Pogrom Quotes
Relations between the United States and the Third Reich opened in 1939 on a distinctly sour and strident note. It began when Harold L. Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, speaking to a Zionist Society dinner in Cleveland at the end of 1938, declared Hitler had taken Germany back to "a period when man was unlettered, benighted, and brutal." The November pogrom demonstrated Hitler counted "the day lost when he can commit no crime against humanity." Ickes attacked Ford and Lindbergh for accepting decorations from the "same hand" that was "robbing and torturing thousands of fellow human beiongs."
Harold L. Ickes
R. S. S is a communal organization and dangerous to the country's secular fabric. Look what they did to Muslims in Gujarat. However, they take a different approach with the Sikhs. During the 1984 Sikh pogrom, they did save many Sikh lives. R. S. S. volunteers participated during the tercentenary celebrations of the Khalsa in 1999. They consider the Khalsa to be a military wing of Hinduism and their savior.
Khushwant Singh
[T]he evidence from anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe. From the anthropologist's point of view, two groups of facts militate against this belief: the wide diversity of Jews with regard to physical characteristics, and their similarity to the Gentile population amidst whom they live. Both are reflected in the statistics about bodily height, cranial index, blood-groups, hair and eye colour, etc. Whichever of these anthropological criteria is taken as an indicator, it shows a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries. ...The obvious biological explanation for both phenomena is miscegenation, which took different forms in different historical situations: intermarriage, large-scale proselytizing, rape as a constant (legalized or tolerated) accompaniment of war and pogrom.
Arthur Koestler
Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob (obviously a religious maniac) died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newman's background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newman's pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!!
Ida Friederike Görres
The motives of people like Dalrymple, those who wilfully set out to deny the facts of the destruction of the Hindu civilisation of India, are the opposite. Their denial of the large-scale destruction and denigration of Hindu religion and culture by the Muslim raiders, invaders and conquerors of India is motivated by the deep-seated political aim of the Independence movement to brook no divide between Hindu and Muslim.It was for its time and for all time a noble aim. That was one of the things V.S. Naipaul said to the BJP gathering--that the project of Nehru and Gandhi to avoid going into the import of that history was in itself positively motivated. There is never any justification for one community in India to conduct a pogrom against another. Not then, not now. But surely the construction of history should be truthful. Suppression can only exacerbate the anger.
William Dalrymple (historian)
