Michael Burleigh Quotes (17 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Michael Burleigh: 17 quotes0 likes

Famous Michael Burleigh Quotes

“Marxist socialism also had dark nooks and crannies where Jews were regarded as money-mad capitalists or as an ‘obsolete’ people who refused to join the onward march of secular progress towards a moneyless society. Anarchists also suffered from this contagion,…”

Michael Burleigh

Source: The Third Reich: A New History (2000), p. 94

“Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis systematically murdered as many as 200,000 mentally ill or physically disabled people whom they stigmatised as 'life unworthy of life.'”

Michael Burleigh

This covert and complex series of operations was known as the ‘euthanasia programme.’

Death and Deliverance 'Euthanasia' in Germany, c.1900 to 1945,Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. i

“It's nonsense to talk about the war on Islamic terrorism as a clash of civilisations. The distinction is between civilisation and chaos. Whatever people may claim - and the desire to cut through the political processes can be very powerful - there is never any justification for violence.”

Michael Burleigh

As quoted in “Michael Burleigh: The reluctant guru,” John Crace, The Guardian, March 10, 2008 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/mar/11/academicexperts.highereducationprofile

“A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow.”

Michael Burleigh

Source: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (2006), p. 415

“Historically, of course, as has been pointed out by such thinkers as Marcel Gauchet and George Weigel Christianity had much to do with the notion of the autonomous, sacrosanct individual, with the preservation of a sphere beyond the state that anticipated civil society, with the notion of elected leadership, and with holding rulers accountable to higher powers.”

Michael Burleigh

Source: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (2006), p. xv

“Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experience at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere. This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by the nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties.”

Michael Burleigh

Source: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (2006), p. xii