"In post-war Germany, the White Rose was and is revered. Sophie’s story looms especially large in the history of Ulm, my hometown.
She personifies the importance of acting according to one’s beliefs and of following your conscience, even in the face of great sacrifice. Her story reminds us to not be silent, and fight for what Sophie wrote on the back of her indictment a day before she was killed: Freiheit — Freedom."
Tanja B. Spitzer, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, February 22, 2020
"At just this moment, I learn for the first time of the martyrdom of the Scholls. I never saw these two young people. In my rural isolation, I got only bits and pieces of the whole story of what they were doing, but the significance of what I heard was such I could hardly believe it.
The Scholls are the first in Germany to have had the courage to witness for the truth. The movement they left at their deaths will go on, and as is always the case with martyrdom, they have sown seeds which will raise important fruit in time to come. This young brother and sister went boldly about their work, almost as though they were defying death. Their betrayal came through a miserable university proctor, who was then so afraid of being beaten or otherwise punished, that he had to be taken into protective custody.
They died in all the radiance of their courage and readiness for sacrifice, and thereby attained the pinnacle in lives well lived.
Their bearing before the tribunal — that of the girl, especially — was inspiring. They flung their contempt of the court, the Party, and the insane, would-be great man, Hitler, into the faces of their judges, and at the end, did something which carries the icy breath of the Eternal about it for us who survive.
For, with their last words, they repeated the warning once given by the condemned Knights of the Temple to their judges, that those who were persecuting them and those who stood behind them would ‘within a year be called to judgement before the throne of God.’
But the Scholls departed from this life quietly, and gravely and with wonderful dignity gave their young blood. On their gravestones let these words be carved, and let this entire people, which has lived in deepest degradation these last ten years, blush when it reads them: Cogi non potest quisquis mori scit — 'He who knows how to die can never be enslaved.'
We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed. Germany has been sinking deeper and deeper into unreality ever since It is now completely drugged on its own lies. The cure will be more awful than anything ever seen before in history. This people is insane. It will pay dearly for its insanity. The air of this summer is full of foreboding, and fire and iron must heal what no physician can any longer cure."
Friedrich Percival Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947
"The world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name. We would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn’t have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were."
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, 2007
"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now. This is what the ruling class has decided is normal."
Aaron Bushnell, Last words, 26 February 2024
Stocks were rallying hard up to new highs today, on a largely in-line inflation number.
Except for core inflation which came in a bit hot.
This is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks.
Do not try to get in front of it. But be mindful when the rest around you go mad.
Gold and silver bounced a little bit, even as the Dollar fell back on the prospect of interest rate cuts in September.
Donnie is going to meet with Putin in Alaska. He does not have a particularly strong hand to play.
If Trump had been president during the Cuban missile crisis we would be all dead.
But Putin is a seasoned diplomat and politician. So we have some nope.
The internal, moral rot and apathy in the US is of much more concern.
We stand silent and complicit in the face of a genocide that matches the viciousness of the worst of the last century.
We stand silent, and therefore complicit, as the structure of our Constitution is slowly being dismantled, clause by clause, amendment by amendment.
We stand silent, as our Congress disgraces itself a bit more every day in the service to greed and power.
What can one say in the face of such complicity with evil?
Where are we going Lord?
"Whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war. Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: the struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist."
The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942
Be mindful of your soul. For that is what this struggle is all about, whether you realize it or not.
Have a pleasant evening.
