"Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel
"A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
Chris Hedges
"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
The Aktion T4 Programme provided the expertise, the administrative practices, and the bureaucratic rationales required to build the mass extermination facilities and the camps for designated victims.
The beginning of social Darwinism is financial Darwinism, the unjust and willful allocation of means and opportunity. This enriches the favored, and permits the oppressed to be more easily labeled as inferior, useless eaters, life unworthy of life.
Thinning their ranks at a distance becomes easy to rationalize, and after a time a purely practical routine, like cutting the grass.
The root of it all is greed, pride, and the will to power, the desire of a select few to determine the value of all life, and to define both good and evil. And they see themselves as the ultimate good.
Their handiwork is not life, but a profound emptiness, the abomination of desolation.
They never have enough. Not enough money, not enough power, not enough killing. They cannot give life, so they will bring death. They fear weakness and death, so they attempt to be its master.
They would be as gods. And in their pride they make themselves, and all those around them, not masters but monsters.
