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From dusk on August 23, 1572, to dawn the next day, hate ruled
absolutely. Several thousand lost their líves. On August 26, the
king ordered an end to it, to barely any effect.
It makes no difference whether it is a Jew or a Huguenot. All
that matters is that the same people who lived beside each other
became alien to each other because of an ideological difference. In
the case of the French, it was a religious difference. For the Nazis,
it was a question of race. And for the Bolsheviks, it was class. Race
or ideology or religion. Without making any equivalency between
these events, I can say they had this in common: anyone, whether
a friend, a relative, or even just an acquaintance, became an alien
and then an enemy. In these cases, they were no longer simply
aliens, but enemies. In fact, they are the kind of enemy that must
be fought against.
How do I recognize the enemy (Huguenots)? Because I was still
talking to them yesterday. I bought eggs from them at the mar¬
ket. I drank a cup of wine with them in the tavern on the corner.
There is something called a sign. Whoever is different is marked
out. According to some descriptions, the houses of the Huguenots
were marked with external signs, while they themselves were also
identified with a sign. Some people put crosses on the enemy’s
houses while putting on a white shawl to mark themselves. To
look at it another way, external difference, in the case of race, is
also decisive here, since I have to see who is the same, who is the
other, and in this case who is the enemy. Yesterday, they were
my colleagues—sorry, my friends—but if they wear a sign and I
wear a sign, then discrimination takes place. I now know who the
enemy is. I know who (more precisely: what) is to be exterminated,
and I also know who the friend is with whom I can exterminate
the enemy. If the enemy is Huguenot, then we kill them for that
reason. If a Jew, then that is why. The same goes for the capitalist.
All must be marked, both the same and the other. The action of
the Danish King during the Second World War was exemplary,
whether it really happened or not, because it also involved wearing/
not wearing a sign that could be seen externally and empirically.