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The Different American Experience Of The 20th Century Is Crucial Because The Lesson Of The Century For Europe, Which Essentially Is That The Human Condition Is Tragic, Led It To Have A Build A Welfare System And A Set Of Laws And Social Arrangements That Are More Prophylactic Than Idealistic. It's Not About Building Perfect Futures; It's About Preventing Terrible Pasts. I Think That Is Something That Europeans In The Second Half Of The 20th Century Knew In Their Bones And Americans Never Did, And It's One Of The Big Differences Between The Two Western Cultures.

-Tony Judt

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The Different American Experience

Tony Judt

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The Different American Experience Of The 20th Century Is Crucial Because The Lesson Of The Century For Europe, Which Essentially Is That The Human Condition Is Tragic, Led It To Have A Build A Welfare System And A Set Of Laws And Social Arrangements That Are More Prophylactic Than Idealistic. It's Not About Building Perfect Futures; It's About Preventing Terrible Pasts. I Think That Is Something That Europeans In The Second Half Of The 20th Century Knew In Their Bones And Americans Never Did, And It's One Of The Big Differences Between The Two Western Cultures.

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Reality Is A Powerful Solvent.

We Have Responsibilities For Others, Not Just Across Space But Across Time. We Have Responsibilities To People Who Came Before Us. They Left Us A World Of Institutions, Ideas Or Possibilities For Which We, In Turn, Owe Them Something. One Of The Things We Owe Them Is Not To Squander Them.

But I'm English. We Don't Do Uplifting.

American Social Arrangements, Economic Arrangements, The Degree Of Inequality In American Life, The Relatively Small Role Played By The Government In American Public Life And So Forth, Compares To Exactly The Opposite Conditions In Most Of The European Societies.

Love, It Seems To Me, Is That Condition In Which One Is Most Contentedly Oneself.

The American Financial And Military Commitment Really Only Kicks In With Korea. Not That Korea Was The Real Game For The Americans; Their Real Fear Was That This Was Just The Prelude To A Second Korea In Germany. We Now Know From The Soviet Archives That The Last Thing Stalin Was Going To Do Was Start A War In Central Europe. The Americans Didn't Know That, And It Was The Fear That He Might Which Transformed Nato From A Sort Of Shell Game Into A Real Military Alliance. That Total Commitment Basically Transformed The Marshal Plan Into Military Aid.

Contrast 1968, When The Ceo Of General Motors Took Home, In Pay And Benefits, About Sixty-six Times The Amount Paid To A Typical Gm Worker. Today The Ceo Of Wal-mart Earns Nine Hundred Times The Wages Of His Average Employee. Indeed, The Wealth Of The Wal-mart Founder's Family In 2005 Was Estimated At About The Same ($90 Billion) As That Of The Bottom 40% Of The Us Population: 120 Million People.

The People Whose Necks Hurt When I Write About The Middle East Tend To Live In Brooklyn Or Boca Raton: The Kind Of Zionist Who Pays Another Man To Live In Israel For Him. I Have Nothing But Contempt For Such People.

History Can Show You That It Was One Pile Of Bad Stuff After Another. It Can Also Show You That There's Been Tremendous Progress In Knowledge, Behaviour, Laws, Civilisation. It Cannot Show You That There Was A Meaning Behind It.

It's Important To Remember That World War Ii Was Experienced Very Much As A Continuity In That Sense. Most Of World War Ii In Most Of Europe Wasn't A War; It Was An Occupation. The War Was At The Beginning And The End, Except In Germany And The Soviet Union, And Even There Really Only At The End. So The Rest Of Time It's An Occupation, Which In Some Ways Was Experienced As An Extension Of The Interwar Period. World War Ii Was Simply An Extreme Form, In A Whole New Key, Of The Disruption Of Normal Life That Began In 1914.

My History Writing Was Based On What I Saw In Strange, Exotic Places Rather Than Just Reading Books.

I Don't Believe That One Should Have One-size-fits-all Moral Rules For International Political Action.

I Do Think We're On The Edge Of A Terrifying World, And That Many Young People Know That But Don't Know How To Talk About It.

I Worry That We Have Forgotten That The De-ideologized, De-politicized, Uncontentious Public Space Of The Last 50 Years As Europeans Have Experienced It Is Not The Normal Human Condition. We Shall Be Sorry To Have Abandoned A Little Too Quickly The Institutions That Were Set Up By Our Parents And Grandparents To Protect Themselves Against A Return Of The Bad Old World. Because The Bad Old World Can Still Come Back To Haunt You.

We Need To Start Talking About Inequality Again; We Need To Start Talking About The Inequities And Unfairnesses And The Injustices Of An Excessively Divided Society, Divided By Wealth, By Opportunity, By Outcome, By Assets And So Forth.

Judaism For Me Is A Sensibility Of Collective Self-questioning And Uncomfortable Truth-telling. I Feel A Debt Of Responsibility To This Past. It Is Why I Am Jewish.

Self Questioning

After 1945 What Happened Was Rather The Opposite: With One Major Exception Boundaries Stayed Broadly Intact And People Were Moved Instead.

We No Longer Ask Of A Judicial Ruling Or A Legislative Act: Is It Good? Is It Fair? Is It Just? Is It Right? Will It Help Bring About A Better Society Or A Better World? Those Used To Be The Political Questions, Even If They Invited No Easy Answers. We Must Learn Once Again To Pose Them.

Israel Today Is Bad For The Jews.

All Modern U.s. Presidents Are Perforce Politicians, Prisoners Of Their Past Pronouncements, Their Party, Their Constituency, And Their Colleagues.

Apparently, The Line You Take On Israel Trumps Everything Else In Life.

If We Remain Grotesquely Unequal, We Shall Lose All Sense Of Fraternity: And Fraternity, For All Its Fatuity As A Political Objective, Turns Out To Be The Necessary Condition Of Politics Itself.

We Know What Things Cost But Have No Idea What They Are Worth.

The 60s Were A Continuation Of The 50s Much More Than People Realized. Certainly In Some Countries, Like Britain, There Was Still A Culture Of Deference, Whereas In The 70s We Really Are In A Time Of Angry Transition. The Generation That Came Into Young Adulthood In The 70s Couldn't Find Jobs; That Wasn't True In My Generation. They Entered A Time When Two Depressing Things Hit Them Both At The Same Time.

Yugoslavia Served As A Reminder That The Lessons Of World War Two Were Only Partially Learned. There's A Great Line Someone Wrote In The Middle Of The 1990s, At The Time When Clinton Was Agonizing About Whether Or Not To Go Into Bosnia: "everyone Says, 'never Again. Never Again.' But All They Really Mean Is Never Again Will Germans Kill Jews In The Streets Of Warsaw".

Love Consists In Leaving The Loved One Space To Be Themselves While Providing The Security Within Which That Self May Flourish.

I Started Work On My First French History Book In 1969; On 'socialism In Provence' In 1974; And On The Essays In Marxism And The French Left In 1978. Conversely, My First Non-academic Publication, A Review In The 'tls', Did Not Come Until The Late 1980s, And It Was Not Until 1993 That I Published My First Piece In The 'new York Review.'

We Need To Learn... How War Brutalises And Degrades Winners And Losers Alike And What Happens To Us When, Having Heedlessly Waged War For No Good Reason, We Are Encouraged To Inflate And Demonise Our Enemies In Order To Justify That War's Indefinite Continuance.

I Was Born Accidentally. I Lived Accidentally In London. We Nearly Migrated To New Zealand. So Much Of My Life Has Been A Product Of Chance, I Can't See A Meaning In It At All.

We Are Not Merely Historians But Also And Always Citizens.

The East European Small Countries Have A Sense Of Betrayal, Of Having Been Forgotten By Western Leaders.

The Military System Of A Nation Is Not An Independent Section Of The Social System But An Aspect Of Its Totality.

There Were Various Different Keys In Which European History Had Tended To Be Written. One Is The Lyrical Key, The Idea That Somehow, In Bretton-woods In 1945, A Bunch Of Well-intentioned Men Got Together And Said, "this Can't Go On; Let's Build A European Union." And It Just Wasn't Like That.

Although The United States Lost A Quarter Of A Million Men And Women, Civilians And Soldiers, In World War Ii, That's Considerably Less Than The Russians Lost In Soldiers At The Battle Of Stalingrad Alone. It's Important To Convey To Countries And To People And To Generations Who Have No Experience Of The 20th Century As It Was Lived In Europe Just How Catastrophic It Was.

The Rottenness Of Politics In Yugoslavia Didn't Come As A Surprise. The Main Lesson Is That This Is A War Which Could Have Easily Been Stopped By Europe. What Was Lacking Was Any Will To Do So. It's An Irony Of The Achievement Of Europe That It Had Lived For 40 Years Under The Assumption Of The Unimaginability Of Internal Wars, So It Didn't Know What To Do With It When It Was Confronted With One Close Up.

I've Lost Count Of The Interviews I've Done About My Illness And Its Relationship To My Ideas And Writing.

The Pleasures Of Mental Agility Are Much Overstated, Inevitably - As It Now Appears To Me - By Those Not Exclusively Dependent Upon Them.

How Should We Begin To Make Amends For Raising A Generation Obsessed With The Pursuit Of Material Wealth And Indifferent To So Much Else?

Today, Neither Left Nor Right Can Find Their Footing.

Words Can Make The Illness A Subject I Can Master, And Not One That One Simply Emotes Over.

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Social Democracy Does Not Represent An Ideal Future; It Does Not Even Represent The Ideal Past.

Unlike Memory, Which Confirms And Reinforces Itself, History Contributes To The Disenchantment Of The World.

History Always Happens To Us And Nothing Ever Stays The Same.

My Generation Those Who Were Students In The Late 60s Was Always, In The Words Of The Who, Talking About Our Generation. That's What We Thought Of Ourselves, As The Most Important Thing Since Sliced Bread. And The "we" That We Meant Was Really The Western Europeans And American Generation. And As I Think Back I Suppose I Have A Sense Of Guilt On Behalf Of My Generation, A Sense That We Were Terribly Provincial And Didn't Understand The Really Important Stuff That Was Going On In Eastern Europe.

Above All, The Thrall In Which An Ideology Holds A People Is Best Measured By Their Collective Inability To Imagine Alternatives.

As Recently As The 1970s, The Idea That The Point Of Life Was To Get Rich And That Governments Existed To Facilitate This Would Have Been Ridiculed: Not Only By Capitalism's Traditional Critics But Also By Many Of Its Staunchest Defenders.

I Can Still Boss People Around. I Can Still Write. I Can Still Read. I Can Still Eat, And I Can Still Have Very Strong Views.

It Does Irritate Me When I Am Described As A Controversialist And Commentator On Israel.

There Is Nothing To Be Said For Being Crippled. You Don't See The World Better Or Clearer, Nor Do You Develop Some Special Set Of Skills By Way Of Compensation.

If We Have Learned Nothing Else From The 20th Century, We Should At Least Have Grasped That The More Perfect The Answer, The More Terrifying Its Consequences. Incremental Improvements Upon Unsatisfactory Circumstances Are The Best That We Can Hope For, And Probably All We Should Seek.

I Know Exactly How And Where I Am Going To Die. The Only Question Is When.

Undergraduates Today Can Select From A Swathe Of Identity Studies.... The Shortcoming Of All These Para-academic Programs Is Not That They Concentrate On A Given Ethnic Or Geographical Minority; It Is That They Encourage Members Of That Minority To Study Themselves - Thereby Simultaneously Negating The Goals Of A Liberal Education And Reinforcing The Sectarian And Ghetto Mentalities They Purport To Undermine.

What I Am Against Is False Optimism: The Notion Either That Things Have To Go Well, Or Else That They Tend To, Or Else That The Default Condition Of Historical Trajectories Is Characteristically Beneficial In The Long-run.

If Words Fall Into Disrepair, What Will Substitute? They Are All We Have

I Don't Believe In An Afterlife. I Don't Believe In A Single Or Multiple Godhead. I Respect People Who Do, But I Don't Believe It Myself.

If Active Or Concerned Citizens Forfeit Politics, They Thereby Abandon Their Society To Its Most Mediocre And Venal Public Servants

The Different American Experience Of The 20th Century Is Crucial Because The Lesson Of The Century For Europe, Which Essentially Is That The Human Condition Is Tragic, Led It To Have A Build A Welfare System And A Set Of Laws And Social Arrangements That Are More Prophylactic Than Idealistic. It's Not About Building Perfect Futures; It's About Preventing Terrible Pasts. I Think That Is Something That Europeans In The Second Half Of The 20th Century Knew In Their Bones And Americans Never Did, And It's One Of The Big Differences Between The Two Western Cultures.

As Citizens Of A Free Society, We Have A Duty To Look Critically At Our World. But If We Think We Know What Is Wrong, We Must Act Upon That Knowledge.

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