FRIDAY, 4 MARCH 2005
Tragedies such as the mass murder the Nazi’s perpetrated against the Jews and other minority groups reminds one of the hopeless suffering some people had to endure in the last months, and sometimes years, of their lives.
It places the themes I touch upon every now and then in a certain perspective – identity, consciousness, environments that are conducive to certain ends, etcetera. How important are these themes in the face of the tragedies that have swept people’s lives away, and that still destroy people on a daily basis? I mean is it not true that these tragedies are on a more primitive level of human experience than “identity, consciousness and environments that are conducive”?
Still, one can also say if an issue like identity, for example, is approached in a reasonable manner, if answers are sought in a process that is characterised by critical thinking, it will ultimately lessen the possibility of man-made tragedies, won’t it?
There is also the simple truth that intellectuals who became victims of tragedies like the Holocaust would have reflected upon exactly the kinds of themes that people ponder in more peaceful times. Topics about which I think so deeply that appear almost frivolous when I consider that people elsewhere in the world are at that very moment struggling for primitive survival are exactly the topics that would have been relevant for these intellectuals, were it not that the Sea of Time had cast them on the Coast of Tragedies.
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