Posted by Naomi Alderman quoting and reviewing Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander in The Guardian Weekly (27.04.12).
” ‘Adolf Hitler was the last century’s greatest what?…Optimist… That’s why he was the biggest monster…Full of hope, the Fuhrer was. A dreamer! A romantic even, yes! If I just kill this one, gas that one, everything will be OK…Pessimists don’t build gas chambers.’
“This is of course a very Jewish way of phrasing a central insight of Buddhism. Pain cannot be avoided, but suffering can, because suffering is what happens when we imagine we can avoid pain.”
One other quote from the article: “It constantly surprises my non-Jewish friends that I don’t feel, as they do that the [Holocaust]is in the past. That I wonder if they’d hide me if the economy went really bad and people started voting for Nick Griffin.”
