“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Milan Kundera
“We cannot understand Fascism, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard...because what happened can happen agai. For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened."
Primo Levi
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.
What is called 'fellow traveling' [collaboration] was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."
Theodor Adorno
"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration. The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps."
Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
"Through his first year in Germany [1933], Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the [Hitler] regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger.
This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere chose to believe Hitler's claim that he had suppressed an imminent rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed. Evidence soon emerged, however, that showed that in fact Hitler's account was false.
The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behaviour. In a letter to Hull, Dodd forecast an even more terroristic regime. 'The people hardly notice this complete coup d'etat. It takes place in silence. I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.'"
Erik Larson, The Garden of Beasts
"Communism and fascism or naziism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."
James A. C. Brown
"There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past."
Ryszard Kapuscinski
"The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition. There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today. They are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters."
Simon Wiesenthal
Gold in particular is coiling, tighter and tighter.
It was hard to tell if the bounce in stocks today was something meaningful, a last ditch attempt to stave off a selling wave, or something else.
History seems to be coiling for a move, tighter and tighter, as well.
Have a pleasant evening.
