If We Remain Grotesquely Unequal, We Shall

My Generation Those Who Were Students In The Late 60s Was Always, In The Words Of The Who, Talking About Our Generation. That's What We Thought Of Ourselves, As The Most Important Thing Since Sliced Bread. And The "we" That We Meant Was Really The Western Europeans And American Generation. And As I Think Back I Suppose I Have A Sense Of Guilt On Behalf Of My Generation, A Sense That We Were Terribly Provincial And Didn't Understand The Really Important Stuff That Was Going On In Eastern Europe.

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.

If We Remain Grotesquely Unequal, We Shall Lose All Sense Of Fraternity: And Fraternity, For All Its Fatuity As A Political Objective, Turns Out To Be The Necessary Condition Of Politics Itself.

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.

I Was Born Accidentally. I Lived Accidentally In London. We Nearly Migrated To New Zealand. So Much Of My Life Has Been A Product Of Chance, I Can't See A Meaning In It At All.