Daily Times
July 31, 2021
“No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the Megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace, which organised mankind poses to organises men, in the epitome of discontinuity.”
When Adorno wrote these lines, millions of Palestinians were undergoing ethnic cleansing by Irgun and Lehi. Half of its population was expelled with no right to return to their native land. Even those who wanted to assimilate had met the identical grisly fate as the one that awaited the assimilationist Jews in Nazi Germany.
“Anti-Semitism,” Adorno said, “is unleashed in a situation, when blinded people, deprived of subjectivity, are let loose as subjects. Their actions – for those involved – are lethal yet meaningless reactions. The mindless pastime of beating people to death confirms the drab existence to which one merely conforms.”