#euro

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. ↗

— Carl Jung

#legitimate #neurosis #substitute #suffering

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#camus #communism #czechoslovakia #david-szmulevski #east-germany

I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let's say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that. ↗

— Renee Fleming

#classical #constantly #european #i #ideal

When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways. ↗

— Robert Kagan

#comes #defense #defining #determining #europe

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus: they agree on little and understand each other less and less. ↗

— Robert Kagan

#each #europeans #less #little #mars

In my view, America has never had the opportunity to enter paradise. Europe enjoys the paradise it enjoys, in part because the United States provides the overall security that allows Europe to live in a system where military power is not a major issue. ↗

— Robert Kagan

#america #because #enjoys #enter #europe

Well, I think he's right to notice that there is a difference in attitudes and even in the broadest sense of world view between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Which is old and which is new is an interesting question, and I almost think that maybe he's got it backwards. ↗

— Robert Kagan

#attitudes #backwards #between #broadest #broadest sense

My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis. ↗

— Anish Kapoor

#history #life #my life #neurosis #story

Conditions were so hard. To send the news out, telex was the only means, but telex was very rare in Africa. So if somebody was flying to Europe, we gave him correspondence to send after he arrived. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#after #arrived #conditions #correspondence #europe

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows. ↗

— Leon Kass

#crude #directly #follows #genetics #goes