'What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?'

The closing line of Perlman's argument is the sort of long-term, grand-scheme thinking I think he is best at. Some writers discuss the immediate, Perlman speaks of trends three thousand years in the making.

His core argument is that nationalism, held up as a form of liberation, was, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, the master's tools eternally remaking the master's house. Alongside this, that such nations, bereft of colonies, turn inwards to accumulate the capital to industrialise. Pogroms, expulsions, forced labour, genocide.

Perlman, who himself escaped the Holocaust and lost many family members to it, uses Israel as the prime example of those who escaped or survived a genocide, living to within years start their own. That Israel alongside others e.g. the US, are the epitome of taking atomised individuals stripped of cultural identity, and giving them as substitution state; garlanded with pastiches of said lost culture, as core identity.

Perlman wrote this in 1984, and perhaps those who laughed then (or now) should look to the descent of Yugoslavia the next decade. What was seen - and is still seen - as inexplicable, Perlman outlines here. His is a highly unorthodox position, yet one of the few to give a decent answer.

Perlman is critic, not architect - he doesn't offer something else in its place, but does skewer what is there.