{"author":"Jonathan Glover","author_id":"Jonathan+Glover","total_quotes":23,"quotes":[{"text":"The genocide [in Rwanda] was not a spontaneous eruption of tribal hatred, it was planned by people wanting to keep power. There was a long government-led hat campaign against the Tutsis.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["hatred","rwanda","rwandan-genocide","tribalism"],"id":11094,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"A phased decision can avoid there being a key moment when the moral issue about killing civilians has to be confronted.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["killing","morality","war"],"id":17475,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"Part of the Maoist project was the deliberate construction of a new moral identity. To do this it was necessary to destroy people’s previous sense of who they were and to make sure there was no room for it grow back.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["china","mao","maoism","maoist-china","morality"],"id":36942,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"Stalin’s Russia was a trap, in which even those running the system were caught. The leaders were trapped by fear of Stalin and even he was trapped by his fear of their desire to be rid of him. Everything he had to eat or drink had to be tasted by one of his colleagues first. Beria’s behavior at his death showed that his fear was only partly paranoia.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["fear","russia","stalin","stalinism","state-terrorism","totalitarianism"],"id":37640,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"The darker side of Nietzsche’s ideas was incorporated into the Nazi belief system. Part of the link was straightforward: some things Nietzsche said were pure Nazi doctrine. His comments that ‘The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction’ and that ‘the tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate’ could come from any work on racial hygiene. Nietzsche’s central contribution was not these explicitly Social Darwinist views, but his rejection of the Judeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak. Self-creation required hardness towards oneself: a strong will imposing coherence on conflicting impulses. It also requires hardness on others. Conflicts between the self-creative projects of different people made inevitable the attempt to dominate others. The whole of life was a struggle in which victory went to the brave and to the strong-willed. Noble human qualities, linked with the will to power, were brought out in combat but atrophied in peace. Compassion was weakness, cowardice and self-deception. The Judeo-Christian emphasis on it was poison. In drawing these consequences from his beliefs about the death of God and from Social Darwinism, Nietzsche provided the part of the Nazi belief system which ‘justified’ the cruel steps they took to implement their other beliefs.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["compassion","death-of-god","morality","morality-without-religion","nazism","nietzsche","race","racial-hygiene","social-darwinism","will"],"id":39350,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"The first step away from being manipulated, and towards a more autonomous outlook, is to stand back from a set of responses and think.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["autonomy","freedom","freedom-of-thought","manipulation"],"id":40906,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic ‘Racial Hygiene’ movement.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["mendelian","nazism","race","racial-superiority","social-darwinism"],"id":44434,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, “Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it?","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["atomic-bomb","hiroshima","killing","morality","responsibility"],"id":66927,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["morality","rationality"],"id":127455,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"},{"text":"Sir Edward Grey echoed this: More than one true thing may be said about the causes of the war, but the statement that comprises most truth is that militarism and the armaments inseparable from it made war inevitable. Armaments were intended to produce a sense of security in each nation – that was the justification put forward in defence of them. What they really did was to produce fear in everybody.","author":"Jonathan Glover","tags":["arms","arms-race","fear","militarism","war"],"id":147158,"author_id":"Jonathan+Glover"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":23,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}