"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 children's hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps. The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small."
Commemorative Tablet, Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
"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
"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' was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else."
Theodor Adorno
"The essential characteristic of a good and healthy ruling elite, however, is that it views itself not as a function of the monarchy or the commonwealth, but as its very meaning and highest justification, and that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it. If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way.
The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.""
George Bernard Shaw, 1933-1934
"A small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.”
Paul A. Lombardo, Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
“The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority, they don't dare to assert themselves.”
Mark Twain
“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis
Like most terrible and horrible acts, it did not begin with a single event, a single decision. It began with a profound intolerance for other people, ideas and dissent; and then, when it found its political footing and felt more confident, it found the will to murder the weakest, the most vulnerable, and those who had no one to speak for them. And its unquenchable thirst for power, money and blood was unleashed. For when all the laws of God and men have been knocked down and flattened, who then can stand when the cold winds blow across the land.
People craft romantic images and myths of themselves and their group as strong and more cunning and ruthless than most, exceptional, like predators entitled to their prey.
And so over time they become truly distorted and corrupt, grotesques, and make themselves into beasts. This is how it is always with the will to power. And in the end it only serves itself, consuming all.
Stocks were trading weakly today on geopolitical news, China-related inventory problems as some tech multinationals like Apple, and the generally fallacious nature of the US economy.
The US Dollar strengthened.
Gold was lower, and silver was hammered.
There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday.
Have a pleasant evening.
