Could not the key be that mysterious human attribute – love – that like despair cannot be measured, that finds in every other living creature a part of oneself, just the inkling in our hearts that everyone is us and should always be treated as an end and not a means, especially at a time when the spiritual has been subordinated to the technical, everything has become means, and the ends have disappeared.
Ed Curtin, Great was its fall
The common understanding of genocides is that they are caused by bad people with evil in their hearts. This is The Christmas Carol version of the expunction of groups. Bob Cratchet was overworked and underpaid because his boss, Ebenezeer Scrooge, was a miser with a heart of adamant, not because he was a capitalist operating in a world of cut-throat competition. Scrooge had two choices: pay his employees as little as possible and work them as long as possible, or go under. It’s no surprise he chose the former.
How many progressives attribute the problems of the working class to the greed of corporations, as if greed can be disappeared in a poof of moral suasion, or a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future? Where does greed come from? Scrooge’s greed came, not from his heart, but from bourgeois society and the capitalist imperatives which enslaved him. “We shouldn’t despise human nature,” counseled the eighteenth-century philosophe, Denis Diderot, “but the despicable conventions that pervert it.” Scrooge’s perversion was the despicable convention of capitalism, not a lonely childhood and a love affair gone sour, as Dickens told the tale.
Stephen Gowans, Why does genocide happen again and again?
… the sigh of the oppressed … the heart of a heartless world … the soul of soulless conditions: the opium of the people …
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
The universe continues – see my recent post on the failure of success – to message me. Rising at daft o’clock this morning I sat for an hour in meditation, a once daily practice I now indulge if and only if I feel the need. On re-entry to the world of cause and effect I fired up the PC to add a footnote to yesterday’s post, Yanis Varoufakis on Venezuela, only to learn a new commentator, one Kilgore Tex, had beaten me to it.
Next I read a piece I received a few days ago; an as yet unpublished obituary by the playwright David Edgar on a dear friend who, with her eighty-fourth approaching, died on Thursday in the Swiss city of Basel (where she’d gone to do just that) two hours after we’d said our farewells on the phone.
I’ll write more about Lily Todd, and why I mean to do as she has, in a future post. Here it suffices that David’s rightly impersonal tribute, to a life-loving pioneer of socialist and feminist theatre in Britain and beyond, readied me 1 for the first of the texts I took my opening quotes from.
Though we’ve never met, I count Ed Curtin as a friend. Two days ago he sent me what I’ve called a ‘mountain stream of existential insight’:
Great Was Its Fall
When it comes, it comes on slowly
The day feels holy, a hush falls down
Whispered names, remembered faces
From desperate places, all gather ‘round
– Tom Paxton, “Come on, Holy”
Early morning and the first heavy snow is falling. It is beautiful. I walk around the lake in the holy hush. Alone except for two newly arrived ducks swimming on an open patch of icing water. When I stop to watch them, the soft sound of the falling snow grows gradually louder, beating drums, like truly listening to Beethoven, not the lionized one, about whose honored status James Agee wrote “is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas,” but the Beethoven whose music you won’t hear nicely but will hurt you and for which you should be glad.
Although I have come here to flee for an interlude the sound of the world’s anguish and to contemplate its beauty, I am deflected, as usual. How could I not be? Isn’t it true as the poet Rilke said, that “beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror,” and we, with all our strange thoughts inside us, try to swallow the sobs that accompany all our joys.
My brother-in-law died unexpectedly a few days ago.
I watch the ducks swim so placidly in circles and I wonder.
I realize that my thoughts are meaningless to most but me, a minor writer in a world of screamers, yet I record them here to learn what I may think and to share with a few other human souls the musings of a distraught man in a world made mad and running red like a butcher’s bench with the blood of the innocent shed by ruthless people. I am old but hope I am forever young with a strong foundation that will help me find some insights along this path. Who knows?
I have spent many decades lost in beauty and an intense scholar’s study of the propaganda the world’s rulers use to convince the gullible that their intentions are pure and their actions are carried out for the common good. Few have heeded my findings. Why should they?
Read the rest on Ed’s substack …
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The second piece is by Stephen Gowans, another North American I’ve yet to meet, though at his asking I did review – and six years on still frequently cite – his 2019 book, Israel: a beachhead in the Middle East. Where Ed’s is what you might call a spiritual – I dislike the word but haven’t a better one to hand – inquiry, Steve’s is a rationalist approach. Both are desperately needed – a truth I’m of late more acutely attuned to than usual – in the soulless conditions of a heartless world in the grip of madness with method in’t.
Today on his What’s Left site, Steve asks:
Why Does Genocide Happen Again and Again?
The genocide scholar Raz Segal has written an insightful article for the Guardian (“The genocide in Gaza is far from over,” 20 November, 2025) which I am flagging because it addresses a question that is almost never asked in public discourse: Why do genocides happen?
Segal asks this question because it is clear that the Nuremberg Trials, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and education programs designed to instil the idea of “never again”, have failed. For, in this post-Holocaust world, the slogan “never again” is belied by the reality of “again and again.”
The common understanding of genocides is that they are caused by bad people with evil in their hearts. This is The Christmas Carol version of the expunction of groups. Bob Cratchet was overworked and underpaid because his boss, Ebenezeer Scrooge, was a miser with a heart of adamant, not because he was a capitalist operating in a world of cut-throat competition. Scrooge had two choices: pay his employees as little as possible and work them as long as possible, or go under. It’s no surprise he chose the former.
How many progressives attribute the problems of the working class to the greed of corporations, as if greed can be disappeared in a poof of moral suasion, or a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future? Where does greed come from? Scrooge’s greed came, not from his heart, but from bourgeois society and the capitalist imperatives which enslaved him. 2 “We shouldn’t despise human nature,” counseled the eighteenth-century philosophe, Denis Diderot, “but the despicable conventions that pervert it.” Scrooge’s perversion was the despicable convention of capitalism, not a lonely childhood and a love affair gone sour, as Dickens told the tale.
What are the despicable conventions that pervert human nature to produce genocides? Read Steve’s answer on What’s Left … * * *