[...] Think about daily life in Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon ... where are the outpourings of international solidarity in the face of constant atrocities perpetrated there? We should remember now that we live in a kind of glasshouse, in which terrorist violence for the most part exists in the public imagination as a threat, which explodes intermittently, in contrast to countries where--usually with the participation or complicity of the West--daily life consists of more or less uninterrupted terror and brutality.

With regard to the refugees, our proper aim should be to try and reconstruct global society on such a basis that desperate refugees will no be forced to wander around. Utopian as it my appear, this large-scale solution is the only realist one, and the display of altruistic virtues ultimately prevents the carrying out of this aim. The more we treat refugees as objects of humanitarian help, and allow the situation which compelled them to leave their countries to prevail, the more they come to Europe, until tensions reach boiling point, not only in the refugees' countries of origin but here as well. [...]

[...] The usual Left-liberal critique of the EU--it's basically OK, just with something of a 'democratic deficit'--betrays the same naivety as the critics of ex-Communist countries who basically supported them while complaining about the lack of democracy. In both cases, however, these friendly critics failed to realize that the 'democratic deficit' was a necessary, inbuilt part of the structure.

[...] what happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for, say, racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to draw the conclusion that emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of legitimization. No, people quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing. There is no short-cut here.

[...] culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the 'real' economic infrastructure, but, more and more, a central ingredient of our mainstream 'real' economy. More than a decade ago, Jeremy Rifkin designated this new stage in our economy 'cultural capitalism'. The defining feature of 'postmodern' capitalism is the direct commodification of our experience itself. Less and less are we buying products (material objects) that we want to own; increasingly, we buy life experiences, experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption. In doing so, we are participating in a lifestyle--or, as Mark Slouka puts it succinctly, 'we become the consumers of our own lives'. [...]

[...] the cruel irony of anti-Eurocentrism is that, on behalf of anti-colonialism, one criticizes the West at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer needs Western cultural values in order to function smoothly, and is doing quite well with the 'alternative modernity'--the non-democratic form of capitalist modernization--to be found in Asian capitalism. In short, critics of Eurocentrism are rejecting Western cultural values at the very moment when, critically reinterpreted, many of them--egalitarianism, fundamental human rights, the welfare state, to name a few--can serve as a weapon against capitalist globalisation. Have we already forgotten, in fact, that the entire idea of Communist emancipation as envisaged by Marx is a thoroughly 'Eurocentric' one?

[...] there is nothing noble or sublime about what Benjamin called divine violence--it is 'divine' precisely on account of its excessively destructive character. Second, we have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable us to open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. There is a memorable passage in Ruth Klüger's Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, in which she describes a conversation with some advanced PhD candidates in Germany:

Auschwitz was no instructional institution ... You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps, I hear myself saying, with my voice rising, and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for? They were the most useless, pointless establishments imaginable.

This, perhaps, is the most depressing lesson of horror and suffering: there is nothing to be learned from it. The only way out of the vicious circle of this depression is to change the terrain toward concrete social and economic analysis.

[...] the hard lesson for the refugees is that 'there is no Norway', even in Norway. They will have to learn to censor their dreams: instead of chasing them in reality, they should focus on changing reality.

As much as a good-hearted rich man may want to think that underneath all his wealth, he is just the same kind of human being as the poor are, he is wrong. Once we have our social (class) positions, there is no zero-level of humanity where we are all the same. He is not one of them: they are not in the same boat, and it would be extremely presumptuous to think so.

[...] the way individuals experience their situation: there is no way for them to step out of their world and somehow see, from 'outside', how things 'really are'? Ideology does not reside primarily in stories invented (by those in power) to deceive others, it resides in stories invented by subjects to deceive themselves. [...]