Postwar

 Here might be a bold statement: this is the most important book I have ever read in my life. I believe anyone wanting to understand the world we live in would find this book massively edifying, but that would be especially the case for those living in Europe. As my mathematics teacher, Elina Beliaeva, once said in class: "History opens your eyes". I gasped, I cried, I shivered, and I was overcome with passion learning about the peoples of Europe, their struggles, their beliefs. I was impressed by how much better I could understand the contemporary scene in Europe by reading this book. At times it felt uncannily prophetic, and that feeling was enhanced when I reminded myself that Postwar was published in 2005 and that Tony Judt, sadly, passed away in 2010.
  I am reminded of what my friend Emily Krüger once tried to explain to me about the differences between the ways in which a State can punish its people and those in which international justice deals with conflicts between States: there is no way in which a State can put another State in prison. But there is more to that. This book made me think of the limits of "cancel culture". Of how it is virtually impossible to rid a whole population of their ideology—I am thinking here of the failed efforts of "de-Nazification". We are stuck in a world with so many ways of thinking, and we have to come to terms with that.
  Postwar's epilogue's essay "From the House of the Dead" is a masterpiece in its own right. I would like us to think a little more about the following quote:

"Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchanment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to weild the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins."

(Judt, T. Postwar. p. 840. United Kindgom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Penguin Books, 2006). That discomfort is typically overwhelming, and I am sure it is a major contributor to us sometimes choosing to remember the past in a way that may minimise that discomfort. That is a natural human weakness, one which we must vigilantly fight against every day of our life.