Presented on October 30, 2024, for the panel discussion “The Left and the 2024 election” with Eddie Liger Smith (American Communist Party) and Jorge Mujica, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of Chicago.
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Was die Nazis den Juden antaten, war unsagbar: die Sprachen hatten kein Wort dafür, denn selbst Massenmord hätte gegenüber dem Planvollen, Systematischen und Totalen noch geklungen wie aus der guten alten Zeit des Degerlocher Hauptlehrers. Und doch mußte ein Ausdruck gefunden werden, wollte man nicht den Opfern, deren es ohnehin zu viele sind, als daß ihre Namen erinnert werden könnten, noch den Fluch des Nicht gedacht soll ihrer werden antun. So hat man im Englischen den Begriff genocide geprägt.
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I IDENTIFY STRONGLY WITH the wrongly accused. So does America more broadly. And Trump has been wrongly accused. If you are in the right, then there is no need to lie. And they have lied about Trump.
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MILTON FRIEDMAN FAMOUSLY DECLARED, on the threshold of the neoliberal revolution he helped usher in, “We are all Keynesians now!” Also around this time, Michel Foucault said that “We are all Marxists now.” The point was to thus thrust aside, by treating as safely past, something longstanding as a banality that could be ignored — as Marx said the Young Hegelians had done to Hegel. Friedman, like Hegel, might be wrongly overlooked by subsequent generations as a “dead dog.”
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"What the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable: language has no word for it, since even mass murder would have sounded, in face of its planned, systematic totality, like something from the good old days of the serial killer. And yet a term needed to be found if the victims—in any case too many for their names to be recalled—were to be spared the curse of having no thoughts turned unto them. So in English the concept of genocide was coined."
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