turn of the last century.
Germany had been a world intellectual center of science, arts and letters. After the Nazi’s came to power most of the great German Intellectual leaders like Albert Einstein—both Jews and non-Jews—left Germany. A few like Roth remained, but those espoused by the Nazis were second rate and the “feebelists of dilettantes.”
Zangwill had been asked to be part of a team to assesses the accusations of pogroms against Jews in the Ukraine.
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
