“Our post-Hannah Arendt imaginations are haunted by the wrong figure: for every owl-eyed, mild-mannered pen-pusher clinically shuffling the euphemistic paperwork of oblivion, there were a hundred noisily dedicated louts revelling in the bloodbath. The gas chambers, our most enduring symbol of the catastrophe, were in fact anomalous: most of those annihilated did not die suddenly and surprised as the result of a deception, but only after protracted humiliations and torments to whose devising their persecutors devoted inexhaustible creative zeal.”

— Clive James

'Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator', a review of Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Clive James 151

Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator an… 1939–2019

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Clive James 151

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