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NauenThen

Monday Quote / What I'm reading

Forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim.

~ Cynthia Ozick, in Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

 

In The Sunflower, Wiesenthal ("the Nazi hunter") recounts an anecdote from his time in a work camp durin the Holocaust; two thirds of the book is then taken up with various thinkers who attempt to answer his question: What would you have done? An important question for all of us, especially now, when the lines between cowardice and bravery, between complicity and resistance are clearer every day. 

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