"The media squabble over Shchepotin’s final day at the Cancer Institute, and the doubts it raised over the motivation of all concerned, were appropriate, because the most corrosive aspect of corruption is the way that it undermines trust. When corruption is widespread, it becomes impossible to know whom to believe, since the money infects every aspect of state and society. Every newspaper article can be criticized as paid for, every politician can be called corrupt, every court decision can be called into question. Charities are set up by oligarchs to lobby for their interests, and those then provoke doubts about every other non-governmental organization. If even doctors are on the take, can you trust their diagnoses? Are they claiming a patient needs treatment only because that would be to their profit? If policemen are crooked, and courts are paid for, are criminals really criminals? Or are they honest people who interfered in criminals’ business? Not knowing whom to believe, you retreat into trusting only those closest to you—your oldest friends, and your relatives—and that reinforces the divisions in society that corruption thrives on. It is impossible to build a thriving economy, or a healthy democracy, without a society whose members fundamentally trust each other. If you take that away, you are left with something far darker and more mercenary."
Hajo Meyer did not speak from ideology. He spoke from Auschwitz . Born in Germany in 1924, Meyer survived the Nazi machinery of annihilation and emerged with a conviction that would shape the rest of his life: the Holocaust was not a Jewish lesson alone—it was a human one . To betray that universality, he believed, was to betray the dead. Late in life, Meyer became one of the most unsettling voices in Jewish ethical discourse —not because he denied Jewish suffering, but because he refused to let that suffering be weaponized . The Moral Core of The End of Judaism (2005) In his seminal book, The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed , Meyer argues that Judaism is not defined by land, power, or ethno-nationalism , but by an ethical tradition rooted in justice for the vulnerable. One of his central claims is uncompromising: “ Judaism is not a bloodline or a state . It is an ethical tradition. When that tradition is abandoned , Judaism ends — regardless of who claims ...
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