Contempt: Holocaust — Genocide
March 13, 2026
Contempt is colder than hatred.
Hatred burns out.
Contempt survives.
It does not begin with arguments.
It begins in the body.
Someone enters your inner world uninvited. Muscles tighten. Something withdraws. You do not want to share air with him or her. You do not want to share time. And yet you do.
Contempt is when something inside you refuses reconciliation.
Hitler – Treblinka
I was thirteen when I read about Treblinka. Nine hundred thousand people murdered industrially. Selection ramps. Gas chambers. Bodies stacked. Women exploited, raped, then gassed if the soldier was not satisfied.
Suddenly it was all there, in black and white.
I remember barely being able to continue reading — and then the feeling: contempt.
That was when I understood that civilization is a thin veneer. Beneath it lies the will to dominate, humiliate, annihilate.
Hitler – Toulon
In Toulon, 2024 I sit by the harbor. The sea is calm. Tourists eat ice cream. Children laugh. It is summer.
In 1942 this same harbor was filled with fear. They waited for Germany and Italy to come and seize the fleet. Hitler spoke of eternity. The Allies acted faster and scuttled seventy ships rather than let them fall into his hands.
He spoke of thousand-year empires while the world burned. He spoke of guilt, of betrayal, of Jews. He promised a turning point. It never came.
When his power was at its height, few saw his pettiness. They saw strength. They saw direction. They saw a man who dared to say what they themselves were thinking but did not dare to articulate.
That is the most dangerous thing: not the tyrant —
but the longing for him.
They wanted to be seduced. They wanted to belong to something greater. They were prepared to maim, rape, kill — if only they could escape the feeling of their own insignificance.
He died in a bunker. He killed his dearest, he killed himself. Millions of others died above ground.
I knew all this. I had read it in history books. But knowledge is not the same as insight. In the harbor I understood how close evil always is. It does not need drama. It needs only obedience.
At the same time, there were others.
Raoul Wallenberg. A man armed with papers and courage. He saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews and then disappeared into the darkness of the Soviet Union. No gratitude. No grave. History is not just. It is only brutal.
Count Folke Bernadotte. White buses through a collapsing Europe. Prisoners leaving camps they believed they would die in. Later Bernadotte was shot in Jerusalem by Jewish terrorists who called themselves freedom fighters. Peacemakers are always in someone’s way.
Contempt took root early in me.
Nixon – Vietnam
Then came Vietnam.
Richard Nixon became its face. American bombs over rice fields. Napalm clinging to children’s skin. The most powerful military force in the world — against farmers in sandals.
They called it the defense of freedom. We saw villages burn.
On the dollar bill it read: In God We Trust. God did not seem to object.
In 1972 Hanoi was bombed at Christmas. Technological perfection against human vulnerability. Olof Palme, a Swedish Prime Minister spoke of how neutrality was not silence in the face of atrocities — that humanity and international law come before realpolitik. Not everyone agreed. They still do not.
Just before Christmas 1972, Palme delivered one of his shortest but most famous speeches. I was nineteen. I watched him on television. I heard in his voice that I was not alone in my contempt for American power.
“One must call things by their proper names.
What is now taking place in Vietnam is a form of torture.
What is being done is to torment people,
torment a nation in order to humiliate it,
to force it into submission under the language of power.
Therefore the bombings are an atrocity.
There are many such in modern history.
They are often associated with names:
Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn,
Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka.
Violence has triumphed.
But the judgment of history
has fallen harshly upon those who bore responsibility.
Now another name is added to that list:
Hanoi – Christmas 1972.”
And today, those of us who are alive now are watching new names enter the same history.
Gaza.
Iran.
2026.
Pinochet – Chile
The year after the Christmas bombings of Hanoi, in 1973, President Salvador Allende took his own life as military forces carried out a coup, supported by the United States and Nixon.
We began listening to VÃctor Jara’s songs. He was tortured, his fingers crushed before he was murdered. With U.S. support, Pinochet took power and held it for seventeen years.
To speak of democracy while crushing it had its price. For me, the price was once again contempt.
Mandela – Robin Island
Oppression continued in many places. For a long time, we spoke constantly of the ANC, and Mandela was mentioned in speeches and articles. He was kept behind bars for to many years. Sanctions were discussed, but decisions took time. Too many died.
I, like many others, began to recognize the West’s moral hesitation. Condemnations that sounded good but cost little. Again the harsh feeling of contempt was there.
Mobutu – Kongo
I remember listening, when I was young, to Bruce Springsteen. The open road in his songs. The promise of movement — of leaving what was confined and driving toward the horizon. America was that: a road forward. Headlights cutting through the night.
The United States was the music, the films, the universities. A country that seemed to carry the future in its hands. I received it all with warmth. It felt generous, almost personally addressed to me.
Only now, writing about contempt, images returns to me.
A river.
A portrait on a wall.
Brazzaville. I am young, working as an accountant in a bookstore run by a Swedish mission organization. The city is calm. I can move freely. The evenings are warm but not threatening.
But across the river lies Kinshasa.
I take the boat across the Congo River. I am going to buy many books for the bookstore. I have hidden the money inside the tire of the car. You learn quickly.
Kinshasa feels denser, more watchful. The air itself seems to carry something unspoken.
At the bank, a white official flips through my passport and sees that it is my first visit. He asks me to follow him into his office.
On the wall hangs a portrait of Mobutu Sese Seko. The uniform. The cap. The gaze.
The official points.
“Here, everything you own can disappear,” he says quietly. “You can disappear. Don’t go out at night.”
His finger lingers toward the president’s face.
It is a gesture I do not fully understand then.
Not in 1975.
Contempt is not yet in me. Only caution. Adaptation.
Much later I begin to draw the lines. I read. I understand how power is built and preserved. How the United States supported Mobutu, armed him, kept him in place. Thirty-two years. That´s a very, very long crime.
The open road in Springsteen’s songs acquires another resonance. The same country that sang of freedom helped sustain a system where people could disappear.
Contempt does not arrive as an explosion of anger. It comes as a slow shift.
A crack in an image that was once whole.
And perhaps that is what unsettles me most. It is not only about politics.
It is about lost innocence.
Contempt can paralyze.
But it can also become a spine.
I refused to carry a weapon. At Sandö School we studied the bookkeeping of colonialism: Belgium in Congo. Germany in Namibia. Extermination administered with stamps and archive numbers. Every crime documented. The powerful never saw them as crimes, but as necessities. Evil is rarely chaotic. It is organized.
Those ten months at Sandö prepared me for what would come when I moved to the Middle East.
Palestine – Genocide
In 2004 I came to Jerusalem. I had just turned fifty.
I was not prepared for what I would see, what I would feel.
Walls. Checkpoints. Ghetto-like enclaves. Millions of displaced people. The word apartheid left the history books and became everyday reality.
My South African colleagues recognized the pattern immediately. They needed no footnotes. They became my mentors. I asked questions, and they explained what I was seeing.
It took a long time before I could accept that what I was witnessing could lead to the ultimate evil — to genocide but I began to see the policies of apartheid in action. I could not miss it, it was there, in front of me. Executed by the Government of Israel and financially supported by United States.
I began writing articles published on CounterPunch and The Palestine Chronicle. My inbox filled with hatred, often from Christians in the United States.
Morality is often loudest among those who risk the least.
I realized something uncomfortable: that I represented a Europe that preferred to speak of:
“conflict” rather than occupation.
“tensions” instead of oppression.
“complexity” instead of responsibility.
“apartheid” in South Africa but not in Palestine.
Words are sometimes only protective walls.
Now there is talk of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Prisoner exchanges have been carried out. But the killing continues.
Every morning, I read now about dead Palestinians. Often several children.
In Swedish media it becomes a brief notice, often accompanied by an explanation: that Israeli forces had been attacked, that they have the right to protect themselves.
More than eighty thousand people are likely dead. Most of Gaza is destroyed — schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, clinics, shops, houses, playgrounds, roads, electricity lines, water pipes, treatment plants. More or less nothing is left. And still it continues.
Always an explanation.
Always a context.
Always an excuse.
International leaders have already moved on. Gaza has become background noise — a problem to manage, not people to protect. Now daily reports are coming in from Iran of death and destruction as the conflict escalates, with casualties mounting and cities attacked. The United States is acting in much the same way as before — repeating the same patterns, never learning from past mistakes.
And we?
We read.
Shake our heads.
Scroll on.
The world did not go mad.
It has always sacrificed the weak for the security of the strong.
What is new is not the violence.
What is new is our ability to see it in real time —
and still go on living as if none of it concerns us.
That is where contempt is born.
Not only toward power.
But toward our own comfort.
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