Slavery, the Holocaust, and the dangerous arithmetic of atrocity
by P.H. Bloecker
Gold Coast QLD Australia, 25 March 2026
The UN General Assembly voted yesterday on a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. 123 nations voted in favour. Three voted against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. 52 abstained — among them all 27 members of the European Union and the United Kingdom.
The resolution is non-binding. It is political. And its most dangerous word stands in the superlative: the gravest.
Because a superlative implies a ranking. And a ranking of human catastrophes inevitably raises a question that nobody in that chamber spoke aloud — but that everyone present heard:
Is the slave trade worse than the Holocaust? And is that even a question we are permitted to ask?
I. Frankl and Benjamin Were Jews
In recent days I have been writing about Viktor Frankl and Walter Benjamin — two Jewish intellectuals from the German-speaking world, both caught in the machinery of the same annihilation, both witnesses to the absolute limit of human barbarism. Frankl survived Auschwitz. Benjamin died fleeing it, in a hotel room in Port Bou on the Spanish border, on the night of 25 September 1940.
Israel voted No yesterday. That is not coincidental. The Israeli delegation read the same subtext every attentive observer read: the phrase gravest crime against humanity is an implicit hierarchy. And that hierarchy positions the slave trade — deliberately or not — above the Holocaust in the moral order of priority of the international community.
That is politically explosive. And philosophically untenable.
II. Can Crimes Against Humanity Be Ranked?
The question is not academic. It has real consequences — for reparations claims, for international jurisprudence, for whose history appears in school curricula and whose pain becomes law.
The historian Yehuda Bauer, one of the foremost Holocaust scholars of the twentieth century, argued throughout his career that the Holocaust was sui generis — a singular crime that could not be placed in a sequence with others. His argument: for the first and so far only time in history, a modern industrial state deployed its entire bureaucratic, military, and technological apparatus with the explicit aim not of subjugating a people, not of exploiting them, but of biologically erasing them from the earth entirely. No economic motive. No territorial logic. Annihilation as an end in itself.
The transatlantic slave trade followed a different — no less brutal — logic. The enslaved were valuable precisely because they were alive and could work. The horrors were immense: dehumanisation, the destruction of families, the erasure of cultures, the creation of an inherited poverty that remains structurally operative today. But the goal was extraction, not extinction.
Does that distinction make one worse than the other?
Most serious ethicists answer: the question itself is the error.
Every human face presents an absolute, irreducible demand. You cannot weigh one face against another.
— Emmanuel Levinas, Holocaust survivor and philosopher
Elie Wiesel was more direct still: he refused all comparison. Every genocide, he argued, is unique to those who suffered it. To rank suffering is to diminish all suffering simultaneously — to treat the victims not as human beings but as data points in a comparative exercise.
This is also Frankl’s implicit position. His entire framework of Logotherapy rests on the absolute uniqueness of each human life and each human suffering. The logic of the will to meaning forbids the ranking of catastrophe — because meaning is not comparative. It is singular, concrete, unrepeatable.
III. The Colonial Motherlands and Their Abstention
And yet — the EU abstained. Britain abstained. The official argument was legal: the formulations in the text were too complex, the juridical implications too unclear, the respect for the subject matter too great to vote yes.
That is diplomatic language for: we are afraid of the consequences.
Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Denmark — these are the colonial motherlands. They did not observe the slave trade from the sidelines. They invented it, financed it, gave it legal frameworks, and ran it for four centuries. The wealth on which European industrialisation was built rests to a considerable degree on the bodies of enslaved Africans.
They know this. And that is precisely why they abstained.
Because a Yes would have meant: we acknowledge. And acknowledgement — as they learned from Germany’s post-war history — leads to reparations. Germany has paid billions to Holocaust survivors and the State of Israel since 1952. Not one European nation has paid a cent in reparations for slavery.
That difference cannot be justified on moral grounds. It is political, geographical — and racist in its consequences, even if no one in the chamber was willing to use that word.
IV. Money Does Not Heal — But Silence Destroys
My deeper objection to reparations in the form of financial transfers is a different one. The slave trade was so catastrophic in scale, duration, and civilisational destructiveness that no financial transaction can calibrate it. Four centuries. Millions of human beings. Generations of broken genealogies, erased languages, destroyed cultures, compounding poverty that no cheque can reverse.
A payment is also a receipt. And a receipt carries the notation: settled and closed.
What would actually help is what no Western government is seriously offering: debt cancellation for African and Caribbean nations, structural trade reform, and above all honest historical education in European and American classrooms. None of that costs what a cheque costs. All of it costs more politically.
Healing is medicine. Healing is acknowledgement. Healing is the naming of truth — without subtext, and without superlatives.
V. What Actually Happened in New York Yesterday
Yesterday in New York, 123 nations said that the slave trade was a crime. That is right and necessary and long overdue.
But the word gravest was a political mistake. Not because the slave trade was not immeasurable in its horror. But because superlatives in the language of suffering always set victims against one another. And because this particular hierarchy — this is the bitter subtext — serves precisely those who abstained from everything: the colonial motherlands, who want to say neither Yes nor No, because both cost them something they are not prepared to pay.
Benjamin’s angel of history stares back at the wreckage. The EU looked away yesterday.
Frankl would ask: what attitude do the heirs of perpetrators take toward unavoidable historical truth?
The answer New York gave yesterday was: we abstain.
Both crimes were absolute. Both were total for those who suffered them. The ranking is not philosophy, it is politics. And the politics reveals, with uncomfortable precision, whose suffering Europe is prepared to name, and whose it is still not.
P.H. Bloecker is a retired Director of Studies and has been writing about education, literature, and the lived life since 2015 at bloecker.wordpress.com and bloeckerblog.com. He lives on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Trained in German language and literature, American Studies, and linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin, he worked across Germany, Namibia, and Queensland over a forty-three year career. He writes from the intersection of German Idealist philosophy, critical theory, and lived experience across three continents.
Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten, sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten. Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen mit Pulver und Blei: Die Gedanken sind frei!
Ich denke was ich will und was mich beglücket, doch alles in der Still', und wie es sich schicket. Mein Wunsch, mein Begehren kann niemand verwehren, es bleibet dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei!
Und sperrt man mich ein im finsteren Kerker, das alles sind rein vergebliche Werke. Denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken und Mauern entzwei, die Gedanken sind frei!
Drum will ich auf immer den Sorgen entsagen und will mich auch nimmer mit Grillen mehr plagen. Man kann ja im Herzen stets lachen und scherzen und denken dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei
On the night of 25 September 1940, Walter Benjamin died in a small hotel room in Port Bou, a Spanish border town at the foot of the Pyrenees. He had crossed the mountains on foot that day, carrying a heavy black briefcase he refused to put down under any circumstances. Spanish border guards informed him his transit visa was invalid. He would be returned to France — and to the Gestapo — the following morning. He did not wait for morning.
Four years later, in the autumn of 1944, Viktor Frankl arrived at Auschwitz. He had sewn the manuscript of his first book into the lining of his coat. It was confiscated and destroyed on the selection ramp. He had nothing left but his life — and, as he would later argue, the one freedom no external power could remove: the choice of his attitude toward what was happening to him.
Two German-speaking Jewish intellectuals. The same machinery of annihilation bearing down on both. Two irreconcilably different responses — not to politics, but to the deepest philosophical question a human being can face: what remains when everything is taken?
This essay is an attempt to hold those two responses together without resolving them too quickly into a comfortable moral. Both men were serious. Both were right about something the other could not see. And the tension between them is still alive.
I. The Burned Visa and the Heavy Briefcase
The biographical facts matter here, because neither man’s philosophy was merely theoretical. Both tested their ideas against the hardest possible reality — and the testing was not metaphorical.
Frankl had received a United States immigration visa in 1941. He was already known internationally. The road out was open. But his parents were elderly and could not emigrate, and Frankl — in a moment of moral seriousness that deserves to be called exactly that — chose to stay. He burned the visa. In Man’s Search for Meaning he describes the decision without sentimentality: he simply could not leave his parents to what was coming. Within a year he, his wife Tilly, and his parents were deported to Theresienstadt. His father died there. His mother was gassed at Auschwitz. His wife died in Bergen-Belsen. His brother perished in the camps. Frankl alone survived, liberated by American forces in April 1945 from a satellite camp of Dachau.
Benjamin’s trajectory ran in the opposite direction — outward, westward, always just ahead of the closing net. He had left Germany in 1933, lived in Paris through the 1930s on a precarious stipend from the Institut für Sozialforschung in exile. When Paris fell in June 1940 he was briefly interned as a German national — enemy alien to the country that had already stripped him of citizenship. Released, he joined the stream of refugees moving south toward the Spanish border. His guide over the Pyrenees, Lisa Fittko, recalled that Benjamin was physically unwell, suffering from a heart condition, and that the mountain crossing nearly killed him. Yet he would not surrender the briefcase. She asked him what was in it. A manuscript, he said. More important than his own life.
The briefcase was never found. What it contained — most likely a final version of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, the essay we know perhaps only as a draft — disappeared with him. We are reading, it may be, an incomplete thought.
Two manuscripts. The same catastrophe. One reconstructed on stolen scraps of paper in a death camp. One lost forever at a border crossing in the dark.
The symmetry is almost too literary to be true. But it is true. And it tells us something about the difference between the two men before we have read a single line of their philosophy.
II. The Angel and the Will
Benjamin’s last completed essay — written in Paris in the early months of 1940, while the Wehrmacht was preparing to cross into France — contains the most devastating image in twentieth-century intellectual history. He is describing Paul Klee’s small painting Angelus Novus, which he had owned since 1921 and which he carried with him into exile:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, IX (1940)
This is not pessimism. It is something more precise and more uncompromising: a demand that we see history as it actually is, not as the story of improvement and accumulation that liberal modernity tells about itself. The catastrophe is not an interruption of history. It is the truth of history, laid bare. The angel cannot look away, and Benjamin will not permit us to look away either.
The philosophical lineage is clear: Marx read through Jewish messianism, mediated by the Frankfurt School’s critique of Enlightenment reason. Horkheimer and Adorno, writing Dialectic of Enlightenment in California while Auschwitz was operating, asked the same question from a safer distance: how did the reason that promised emancipation produce the industrial murder of a people? Benjamin’s answer was already implicit in the image of the angel: it produced it because it was always already heading there. Progress and catastrophe are not opposites. They are the same storm.
Now set against this Frankl’s central argument, formulated not in Paris in 1940 but in Auschwitz in 1944 — from inside the catastrophe, not theorising it from outside.
Where Benjamin’s angel faces backward, paralysed by the accumulating wreckage, Frankl insists on a forward-facing posture — not because the wreckage is less real, but because the human being who is standing in it must still answer the question of how to live today. Frankl never denies the horror. He survived it. But he observed — in himself and in those around him — that the prisoners who retained something to live for, some person to return to, some work to complete, some meaning however small and however contingent, were more likely to survive than those who had lost all orientation toward the future.
The philosophical claim that follows is not a piece of therapy. It is a metaphysics. The human being, Frankl argues, is constitutively a meaning-seeking creature — not driven primarily by pleasure as Freud held, not by power as Adler held, but by the need for significance, for a life that points toward something beyond itself. When this need is met, even in the direst circumstances, the person remains human. When it is extinguished, something essential collapses.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
The contrast with Benjamin could not be sharper. Benjamin: history is catastrophe; the angel sees it and cannot turn away. Frankl: yes, the catastrophe is real; and within it the human being retains the one freedom no external force can abolish. Benjamin looks at the wreckage. Frankl looks at what, even within the wreckage, the human being can still choose.
They are not contradicting each other. They are looking at the same abyss from different positions — Benjamin from the outside, in flight, theorising what is coming; Frankl from the inside, having lived it, finding what survives.
III. Different Catastrophes, Different Inheritances
It would be too simple to say that Benjamin despaired and Frankl affirmed. The reality is more nuanced and more interesting.
Benjamin did not die because he lost hope in any simple sense. He died because a bureaucratic contingency — the transit visa, the border policy, the single night — closed the exit at the precise moment he reached it. His death was, in the most literal sense, a matter of hours. The group he travelled with was waved through the following morning. This fact, once known, cannot be unknown. It does not allow us to read his death as philosophical resignation. It was a bureaucratic murder carried out by exhaustion, fear, and the random cruelty of historical timing.
And Frankl did not simply endure. He had a psychiatric framework — Logotherapy — already formed before his imprisonment, and the camps became, in his own account, the unwilling laboratory in which it was tested. This gives his testimony an unusual dual character: it is both witness and theory, both unbearable personal loss and intellectual argument. The two cannot be fully separated, and we should not try. But we should be honest that Frankl arrived in Auschwitz with conceptual tools that most of his fellow prisoners did not have. His survival was not only a matter of will. It was also, in part, a matter of intellectual formation.
Benjamin arrived at Port Bou with a philosophy that saw history as catastrophe — and was then killed by a catastrophic history. The irony is not bitter. It is simply exact. His thought and his fate achieved a terrible coherence.
Frankl arrived at Auschwitz with a philosophy that insisted on the human capacity to find meaning under any conditions — and then survived conditions under which almost no one did. His thought and his fate achieved a different coherence, no less terrible in its origins, more hopeful in its outcome.
What we cannot do — what intellectual honesty forbids — is use one to invalidate the other. Frankl’s survival does not prove that those who died lacked meaning. Benjamin’s death does not prove that his philosophy was wrong. The catastrophe was not a test of ideas. It was a crime.
IV. Sebald’s Shadow
No essay that places Benjamin and Frankl in dialogue can avoid W.G. Sebald, because Sebald spent his entire literary career in the space between them, drawn to Benjamin’s backward-facing angel, haunted by the lost manuscripts, circling the ruins of Central European Jewish culture that both men embodied and that the Nazis destroyed in a single decade.
Sebald never writes about the Holocaust directly. He approaches it obliquely, through buildings, photographs, train timetables, the unreliable memories of witnesses. His narrator in Austerlitz moves through Europe the way Benjamin’s angel faces history: seeing the wreckage, accumulating detail, unable to reconstruct what was lost, unable to look away. The structural method, fragmentary, digressive, image-laden, refusing resolution, is itself a form of argument: the past cannot be made whole. To pretend otherwise is a form of violence toward those who were destroyed.
And yet, and this is the Frankl counter-pressure that Sebald never fully acknowledges, the act of writing, the act of bearing witness, the act of making something that will outlast the writer, is itself a gesture in the direction of meaning. Sebald’s novels exist. They carry the names and faces of the destroyed. They make the reader uneasy in precisely the way Frankl said unavoidable suffering must be held: with full awareness, without flinching, and without surrender.
Port Bou has a memorial now. The Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan installed it in 1994: Passages. A rusted steel walkway descends into the cliff face above the sea, angled toward the water, open at the end to the Mediterranean. There is no explanatory text. Only Benjamin’s name, his dates, and a single fragment from the Theses:
It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned.
— Walter Benjamin
Sebald would have photographed it. Grainy. Without caption. The image would have appeared mid-sentence in a paragraph about something apparently unrelated, and the reader would have felt, without being able to say exactly why, that something essential had just been said.
V. What the Comparison Asks of Us
The question this essay has been circling is not primarily historical. It is present-tense.
Benjamin’s diagnosis, that modernity produces catastrophe as reliably as it produces comfort, that progress and barbarism are not opposites but companions, has not aged poorly. The twentieth century gave us Auschwitz, the Gulag, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda. The twenty-first has continued the syllabus. Anyone who reads Benjamin’s angel image in 2026 and feels it does not apply is not paying attention.
Frankl’s counter-claim, that within any catastrophe, however extreme, the human being retains the freedom of attitude, the capacity for meaning, the choice of how to respond, has also not aged poorly. The existential vacuum he diagnosed in the 1950s, the inner emptiness that hides behind abundance and distraction, is now a documented mass phenomenon. FOMO, burnout, the collapse of meaning-structures in secular societies: Frankl named the disease before the culture had the vocabulary for it.
The tension between them is not resolvable, and that is precisely its value. Benjamin tells us: see the catastrophe clearly. Do not let comfort or optimism anaesthetise your historical perception. The wreckage is real. Frankl tells us: yes, the wreckage is real. Now, what will you do with the day you have been given?
These are not competing answers to the same question. They are answers to different questions that any serious person must hold simultaneously. The question of how to read history, and the question of how to live within it, are not the same question — even though they are inseparable.
What both men shared, under the differences, is worth naming at the close. Both were formed by the same Central European Jewish intellectual culture. Both lost almost everything to the same machinery of destruction. Both wrote, under conditions that would have justified silence, because they believed that ideas matter, that how human beings think about their situation shapes what they are capable of, for good and for ill.
And both left us something we are still reading.
The briefcase that went over the Pyrenees and was never found, that loss is permanent. No amount of interpretation recovers what Benjamin may have written on those final pages. Frankl’s manuscript, reconstructed from memory on stolen scraps of paper in a labour camp near Dachau, became one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century, translated into more than fifty languages.
One text lost. One text found. The catastrophe took both men to the edge of silence. One fell silent. One spoke — and kept speaking until he was ninety-two years old.
Between Port Bou and Auschwitz lies not a choice between despair and hope, but a demand: see clearly, and live anyway.
Further Reading
Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940) — in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968)
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project — fragments on modernity, history, and the city
Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning (1946 / English 1959)
Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz (2001)
Lisa Fittko: Escape through the Pyrenees (1985) — the account of the mountain crossing
Dani Karavan: Passages — memorial installation, Port Bou, 1994
P.H. Bloecker is a retired Director of Studies and has been writing about education, literature, and ideas since 2015 at phbloecker.wordpress.com and bloecker.wordpress.com. He lives on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Trained in German language and literature, American Studies, and linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin, he worked across Germany, Namibia, and Queensland over a forty-three year career. He writes from the intersection of German Idealist philosophy, critical theory, and lived experience across three continents.
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
Since I read stories and books and saw the first black and white films on TV since 1956, I wished I found a Tarnkappe, making me invisible.
These and other stories have faszinated me a lot, identifying with my heroes.
And the giants and the large birds carrying me out into the world.
I read every book I could find.
Even Comics with Tarzan and Jane in the jungle.
Now at the age of 76 and born in 1949 I have the time to sort things out a bit.
Connecting the dots …
Like Steve Jobs phrased it before he went up there into the clouds.
Of Google, I would guess.
Read this about Albo and Pauline Hanson in Australia, friend of Gina Reinhard, the Mining Queen of Australia:
One Nation (Australian Party gained 20% while the Liberals lost 19%):
Credit phb
Just listen very carefully and word by word:
This is just one example of Media and how Propaganda is designed:
Greetings from George Orwell and the Animal Farm
Soma in Huxley’s New World.
Stupidity and the melting down of Liberals or FDP in Germany and the so called Middle of Grand Coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD in Germany (Australian Labour Party in OZ with Albo).
The man is trying as good as he can …however ….
Pauline Hanson gained 20%
The Farage Kasper or better Clown in Britain is called a Reformer
He was with Boris Johnson one of the Masters of Brexit.
Masters of War like Trump or former US Presidents have been characterized well enough by Bob Dylan.
One of the reasons for his Nobel Prize, there are many more reasons for sure.
Cockatoo Island is one of the great Sydney stops — and it’s right on the F8 ferry line from Circular Quay.
Credit phb
What it is: Cockatoo Island is a former convict gaol and shipyard in the heart of Sydney Harbour, home to a UNESCO World Heritage listed Convict Site, waterfront cafes, guided tours and heritage accommodation. Known to Sydney’s First Nations peoples as Wareamah, it’s just a short ferry ride from the CBD.
The History — three distinct eras:∙ The Convict Precinct on the upper island: Barracks, Mess Hall, Guard House, Solitary Confinement Cells. ∙ The Docks Precinct: the convict-built Fitzroy Dock, the cathedral-like Turbine Shop, and Sutherland Dock — 135 years of shipbuilding history. ∙ The 1918 Powerhouse — once the largest open-fronted DC generating plant in Australia, with a towering chimney still standing.
The unmissable walk: Don’t miss walking through the dog-leg tunnel to reach the docks — remarkable sandstone geology and a genuinely eerie atmosphere.
Tours: Various guided tours cover the prisons, the island’s general history, WWII shipbuilding, and even a ghost tour for adults. A self-guided audio tour from the visitor centre costs just AU$6.
Before leaving, climb to Biloela Lawn on the upper island for panoramic views over Sydney Harbour — one of the finest vantage points in the city.
Getting there: F8 ferry from Circular Quay — it runs directly to the island. No additional cost beyond your Opal fare.
With degraded industrial landscapes and
the Turbine Shop …
21 Mar 2026
——
Crown Casino | Credit phb
Die neuen Tempel von Babylon — Notizen aus Sydney
von P.H. Blöcker
Ich stehe im Dog Leg Tunnel auf Cockatoo Island, mitten im Hafen von Sydney. Der Tunnel wurde in den 1880er Jahren von Sträflingsarbeitern durch den Sandstein gehauen — mit Schaufel, Meißel und bloßen Händen. Heute läuft an der Wand ein Video: Bilder aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Arbeiter in Overalls, Gewerkschaftsversammlungen, kommunistische Parteizellen, die in den Hafenbetrieben des 20. Jahrhunderts tief verwurzelt waren. 4.000 Männer arbeiteten hier auf dem Höhepunkt des Krieges — sie reparierten die Queen Mary, die Queen Elizabeth, Kriegsschiffe der US Navy und der Royal Australian Navy. Ohne sie hätte der Pazifikkrieg anders ausgesehen.
Es riecht nach Stein und feuchter Geschichte.
Dann verlasse ich die Insel mit der Fähre.
Und direkt gegenüber — Barangaroo — stehen sie: die neuen Tempel von Babylon.
Crown Sydney. Glass und Stahl. Eine gedrehte Turmklinge, die den Himmel aufschneidet wie ein Händlerargument. Architektonisch beeindruckend, ohne Frage. Aber was trägt dieses Gebäude in sich? Keine Sedimentschicht, kein Gedächtnis, keine Verwurzelung. Nur Gegenwart. Nur Kapital.
Das Crown Casino wurde für VIP-Glücksspieler gebaut — vorwiegend aus China, vorwiegend steinreich. Eine Royal Commission stellte 2021 fest, dass Crown über Jahre Geldwäsche ermöglicht, mit kriminellen Netzwerken kooperiert und regulatorische Behörden systematisch getäuscht hatte. Das Unternehmen hätte seine Lizenz verlieren sollen. Es verlor sie kurz. Dann bekam es sie zurück.
Warum?
Cui bono? Wer profitiert?
Das ist die Frage, die der Tunnel stellt — auch wenn er sie nicht laut ausspricht.
Die Männer, die Cockatoo Island aufgebaut haben, kämpften für den Achtstundentag. Für Krankenversicherung. Für das Recht, Nein zu sagen. Ihre Gewerkschaften waren imperfekt, manchmal dogmatisch, manchmal korrupt. Aber sie repräsentierten eine Grundidee: dass Arbeit Würde verdient. Dass der Staat den Schwachen schuldet, nicht nur den Starken dient.
Schaut man von der Fähre auf Crown Barangaroo, fragt man sich:
Wer macht hier Kohle und wer verliert?
Was bekommt der Staat?
Spektakel statt Substanz. Die Kulturindustrie in gebauter Form. Ein Hafen, der einmal Schiffe reparierte und Kriege gewann, der heute Reichtum reflektiert und nichts zurückhält.
Für junge Menschen weltweit, die gerade studieren und sich fragen, wie eine gerechte Gesellschaft aussehen könnte: Der Tunnel auf Cockatoo Island hat mehr zu sagen als der Turm gegenüber. Man muss nur hinuntergehen. In die Tiefe. In die Geschichte.
I am standing in the Dog Leg Tunnel on Cockatoo Island, in the middle of Sydney Harbour. The tunnel was cut through sandstone in the 1880s — by convict labour, by hand, with pickaxe and chisel. Today a video plays on the wall: wartime footage, men in overalls, union meetings, communist party cells deeply embedded in the harbour industries of the twentieth century. At its peak, 4,000 men worked here — repairing the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, warships of the US Navy and the Royal Australian Navy. Without them, the Pacific War would have looked different.
The tunnel smells of stone and damp history.
Then I take the ferry back.
And directly opposite — Barangaroo — there they stand. The new temples of Babylon.
Crown Sydney. Glass and steel. A twisted tower blade cutting the sky like a broker’s argument. Architecturally striking, no question. But what does this building carry inside it? No sediment. No memory. No roots. Only the present tense. Only capital.
Crown Casino was built for VIP gamblers — predominantly Chinese, predominantly very wealthy. A Royal Commission found in 2021 that Crown had facilitated money laundering for years, cooperated with criminal networks, and systematically misled regulatory authorities. The company should have lost its licence. It lost it briefly. Then it got it back.
Why?
Cui bono? Who benefits?
That is the question the tunnel asks — even without saying it aloud.
The men who built Cockatoo Island fought for the eight-hour day. For sick pay. For the right to say no. Their unions were imperfect, sometimes dogmatic, sometimes corrupt. But they represented a foundational idea: that labour deserves dignity. That the state owes something to the weak, not only to the powerful.
For young people around the world who are studying right now, asking themselves what a just society might look like: the tunnel on Cockatoo Island has more to say than the tower across the water. You just have to go down. Into the depth. Into the history.
The light in the tunnel is dim. But it is enough.
View from the top of Cockatoo | Credit phbFerry Terminal | Credit phb
The Surrealists and the Romantics before him treated the dream as a breach in the rational surface, Novalis’s Nachtseiten, the blue flower emerging from the unconscious as something irreducibly personal, biographically charged, resistant to reproduction. The dream revealed what the waking ego suppressed. It was dangerous in the right way.
What the question identifies correctly, is that the AI “hallucination” mimics this formal quality (the strange, the unstable, the illogical) while being its structural opposite. There is no suppressed interiority producing it. It is, as the author says, statistical: the averaged residue of millions of human images, stripped of the particular life that generated any single one. The result resembles a dream but has no dreamer.
This is essentially a Frankfurt School argument wearing contemporary clothes. Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry critique already described a mechanism that mimics subjective expression while evacuating subjectivity, what they called pseudo-individuation. AI image generation is pseudo-individuation perfected.
The passage’s closing question, who gets to decide? This is the weakest moment, because it points toward a governance answer when the deeper problem is ontological. The question isn’t who controls AI imagery but what happens to human visual imagination when it is continuously mirrored back through a statistical lens that has no Erlebnis, no lived experience is behind it.
Compare with Benjamin’s Kunstwerk essay. Benjamin mourned the loss of Aura through mechanical reproduction. AI doesn’t just reproduce, it averages. That’s a further step into the abyss he was already describing.
Source is the Contemporary Art Museum Sydney Rocks: An awesome AI exhibition with artist from New York and around the globe!
Credit phbCredit phbCredit phbIconic Opera House Harbour | Credit phbIconic Harbour Bridge | Credit phbArt Gallery | Credit phbGood morning world | Credit phbGood morning world | Credit phb
Thank you – with research of Claude AI:
Ron Mueck — Encounter: Background and Legacy
Origins: From Puppets to Provocation
Ronald Hans Mueck was born on 9 May 1958 in Melbourne to German parents, growing up in the family business of puppetry and doll-making. That German heritage is worth noting — it is not incidental. The obsessive craftsmanship, the memento mori undertow, the refusal of sentimentality: these feel distinctly rooted in a Central European tradition of Kunsthandwerk elevated into existential statement.
His father was a toymaker, and Mueck would later attribute his interest in realism to the meticulous, hands-on world of model-making that defined his childhood. He never attended art school. His early experiences in puppetry and special effects for Jim Henson taught him the technical skills — sculpting, moulding, animatronics — that would later underpin his fine art practice. Most notably, he designed, performed, and voiced the character of Ludo in the 1986 Jim Henson fantasy film Labyrinth.
The Breakthrough: Dead Dad and Sensation (1997)
Mueck’s move into fine art was initiated by a collaboration with Paula Rego — his mother-in-law — at the Hayward Gallery in 1996. A year later, his sculpture Dead Dad became a highlight of the era-defining Sensation: Young British Artists at the Royal Academy, London.
Dead Dad — a scrupulously rendered, three-foot-long sculpture of the artist’s father lying naked on the floor — established the central grammar of his work: radical scale distortion as psychological amplification. Mueck’s manipulations of sculptural scale are often dramatic — his figures are either writ large or reduced drastically to strengthen the metaphor between the artist’s material presentation of a personality and the psychic life the viewer imagines for the figure.
As Mueck himself put it plainly: “I change the scale intuitively — avoiding life-size because it’s ordinary.”
Technique: Hyperrealism as Philosophical Gesture
All his sculptures are made with an obsessive attention to realism, right down to the pores in the skin and the hair on the body. The process is extraordinarily labour-intensive: Mueck first sculpts the figure in clay, incorporating all the fine details of expression and skin texture, before making a mould in silicone or fibreglass. For larger works, a metal frame is covered by wire mesh and plaster strips before being worked in modelling clay. Individual hairs are glued into holes drilled by hand.
Influences such as classical sculpture, 19th-century waxworks, and the Old Masters are visible in his anatomical precision, while contemporaries like Duane Hanson and George Segal resonate through his approach to realism.
The result produces what one observer aptly described as the uncanny valley turned aesthetic programme: the sculptures are not merely representations of people — they feel as though they contain lived experience. They hold silence, tension, introspection, vulnerability. Standing before them, one is not simply looking — one is being looked at.
The Career Arc: From Venice to Seoul
After Sensation, Mueck was invited in 2000 by the London National Gallery to become Associate Artist for two years. The immense sculpture Boy was presented at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington gave Mueck a solo show in 2002, as did the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2003.
His 2025 exhibition in Seoul, and his two 2014 exhibitions in Brazil at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, each broke visitor attendance records.
The Kollwitz Parallel
Particularly resonant for a German-educated viewer: the AGNSW has staged alongside Encounter an additional display pairing Mueck with the German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz. Sharing a profoundly empathetic humanist vision, Mueck and Kollwitz each explore the body’s emotional traces — the gestures, postures and expressions that emerge from both ordinary and exceptional human experiences, which Kollwitz called the “silent and noisy tragedies” of everyday life. This curatorial decision is not decorative — it is a thesis about lineage.
Encounter Sydney 2025–26: The Exhibition Itself
Ron Mueck: Encounter runs exclusively at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 6 December 2025 to 12 April 2026, bringing together nearly a third of Mueck’s exceptional output over a three-decade career, featuring major works sourced from public and private collections across Australia, Europe, Asia and North America — most never before seen in Australia.
At the centre of the exhibition is the world premiere of Havoc 2025 — a monumental installation drawing visitors into a tense stand-off between two packs of colossal dogs, an unsettling reflection on the anxieties shaping our times.
Gallery director Maud Page described the show as offering “the rare chance to experience the depth and ambition of his practice on home soil — each of his sculptures carries an uncanny power to hold us still, asking us to reflect not only on the intimate details of life but on our shared humanity.”
I read Sam Harris Lying and the Interview with his teacher.
This Book and the Interview is about the Master and the Disciple and how they may interact.
I understand Harris published this essay plus interview and what he learnt from his University Teacher Ron Howard as a kind chapeau id est simply Thank You.
Education can succeed, but it needs two to tango.
Passion Flower or teaching with passion l Credit phb
First the English Version
Lying Sam Harris, Ronald Howard and the Art of Telling the Truth P.H. Bloecker · bloecker.wordpress.com · 2026
I. A Thin Book with Considerable Weight Sam Harris’ essay Lying is not a long book. Barely a hundred pages, no academic apparatus, no mountain of footnotes. Those who pick it up because it is short will quickly discover: it is short the way a scalpel is short. It cuts deeply nonetheless. The argument is simply stated, and therefore provocative: lying is always wrong. Not almost always. Not in most cases. Always. Even the white lie. Even the protective lie. Even the polite silence that deliberately misleads. Harris acknowledges edge cases — the Nazis are at the door, Anne Frank is hiding in the attic — but he refuses to let the exception become the rule. Whoever makes habits out of exceptions has already dismantled their ethical architecture before realising they were ever building one. The book appeared in 2013 and was immediately contested. Too absolute, said some. Too naive, said others. Insufficiently nuanced. Harris had anticipated every one of these objections — and answered them within the book itself before they were raised. That is the hallmark of a man who argues very well. And of a man who had a very good teacher.
II. The Teacher: Ronald A. Howard Ronald A. Howard taught at Stanford University for more than five decades. He was an engineer, a mathematician, a decision scientist — and, quietly, one of the most influential ethics teachers America produced in the twentieth century. Not because he preached ethics. Because he analysed it. Howard developed the first ethics course ever offered at the Stanford School of Engineering, which he called The Ethical Analyst. The title says everything: ethics not as a matter of feeling, not as religious inheritance, not as cultural convention — but as an analytical discipline. One can learn to think clearly. One can learn to recognise one’s own rationalisations. One can develop a personal ethical code — formulated in calm moments, so that in moments of pressure one does not have to improvise. From these courses and decades of reflection came the 2008 book Ethics for the Real World, co-authored with Clinton Korver and published by Harvard Business Press. It is the counterpart to Harris’ Lying: Howard builds the system, Harris draws the sharpest possible line within it. Howard constructs the architecture; Harris inhabits it without compromise. Howard died on 6 October 2024, aged ninety. His final published work was A Hippocratic Oath for Technologists — the pledge he demanded of engineers and programmers before they released tools into the world whose consequences they could not fully foresee. A man who remained consistent to the end.
III. What the Seminar Did to Sam Harris Sam Harris is not generous with praise. He is one of the sharpest critics of religious thinking, political hypocrisy and intellectual cowardice of our time. He rarely commends. When he does, he means it. At the close of the interview Harris conducted with his former teacher Howard — for his blog samharris.org, a long and serious conversation about lying, truth and whether one would betray Anne Frank — Harris says something unusual. He says it in his precise, unadorned English, but it reads like a letter that had been waiting a long time to be sent: “Let me say again, in case I never fully expressed it: the courses you taught at Stanford were probably the most important I ever took. It is rare that one sees wisdom being directly imparted in an academic setting. But that is what you did, and have continued to do for decades. So I just want to say: Thank you.” This is not a polite conclusion to an interview. It is an act of reckoning. Harris, who rarely displays gratitude in public, does so here — completely, without qualification, with the precision of a man who weighs his words. The phrase that stops one in its tracks is wisdom being directly imparted. Not knowledge. Not information. Not analytical frameworks. Wisdom. What did Howard leave in him? Harris writes in the introduction to Lying that Howard’s courses had decisively shaped his views on ethics, social systems and decision-making. That is the sober version. The emotional version stands at the end of the interview. Between these two versions lies an intellectual life.
IV. Skillful Truth-Telling — the Book’s Most Beautiful Concept Howard coined a phrase that becomes a key concept in Harris’ Lying: skillful truth-telling. It is the phrase that dissolves the false opposition through which most people approach the subject of honesty. The false opposition runs as follows: either I tell the brutal truth — and I wound, destroy, lose the other person. Or I lie — and I protect, spare, preserve the relationship. Howard and Harris say together: this choice is an illusion. There is a third way. Skillful truth-telling means formulating the truth so that it arrives. Not softened in substance, not falsified at its core — but considered in timing, tone and context. A good doctor tells his patient the diagnosis. He does not tell it at midnight in a corridor. A good teacher tells the student what is not working. He tells it in such a way that the student can still work and still want to. Whoever has taught for forty-three years knows this difference not from books. They know it from a thousand situations in which the truth could
V. The White Lie Infantilises the Other The strongest chapter in Harris’ essay deals with the white lie. It is provocative because it strikes something most people take entirely for granted: the friendly untruth out of consideration, the protective silence out of care, the “it’s lovely” instead of “it is mediocre.” Harris’ argument is simple and lands like a hammer: whoever protects another person through lying presupposes that the other cannot bear the truth. That is not care. That is condescension. The white lie says, without saying it: I consider you too weak, too sensitive, too immature to hear what is actually the case. I decide for you what you are permitted to know. This is a profound disrespect dressed as kindness. And it has consequences. Whoever does not learn the truth about their essay cannot improve it. Whoever does not learn the truth about their performance cannot develop. Whoever does not learn the truth about a relationship makes wrong decisions on false premises. For teachers, this chapter is particularly uncomfortable. The school system produces institutional white lies by design: the friendly report that says nothing; the feedback that spares feelings rather than clarifying them; the assessment that preserves the peace and prevents growth. Harris calls this ethical decay by habit. One does not lie out of malice. One lies because one has done it so often that it has come to feel like virtue.
VI. The Lie Destroys from Within — Slowly and Thoroughly Harris’ second major argument concerns not the other person, but oneself. Small ethical compromises — the small act of looking away, the small untruth, the small silence — install a habit of distorted thinking. Rationalisations drown out the inner voice. One begins to invent one’s own rules as required. Howard had said the same, only more analytically: whoever has no personal ethical code — formulated in calm moments, before the pressure of the situation arrives — will improvise at the moment of decision. And improvisation under pressure almost always leads to the convenient choice, not the right one. Together these arguments produce a picture that is both psychologically and ethically persuasive: the lie does not damage the liar through dramatic consequences — but through silent erosion. It undermines the foundation on which character is built. And one often notices only when one needs to stand on that foundation and it gives way.
VII. What Remains: Clarity as an Ethical Stance Lying is not a comfortable book. It leaves no back door open. It creates no category of “almost honest” or “well-intentioned.” Whoever has read it must decide: does one take it seriously, or put it down and carry on as before? Howard had made the same demand of his students. Not theoretical agreement — practical consequence. What is your personal ethical code? Not the one you espouse in good company. The one you act on when no one is watching. Sam Harris took that question seriously. Not because he is a saint — he is a complex, sometimes demanding intellectual figure who also errs and also argues. But because he had a teacher who showed him that clarity of thought is the prerequisite for clarity of action. Clarity of action depends on quality of thought. That was Howard’s sentence. Harris lived it — and in Lying made it available to everyone. For a teacher who stood in classrooms on three continents for forty-three years, this is not an abstract message. It is a description of what teaching is, at its best: not the transmission of knowledge, but the training of clarity. Not giving answers, but forming habits of thought. The student should not leave knowing what the teacher knows — they should leave seeing more clearly than before. That is Howard’s legacy. That is Harris’ book. And it is, not incidentally, also the task of the horizon of experience: not to know more, but to see more clearly — and to say honestly what one sees.
bloecker.wordpress.com Sam Harris: Lying. Four Elephants Press, 2013. · Ronald A. Howard & Clinton Korver: Ethics for the Real World. Harvard Business Press, 2008.
And now the German Version
Lying
Sam Harris, Ronald Howard und die Kunst, die Wahrheit zu sagen.
Der Entwurf wurde nach einer Diskussion mit Claude AI geschrieben und anschliessend von mir ueberarbeitet: Sozusagen edited oder herausgegeben.
P.H. Bloecker · bloecker.wordpress.com · 2026
Wahre Bildung + Ausbildung
Ein Higher Education Blog – Life Skills und Erfolg im Leben.
I. Ein dünnes Buch mit großem Gewicht
Sam Harris’ Essay Lying ist kein dickes Buch. Kaum hundert Seiten, kein akademischer Apparat, kein Fußnotengebirge. Wer es kauft, weil es kurz ist, wird rasch merken: Es ist kurz wie ein Skalpell kurz ist. Es schneidet trotzdem tief.
Die These ist einfach formuliert und deshalb provokant: Lügen ist immer falsch. Nicht fast immer. Nicht meistens. Immer. Auch die weiße Lüge. Auch die Schutzlüge. Auch das höfliche Schweigen, das bewusst in die Irre führt. Harris räumt Grenzfälle ein — die Nazis stehen vor der Tür, Anne Frank versteckt sich auf dem Dachboden — aber er weigert sich, den Grenzfall zur Regel zu machen. Wer aus Ausnahmen Gewohnheiten macht, hat seine ethische Architektur bereits eingerissen, bevor er gemerkt hat, dass er gebaut hat.
Das Buch erschien 2013 und wurde sofort kontrovers diskutiert. Zu absolut, sagten die einen. Zu naiv, sagten die anderen. Zu wenig differenziert. Harris hat auf all diese Einwände gewartet — und sie im Buch selbst bereits beantwortet, bevor sie gestellt wurden. Das ist die Handschrift eines Mannes, der sehr gut argumentieren kann. Und eines Mannes, der einen sehr guten Lehrer hatte.
II. Der Lehrer: Ronald A. Howard
Ronald A. Howard lehrte über fünf Jahrzehnte an der Stanford University. Er war Ingenieur, Mathematiker, Entscheidungswissenschaftler — und nebenbei einer der einflussreichsten Ethiklehrer, die Amerika im 20. Jahrhundert hervorgebracht hat. Nicht weil er Ethik predigte. Sondern weil er sie analysierte.
Howard entwickelte an der Stanford School of Engineering den ersten Ethikkurs überhaupt, den er The Ethical Analyst nannte. Der Titel sagt alles: Ethik nicht als Gefühlssache, nicht als religiöse Überlieferung, nicht als kulturelle Konvention — sondern als analytische Disziplin. Man kann lernen, klar zu denken. Man kann lernen, die eigenen Rationalisierungen zu erkennen. Man kann einen persönlichen ethischen Code entwickeln — und ihn in ruhigen Momenten formulieren, damit man in unruhigen Momenten nicht improvisiert.
Aus diesen Kursen und Jahrzehnten des Nachdenkens entstand 2008 das gemeinsam mit Clinton Korver verfasste Buch Ethics for the Real World, erschienen bei Harvard Business Press. Es ist das Gegenstück zu Harris’ Lying: Howard zeigt das System, Harris zeigt die Konsequenz. Howard baut die Architektur, Harris zieht darin die schärfste Linie.
Howard starb am 6. Oktober 2024, neunzigjährig. Sein letztes veröffentlichtes Werk war Ein Hippokratischer Eid für Technologen — das Gelöbnis, das er von Ingenieuren und Programmierern forderte, bevor sie Werkzeuge in die Welt entließen, deren Konsequenzen sie nicht überblickten. Ein Mann, der bis zum Ende konsequent war.
III. Was das Seminar mit Sam Harris gemacht hat
Sam Harris ist nicht zimperlich mit Lob. Er ist einer der schärfsten Kritiker religiösen Denkens, politischer Scheinheiligkeit und intellektueller Feigheit unserer Zeit. Er lobt selten. Wenn er lobt, meint er es.
Am Ende des Interviews, das Harris mit seinem früheren Lehrer Howard für seinen Blog samharris.org führte — ein langes, ernstes Gespräch über Lügen, Wahrheit und die Frage, ob man Anne Frank verraten würde — sagt Harris etwas Ungewöhnliches. Er sagt es auf Englisch, aber es klingt wie ein Brief, der lange nicht abgeschickt wurde:
“Let me say again, in case I never fully expressed it: the courses you taught at Stanford were probably the most important I ever took. It is rare that one sees wisdom being directly imparted in an academic setting. But that is what you did, and have continued to do for decades. So I just want to say: Thank you.”
Das ist kein höflicher Abschluss eines Interviews. Das ist Rechenschaft. Harris, der öffentlich kaum je Dankbarkeit zeigt, zeigt sie hier — vollständig, ohne Einschränkung, mit der Präzision eines Mannes, der weiß, was er sagt.
Was hat Howard in ihm hinterlassen? Harris schreibt in der Einleitung zu Lying, Howards Kurse hätten seine Ansichten über Ethik, soziale Systeme und Entscheidungsfindung “maßgeblich geprägt”. Das ist die nüchterne Version. Die emotionale Version steht am Ende des Interviews. Und zwischen diesen beiden Versionen liegt ein Intellektuelles Leben.
IV. Skillful Truth-Telling — der schönste Begriff des Buches
Howard hat einen Begriff geprägt, der in Harris’ Lying zum Schlüsselkonzept wird: skillful truth-telling. Geschicktes Wahrsagen. Es ist der Begriff, der den falschen Gegensatz auflöst, mit dem die meisten Menschen das Thema Ehrlichkeit denken.
Der falsche Gegensatz lautet: Entweder sage ich die brutale Wahrheit — und verletze, zerstöre, verliere den anderen. Oder ich lüge — und schütze, schone, erhalte die Beziehung. Howard und Harris sagen gemeinsam: Diese Wahl ist eine Illusion. Es gibt einen dritten Weg.
Skillful truth-telling bedeutet: die Wahrheit so formulieren, dass sie ankommt. Nicht abgemildert im Gehalt, nicht verfälscht im Kern — aber bedacht in Timing, Ton und Kontext. Ein guter Arzt sagt seinem Patienten die Diagnose. Er sagt sie nicht um Mitternacht auf dem Flur. Ein guter Lehrer sagt dem Schüler, was nicht stimmt. Er sagt es so, dass der Schüler danach noch arbeiten kann und will.
Wer 43 Jahre unterrichtet hat, kennt diesen Unterschied nicht aus Büchern. Er kennt ihn aus tausend Situationen, in denen er die Wahrheit hätte verschweigen können — und es nicht getan hat. Und aus einigen, in denen er sie besser hätte formulieren können. Skillful truth-telling ist kein Naturtalent. Es ist Handwerk, das man übt.
V. Die weiße Lüge infantilisiert den anderen
Das stärkste Kapitel in Harris’ Essay handelt von der weißen Lüge. Es ist provokant, weil es etwas trifft, das die meisten für selbstverständlich halten: die freundliche Lüge aus Rücksicht, das schützende Schweigen aus Fürsorge, das “es ist schön” statt “es ist mittelmäßig”.
Harris’ Argument ist einfach und trifft wie ein Hammer: Wer den anderen durch Lügen schützt, setzt voraus, dass der andere die Wahrheit nicht tragen kann. Das ist keine Fürsorge. Das ist Herablassung. Die weiße Lüge sagt, ohne es zu sagen: Ich halte dich für zu schwach, zu empfindlich, zu unreif, um das zu hören, was wirklich ist. Ich entscheide für dich, was du erfahren darfst.
Das ist eine tiefe Respektlosigkeit, die sich als Güte verkleidet. Und sie hat Konsequenzen. Wer die Wahrheit über seinen Aufsatz nicht erfährt, verbessert ihn nicht. Wer die Wahrheit über seine Leistung nicht erfährt, kann sich nicht entwickeln. Wer die Wahrheit über eine Beziehung nicht erfährt, trifft falsche Entscheidungen auf falscher Grundlage.
Für Lehrer ist dieses Kapitel besonders unbequem. Das System der Schule produziert institutionell weiße Lügen: das freundliche Zeugnis, das nichts sagt; das Feedback, das schont statt klärt; die Beurteilung, die den Frieden wahrt und das Wachstum verhindert. Harris nennt das ethischen Verfall durch Gewohnheit. Man lügt nicht aus Bosheit. Man lügt, weil man es so oft getan hat, dass es sich wie Tugend anfühlt.
VI. Die Lüge zerstört von innen — langsam und gründlich
Harris’ zweites großes Argument betrifft nicht den anderen, sondern einen selbst. Kleine ethische Kompromisse — das kleine Wegsehen, die kleine Unwahrheit, das kleine Schweigen — installieren eine Gewohnheit des verzerrten Denkens. Rationalisierungen übertönen die innere Stimme. Man beginnt, die eigenen Regeln nach Bedarf zu erfinden.
Howard hatte dasselbe gesagt, nur analytischer: Wer keinen persönlichen ethischen Code hat — formuliert in ruhigen Momenten, vor dem Druck der Situation — wird im Moment der Entscheidung improvisieren. Und Improvisation unter Druck führt fast immer zur bequemen, nicht zur richtigen Entscheidung.
Zusammen ergibt das ein Bild, das sowohl psychologisch als auch ethisch überzeugt: Die Lüge schadet dem Lügenden nicht durch dramatische Konsequenzen — sondern durch stille Erosion. Sie unterhöhlt das Fundament, auf dem Charakter gebaut ist. Und man merkt es oft erst, wenn man auf dem Fundament stehen will und es nachgibt.
VII. Was bleibt: Klarheit als ethische Haltung
Lying ist kein bequemes Buch. Es lässt keine Hintertür offen. Es gibt keine Kategorie des “fast ehrlich” oder “gut gemeint”. Wer es gelesen hat, muss sich entscheiden: Nimmt man es ernst, oder legt man es zur Seite und macht weiter wie bisher?
Howard hatte denselben Anspruch an seine Studenten. Nicht theoretische Zustimmung — praktische Konsequenz. Was ist dein persönlicher ethischer Code? Nicht der, den du in guter Gesellschaft vertrittst. Der, nach dem du handelst, wenn niemand zuschaut.
Sam Harris hat diese Frage ernst genommen. Nicht weil er ein Heiliger ist — er ist eine komplexe, manchmal anstrengende intellektuelle Persönlichkeit, die auch irrt und auch streitet. Sondern weil er einen Lehrer hatte, der ihm gezeigt hat, dass Klarheit des Denkens die Voraussetzung für Klarheit des Handelns ist. Clarity of action depends on quality of thought. Das war Howards Satz. Harris hat ihn gelebt — und in Lying für jedermann zugänglich gemacht.
Für einen Lehrer, der 43 Jahre lang in Klassenzimmern auf drei Kontinenten gestanden hat, ist das keine abstrakte Botschaft. Es ist die Beschreibung dessen, was Unterricht im besten Fall ist: nicht Wissensvermittlung, sondern Klarheitsschulung. Nicht Antworten geben, sondern Denkgewohnheiten formen. Nicht der Schüler soll am Ende wissen, was der Lehrer weiß — er soll am Ende klarer sehen als vorher.
Das ist Howard’s Erbe. Das ist Harris’ Buch. Und es ist, nebenbei, auch die Aufgabe des Erfahrungshorizonts: nicht mehr zu wissen, sondern klarer zu sehen — und ehrlicher zu sagen, was man sieht.
P.H. Bloecker · Burleigh Waters, Gold Coast · Mar 2026
bloecker.wordpress.com
Sam Harris: Lying. Four Elephants Press, 2013. · Ronald A. Howard & Clinton Korver: Ethics for the Real World. Harvard Business Press, 2008.
When studying in Berlin around 1974, I bought the Penguin Classic I found now in a Camp Kitchen along my Camping Trip Northern Rivers area in New South Wales in Australia before Xmas 2025.
One of the best US books ever written, for sure.
True Crime Genre and Podcasts were not even at the Horizon.
And I am glad I found a copy of Moby Dick as well.
Nothing like reading when camping in Australia.
By the way: The Place to be, if not in Berlin.
In Cold Blood: The Birth of True Crime
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) remains the definitive work that created the true crime genre—a “nonfiction novel” that reads with the psychological depth of fiction while maintaining journalistic rigor.
The Achievement
Capote spent six years researching the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in rural Kansas, conducting over 8,000 pages of interviews. His breakthrough was treating real events with novelistic techniques: shifting perspectives, building suspense, and developing the killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock as complex characters rather than monsters. The result transforms crime reporting into literature.
Enduring Power
The book’s strength lies in its moral ambiguity. Capote neither romanticizes nor demonizes the murderers, instead revealing how circumstance, psychology, and choice intersect tragically. His depiction of small-town America shattered by random violence captured something essential about American anxiety in the post-war era—a theme that resonates even more strongly today.
Why? Good question, in fact the Mother of all questions!
Critical Perspective
The work raises questions Capote couldn’t fully answer: Where does empathy for killers become complicity? Can journalism ever be truly “objective” when shaped by literary craft? His emotional entanglement with Perry Smith—and possible manipulation of facts for narrative effect—complicates the book’s documentary claims.
Legacy
In Cold Blood established the template every true crime work since follows: meticulous research, narrative drive, psychological insight, and the uncomfortable intimacy between observer and observed. It remains essential reading not just for the genre it spawned, but for anyone interested in how storytelling shapes our understanding of violence, justice, and American identity.
A masterwork that asks more questions than it answers—which is precisely why it endures.
So, in short: Am reading now The Widow.
Another great author I love: John Grisham.
60 % read: Oh dear, how is Simon going to convince the Jury …?
Another must read, I would suggest!
Happy New Year from Dorrigo in NSW, one of my favourite Villages, where the folks are fine 😎
George Orwell’s slender novella turns 80 this year, yet Animal Farm has never felt more urgently relevant. Sales surged 300% in 2024 following the U.S. presidential election— the same pattern that occurred in 2017 when “alternative facts” sent Orwell’s works to the top of bestseller lists. This isn’t nostalgia for a Cold War relic. It’s recognition that Orwell identified something fundamental about how power corrupts, truth erodes, and democracies die—patterns playing out across our current political landscape with alarming precision.
The novel’s endurance stems from a deceptively simple insight: authoritarian control doesn’t arrive overnight through jackboots and tanks. It creeps in through incremental betrayals, linguistic manipulation, and the systematic rewriting of shared reality. In an era of deepfakes, algorithmic propaganda, and “alternative facts,” Animal Farm provides essential vocabulary for recognizing these dangers before they metastasize.
The allegory that transcends its moment
Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a “fairy story” satirizing Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, but he intended “wider application.” That foresight has proven prophetic. The novella’s genius lies in its allegorical structure—rather than depicting specific historical events, it illuminates universal patterns of oppression that manifest across political systems and centuries.
The transformation is gradual and familiar: revolutionary ideals proclaimed, then quietly amended, finally perverted beyond recognition. The pigs begin as liberators preaching equality. They take small privileges—the milk and apples—justified as necessary for “brain work.” They move into the farmhouse, sleep in beds, drink whiskey, trade with the enemy, and ultimately walk on two legs while carrying whips. The final scene’s brilliance lies in its visual metaphor: the animals peer through the window at pigs and humans playing cards, “but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
This trajectory—from “All animals are equal” to “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”—has become political shorthand for hypocrisy in any system claiming egalitarian ideals. The phrase appears constantly in contemporary debates about wealth inequality, corporate governance, and political privilege. As one 2025 analysis noted, tech platforms “claim equitable access and free speech” while algorithms privilege certain voices and billionaire owners operate above the law. The revolutionary dream corrupted by those claiming to protect it: this is Animal Farm’s timeless warning.
Squealer’s toolkit for the digital age
If Animal Farm were written today, Squealer would have a Twitter account and a cable news segment. His propaganda techniques map with disturbing precision onto modern information warfare: memory manipulation (“Surely you remember, comrades”), statistical deception (reading false figures “in a shrill, rapid voice”), scapegoating (Snowball blamed for every misfortune), and historical revisionism (literally rewriting the Seven Commandments with paint and brush).
The 2020s have provided countless examples. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine employed textbook Orwellian doublespeak—calling war a “special military operation.” Hungarian political analysts in 2025 observed that “social media and algorithmic content filtering” serve as modern equivalents of Squealer’s propaganda. Multiple commentators noted Trump’s repeated false claims mirror the novel’s manipulation tactics. The mechanics change—from handwritten amendments to deleted tweets—but the function remains identical: making populations doubt their own memories and accept manufactured realities.
The novel’s genius lies in showing how language itself becomes weaponized. When words lose fixed meanings, when history becomes fluid, when contradictions are accepted without discomfort—“Napoleon is always right”—totalitarianism wins without firing a shot. This insight connects Animal Farm directly to Orwell’s 1984 concepts of Newspeak and doublethink, and to his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” which warned that language manipulation makes “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Boxer’s tragedy and the exploitation of loyalty
Perhaps no character carries more contemporary resonance than Boxer, the powerful cart-horse whose mantras—“I will work harder” and “Napoleon is always right”—epitomize dangerous devotion. Boxer possesses the physical strength to overthrow the pigs but lacks the critical thinking to recognize his exploitation. When injured and no longer useful, he’s sold to the glue factory for whiskey money—precisely the fate Old Major warned would occur under human oppression, now perpetrated by the animals’ own revolutionary leaders.
Boxer symbolizes how dedication and work ethic can be weaponized against the worker. His tragedy warns against unquestioning loyalty to authority and prioritizing hard work over critical thought. In contemporary terms, he represents every voter who channels legitimate grievances into blind faith in authoritarian figures promising simple solutions. The South African analyst who wrote in 2025 that citizens watched “state capture, corruption, and cronyism eat away” at post-apartheid ideals could be describing Boxer’s betrayal.
Teaching democracy’s fragility
Educators increasingly view teaching Animal Farm as “civic duty”—essential training for citizens navigating an era of misinformation and democratic backsliding. The novella has sold over 11 million copies, with dramatic sales spikes during political crises (2013, 2017, 2024). Teachers report it’s more vital now than ever for developing media literacy and propaganda recognition.
The pedagogical power lies in accessibility meeting sophistication. At roughly 100 pages, readable in a single sitting, the work introduces complex political concepts through an engaging narrative. Students learn to identify propaganda techniques, understand how democracies erode incrementally, and recognize warning signs of authoritarianism—skills desperately needed when institutional checks weaken and shared truth becomes contested.
Stanford professor Alex Woloch argues Animal Farm may be more relevant than 1984 because it shows the “slippery slope” into tyranny rather than established dystopia. We’re not (yet) living in perpetual surveillance states. We’re watching democratic norms erode, facts become negotiable, and power concentrate while egalitarian rhetoric intensifies. This is Animal Farm’s territory: the dangerous transition, the incremental betrayals, the moment when resistance is still possible but increasingly difficult.
Why Orwell endures across the political spectrum
Orwell occupies rare territory: claimed by left, right, and center. His work provides shared vocabulary—“Big Brother,” “thoughtcrime,” “Orwellian”—for discussing authoritarianism regardless of ideological origin. This universality stems from his focus on power’s mechanisms rather than partisan positions. Both Napoleon’s communist totalitarianism and the capitalist farmers’ exploitation appear as variations on the same oppressive theme.
Recent scholarship, including critical animal studies approaches, continues finding new dimensions in the text. The 2025 film adaptation by Andy Serkis demonstrates ongoing cultural engagement. The Orwell Foundation—dedicated to “bravery, integrity, decency and fidelity to truth”—calls his values “a light in the darkness of these troubled times.”
The warning we continue to ignore
Perhaps the most sobering insight comes from Time Magazine’s 2020 observation: “That we so dependably manage to be” in familiar trouble “despite the existence of prophetic works like Animal Farm, should worry us to the point of despair.”
Yet despair isn’t Orwell’s point. The novella offers no solutions—its pessimistic ending suggests the cycle may be inevitable—but in diagnosing the disease, it provides tools for resistance. Recognizing Squealer’s tactics makes them less effective. Understanding how commandments get quietly amended enables vigilance. Remembering Boxer’s fate warns against blind loyalty.
Eighty years after publication, with authoritarianism resurgent globally and truth itself contested, Animal Farm remains essential reading not as historical artifact but as urgent warning. The mechanisms of control it illuminates—propaganda, historical revisionism, language manipulation, fear-based compliance—operate today through different technologies but identical logic.
The animals’ inability to remember clearly made them vulnerable to tyranny. In an age of information overload and algorithmic manipulation, our challenge mirrors theirs: maintaining clear-eyed awareness of reality, resisting the convenient lie, questioning power even when clothed in revolutionary rhetoric. Orwell shows that defending democracy requires constant vigilance, critical thinking, and commitment to truth—uncomfortable work, but necessary.
The logic of Animal Farm, as one 2025 analyst concluded, “will play out again and again—not in a fairy story, but in reality” unless citizens remain alert to power’s corrupting patterns. That’s why, eight decades later, this brief allegory about farm animals remains indispensable for understanding human politics.
Published by Peter H Bloecker, Director of Studies (Retired)
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