Michael Burleigh quotes

A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow. (Michael Burleigh)
Historically, of course, as has been pointed out by such thinkers as Marcel Gauchet and George Weigel Christianity had much to do with the notion of the autonomous, sacrosanct individual, with the preservation of a sphere beyond the state that anticipated civil society, with the notion of elected leadership, and with holding rulers accountable to higher powers. View quote
Michael Burleigh
Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experience at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere. This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by the nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties. View quote
Michael Burleigh
Many of history's murderers have staked out the moral high ground, killing for love of confession or country, or in the name of social equality. View quote
Michael Burleigh
Just as the SS was the most implacable in its persecution of racially unwanted, so it single-mindedly pursued the goal of integrating all Germans on the basis of racial equality. Himmler sincerely meant it when he warned his German SS men to behave respectfully towards their foreign racial comrades. View quote
Michael Burleigh
Christianity regarded all earthly existence as transient, while the Nazi thought in terms of rendering life eternal through a sort of biological Great Chain of Being. The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the aeons. View quote
Michael Burleigh
If faith and hope were integral to National Socialism, so too, surprisingly enough, was charity. This ceased to be an uncomplicated reflection of human altruism, still less something individuals do discreetly for the good of their souls, or to reap tax exemptions and titles. Instead, it became a favoured means of mobilising communal sentimentality, that most underrated, but quintessential, characteristic of Nazi Germany. View quote
Michael Burleigh
For, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, Nazi Germany eschewed the doctrine of aggressive class war, whatever revolutionist animosities lingered, against the limp bourgeoisie in general. View quote
Michael Burleigh
The Enabling Law permitted the government to pass budgets and promulgate laws, including those altering the constitution, for four years without parliamentary approval. In democracies, constitutional amendments are especially solemn moments; here they were easier than changing the traffic regulations. None of the guarantees Hitler extended to the Churches or the judiciary in his address to the Reichstag amounted to a hill of beans. View quote
Michael Burleigh
The Nazis offered a combination of economic nationalism with unorthodox anti-cyclical measures to stimulate employment. View quote
Michael Burleigh
The National Socialists not only joined the Communists in denouncing Social Democratic bosses, but also practiced egalitarianism, unlike bourgeois parties. One should not underestimate the extent to which working-class people bitterly resented being treated as infantile inferiors by the middle and upper classes. (Michael Burleigh)
Nazi infiltration of interest groups and also the creation of parallel organizations, which gave the impression of a party listening attentively to particular grievances. It also reflected a totalitarian aspiration, in the sense that Nazis believed that no area of life was to remain unpolitical, and a very modern view that an aggregation of interests would facilitate an eventual political takeover. View quote
Michael Burleigh
Nazi ideology offered redemption from a national ontological crisis, to which it was attracted like a predatory shark to blood. View quote
Michael Burleigh
Within a remarkable short time totalitarian rule had been reimposed on half a continent using a combination of force and fraud. . . Although they were subjected to relentless assault from state-sponsored atheism, the Christian Churches remained the only licensed sanctuaries from the prevailing world of brutality and lies. Appropriately enough . . . they played an important role in the overthrow of Communism forty years later. View quote
Michael Burleigh
Marxist socialism also had dark nooks and crannies where Jews were regarded as money-mad capitalists or as an ‘obsolete' people who refused to join the onward march of secular progress towards a moneyless society. Anarchists also suffered from this contagion,... View quote
Michael Burleigh
Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis systematically murdered as many as 200,000 mentally ill or physically disabled people whom they stigmatised as 'life unworthy of life.' View quote
Michael Burleigh
It's nonsense to talk about the war on Islamic terrorism as a clash of civilisations. The distinction is between civilisation and chaos. Whatever people may claim - and the desire to cut through the political processes can be very powerful - there is never any justification for violence. View quote
Michael Burleigh

Michael Burleigh

Quotes count: 17