Charles Simic: Slavko Goldstein - He Understood Evil

[From a review of Goldstein's history of 1941 Croatia. ]br /br /blockquoteRevenge doesn't know how to choose between the guilty and the innocent.br /--Slavko Goldstein/blockquotebr /br /The victims turn into oppressors and the oppressors are victims again. Once more, the culprit was nationalism, that madness of identifying with a single ethnic group to a point where one recognizes no other duty than furthering its interests even if it means placing its actions beyond good and evil. Many the world over believe this is the only way; that the survival of their people justifies any crime they commit. They find the scruples of those who cringe at the shedding of innocent blood in pursuit of some noble cause naive and repugnant.br /br /Simic, Charles. "He Understood Evil." span style="font-style:italic;"The New York Review of Books/span (July 2, 2009)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6323968-3640608434099910926?l=dialogic.blogspot.com'//div