"The Hitler Party likes to emphasize its uniqueness, and it really should not be measured against conventional yardsticks. Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that it recently won fifteen million voters. Its brutality, loud-mouthedness and brainlessness have acted not as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and have generated unconditional and subservient followers."
Carl von Ossietzky, Die Weltbühne, January, 1933
"The quiet words of the wise are worth more than the shouts of a ruler of fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinful man can destroy much that is good."
Ecclesiastes 9:17-18
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder the prophets and abuse those whom God has sent to you as messengers. As you have willed it, so your house is now yours to command— but it is made desolate.”
Matthew 23:37-38
"The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last. The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom."
Hillaire Belloc, This That and the Other, 1912
“If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.”
G. K. Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914
The US will be observing Memorial Day this coming Monday. The markets will be closed.
Stocks were weak on fresh tariff threats from Trump.
Gold and silver rallied as the Dollar swooned back down to the bottom of the 99 handle again.
There will be a precious metals futures option expiration this coming Tuesday.
VIX ticked up a bit, but still remains relatively subdued.
Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
Have a pleasant weekend.