"Empires have always succumbed to the same disease. With each new conquest, Rome thrust forward her frontiers and retreated from her principles.
The government was in the hands of a few opulent families of the world of finance, supported by the military junta. These families knew how to protect their interests: they disguised them as national necessities. The preservation of Rome was identified with that of the ruling families.
The Roman people consisted of a small oligarchy of landowners, bankers, speculators, merchants, artisans, adventurers, and tatterdemalions, avid for pleasure, excitement, and sudden gain, proud, turbulent, corrupted by the life of the city, and placing their own interests ahead of even the most salutary reform.
Guglielmo Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, 1909
When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, then in Italy, we said to one another, 'That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.'
The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn't know. They didn't know because they didn't want to know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly.
I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. But I didn't want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community. To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures that no 'patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, 1955
Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element. Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.
White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich 1942
Yet another interesting day in the risk markets, as stocks dropped sharply earlier in the day, but then gradually rallied in the quiet of the afternoon, to close unchanged or even positive.
Hardly anyone talks about it anymore, but as far as I can tell the Exchange Stabilization Fund, colloquially known as The Plunge Protection Team, is still functioning in secret with little to no oversight as to its criteria for action.
The Fed and the Machine are throwing around huge amounts of money in a very sloppily regulated financial system, so the sources of certain things are hidden, or at best obscure.
Gold and silver rallied a bit, but were held back once again. They rally in Asia, and are dampened in London and New York.
VIX rose sharply and then fell, consistent with the adjustments in the risk markets as the day wore on.
The Dollar dropped quite a bit, as it vacillates around.
The disastrous foreign policy of the US is alienating a significant portion of the global economy, with a few powerful entities reacting badly to what they perceive as 'bullying.'
Well, it's fair to say that there are a number of key factors that seem to show a divergence in the future paths of the different principalities and powers.
It will be interesting to see how this resolves, in what surely will be looked back upon as an historic period of transition from a unipolar to multipolar world.
But as it goes, the biggest risk is not the geopolitical, or the social, but the personal, with regard to our ability to remain standing as a moral human being, in an increasingly hysterical and hostile environment characterized by ruthless lawlessness exercised by sociopaths and marginally contained psychopaths.
But this is a familiar pattern in history. We read about it, but do not expect it in our own case.
In the end, our standing as a moral human being is the only thing that truly matters— how God sees us, and how we are received by Him in judgement.
The days of judgement are coming; the days of reckoning are at hand.
Israel cries out, 'The prophet is a fool, the righteous men are mad.'
Because your sins are great, all the greater still your hatreds.
Hosea 9:7
Our faith is purified in the crucible of trials and temptations.
Have a pleasant evening.
