"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"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.
"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
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."
Simone Weil
"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. There was a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of 'inherent worth'— if not of things, then at least of persons.
It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule of The Market, nothing is sacred. Does anyone doubt that if the True Cross were ever really discovered, it would eventually find its way to Sotheby's? The Market is not omnipotent— yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum."
Harvey Cox, The Market as God
"The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.
The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind in the ruck everything that is weak or diseased or wavering; while the fight of the male to possess the female gives to the strongest the right, or at least, the possibility to propagate its kind. And this struggle is a means of furthering the health and powers of resistance in the species. Thus it is one of the causes underlying the process of development towards a higher quality of being.
Since the inferior always outnumber the superior, the former would always increase more rapidly if they possessed the same capacities for survival and for the procreation of their kind; and the final consequence would be that the best in quality would be forced to recede into the background. Therefore a corrective measure in favour of the better quality must intervene. Nature supplies this by establishing rigorous conditions of life to which the weaker will have to submit and will thereby be numerically restricted; but even that portion which survives cannot indiscriminately multiply, for here a new and rigorous selection takes place, according to strength and health."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of The Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see."
Thomas Merton
“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life.
But now we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism
Most people are unaware or simply overlook the actions of the German government that began in 1939, in which the State, with the active cooperation of the medical and legal professions, began the systematic murder of people who were physically and mentally inferior, undesirable and a drain on resources better used by the superior ones, at least according to the harsh but necessary judgement of the State.
It was this decision, and its willing acceptance by the thought leaders and intellectuals of the day, along with the sociopaths of all classes, in defining who had the right to live based on their ability to serve the State according to its needs, that laid the groundwork for the death of compassion, and the murder of over ten million people.
Once the State has the power to say who is or is not a worthy human being, no one is safe. The mentally and physically disabled, the depressed, the vagrants, the elderly, those of mixed races, homosexuals, and those who irritate the powerful.
We do not often hear about Aktion T4, the euthanasia program, because the weakest have little or no constituency, and are sometimes overlooked because others think that their own causes, or their own pain, is more significant than the least of these.
It was the professional class, the doctors and the lawyers, who willingly sanctioned the murder of the innocents in Germany. And for that great crime against God and Man, which almost no one protested against, the country was brought low and laid to ruin.
It is a terrible trap to think that we today are so different, so exceptional, that we are not capable of permitting the same thing to happen all over again. After all, we are only doing what is necessary, what is required by The Market, backed up by made up statistics and clever propaganda designed to make the reasonably successful feel superior to the unfortunate.
And to make the unfortunate, the different, and the others appear to be vermin to be controlled and then exterminated, as an unjust economic drain on the nation.
They sanctify the rich, no matter how they made their fortunes, and demonize the unfornate, no matter what the cause of their poverty, which is the law of the god of the darkness of this world.
And this is how the madness begins. Look, don't turn away. See what you are becoming.
In their desire to escape the pain and complexity of being human, men can make themselves into beasts, one step at a time. And then there is hell on earth.
Aktion T4 was the name used after World War II for Germany's "Euthanasia programme" during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination".
The programme officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.
During the official stage of Action T4, 70,273 people were killed, but the Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German and Austrian physicians continued the murder of patients after October 1941 and that about 275,000 people were killed under T4.
More recent research based on files recovered after 1990 gives a figure of at least 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people killed by medication, starvation, or in the gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.
The name T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English as Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care.
This body operated under the direction of Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.
This dialogue is taken from the transcripts of Sophie Scholl's interrogation, before she was tried and executed for her dissent and act of conscience in 1943 in Munich.
"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."
"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.
The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small."
Commemorative Tablet, Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
"But as Solomon said, wisdom enters not into a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul."
François Rabelais
"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 U.S. has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs, and some of the worst outcomes."
Noam Chomsky
"The system continues unchanged since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money, money, cash commands. Men and women are sacrificed to the idols of profit and consumption...In this way people are thrown aside as if they were trash."
Francis I
Power and money have been the two great corrupting influences on mankind throughout history. We are not immune to this, although we like to think that we are just that much different, and better.
Competency without conscience is especially pernicious in the professional classes, which can come to consider themselves above the conventional restraints suitable only for the common people.
They thereby become more vulnerable to pride, and privileged judgement, and greed made virulent by indifference, and all the evils that thereby follow.
"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. The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small."
Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
"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
“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis
The efficiencies of the death camps evolved from the initial experiments in killing the disabled, the mentally ill, the anti-social, and the poor.
One does not wake up one morning, and decide to become a monster. No, men become beasts, but one rationalization, one marginalization and objectification of the other, one small step and excuse towards the horror at a time.
Do you think that we are so good as to be exempt from this? That we are incapable of such wanton blindness towards sin?
The model for the identification, sterilization, and finally the slaughter of the weak and the vulnerable in Germany was found in the United States, an ugly chapter in American history that is rarely mentioned.
And what then, is the difference between gassing and burning those who you consider to be life unworthy of life, or exposing them to predators, denying them a fair chance or the assistance for the basics of a decent life such as a living wage, health care, warm clothing, and basic human dignity, slowly working them to an early death while defaming them as deserving of it, because you think that they are inferior, and not as human as the such as you.
Oh no, no one ever helped me. I did it all on my own. And so can they.
And so you deny God Himself, and how He has saved you from misfortune, He has helped you in your failings, and He has given you the gifts that you possess, in your pride.
“It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Carrie Buck story [from Charlottesville, Va]: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.”
Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.”
Lord Acton
The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.
He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
"Many commentators automatically assume that low intergenerational mobility rates represent a social tragedy. I do not understand this reflexive wailing and beating of breasts in response to the finding of slow mobility rates. The fact that the social competence of children is highly predictable once we know the status of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents is not a threat to the American Way of Life and the ideals of the open society.
The children of earlier elites will not succeed because they are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and an automatic ticket to the Ivy League. They will succeed because they have inherited the talent, energy, drive, and resilience to overcome the many obstacles they will face in life."
Greg Clark, The Economist, 13 Feb. 2013
"You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bandaged the injured or brought back the strays or looked for the lost; rather, you have ruled them with harshness and tyranny. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd; they were scattered and became prey for every wild beast of the field."
Ezekiel 34:2-5
“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness...
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"One of the primary characteristics of narcissists is their exaggerated sense of entitlement. It's hardly surprising then that so many politicians somehow think they 'deserve' to game the system. After all, from their self-interested perspective, isn't that what the system is for?
In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be their's. So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with. And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything.
Exploiting their privileged position in such a manner hardly leaves them plagued with guilt. In general, guilt isn't an emotion they're prone to. How could they be if they feel entitled to the objects of their desire? In their minds their very ability to attain something must certainly mean it was merited."
Leon F. Seltzer
"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
"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.”
Lord Acton
“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
William Wilberforce
The systematic murder of the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, the infirm, alcoholics, and social misfits began on the same day that Germany invaded Poland.
The Nazi euthanasia program was modeled on the eugenics programs in the UK and the US, although those programs avoided actual murder in favor of forced sterilization of the feeble, the infirm, alcoholics, and the mentally ill. The purpose was to cleanse the peoples gene pool, also referred to as racial hygeine.
The German program of extermination was carried out not at camps by SS soldiers, but in hospitals and psychiatric asylums by doctors and nurses.
Various experiments with the most efficient means of performing these murders led to the development of the camps with their gas chambers and crematoria.
"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness...
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.
The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.
He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
"One of the primary characteristics of narcissists is their exaggerated sense of entitlement. It's hardly surprising then that so many politicians somehow think they 'deserve' to game the system. After all, from their self-interested perspective, isn't that what the system is for?
In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be their's. So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with. And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything.
Exploiting their privileged position in such a manner hardly leaves them plagued with guilt. In general, guilt isn't an emotion they're prone to. How could they be if they feel entitled to the objects of their desire? In their minds their very ability to attain something must certainly mean it was merited."
Leon F. Seltzer
"On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe."
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
"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
“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis
"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.
Their fundamental belief simply has to be that society must not exist for society's sake, but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which the best type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being..."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"People do not wake up one morning and decide to become monsters that will be reviled by all civilized people throughout history. They go down that path one small step at a time, one seemingly harmless and practical decision after another. They are just being reasonable, practical, realistic— merely following the advice of thought leaders and repeating the stories and slogans that 'everyone knows.'
For most people it quickly becomes depersonalized, a kind of game. What clever slogans and high sounding arguments can one memorize, what authorities and books will one reference and quote, and finally, what resolve can a person muster to stubbornly go back and defend the position which they have taken, which most likely has little or nothing to do with logical arguments or reason?
Having freed ourselves from the constraints of truth and morality, we live in a truly cynical age. My purpose is this— to show us what we are becoming, to expose that which we serve, without any self-righteous illusions.
"And then he prompts you what to say, and listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."
It is surprising how many people do not know about, have never even heard about, the first victims of the Nazi concentration camps and Euthanasia programs.
The first victims of the Konzentrationslager, concentration camps, were largely the political opposition to Hitler: the Social Democrats, the intellectuals, the communists.
"The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, The SA (Sturmabteilungen; commonly known as Storm Troopers), the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons—the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy.
German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. The SS established larger camps in Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo, the German secret state police, until 1936."
But as brutal as they were, these first concentration camps were meant to remove and intimidate opposition to the regime. We must never forget how the people of conscience among the German people were cowed into submission, to remove and silence their voices and serve as an example to the rest.
The first victims of mass murder were the disabled, the emotionally impaired, and the unproductive. Hitler personally signed an order to begin the 'mercy killings' of men, women and children who were in state run hospitals and schools, and even in private care. The reason they were murdered is that they were deemed to be too expensive to live, too unrproductive, too much of a drain on the people and the state. This even included people with what today might be considered treatable and transitory mental illnesses such as depression. If you showed the wrong kinds of weakness, you were disposed of, and often brutally by starvation.
Why have most of us never heard about this? For two or three reasons perhaps.
First, of course, is that the weakest, then as it is now, have few to rise up and speak on their behalf against the power of an over-reaching State and the sociopaths among us. Where is the lobby that speaks on behalf of the poor and the disabled, the sick and the defenseless? Yes, the churches and different groups may speak out, but they are easily marginalized and overwhelmed by slogans and insults.
Second, the sad truth is that this first mass killing compromised the greater part of the German professional class: the lawyers, the doctors, the nurses, the economists, the media, and other ambitious placeseekers.
People who knew what was happening either approved or pretended not to see it. It was a very poor career decision to oppose such a policy, especially since as I noted above the most visible opponents of the new regime were being carted off to Dachau starting in 1933.
And German propaganda was weighing heavily from early days on the notion that some people were not fit to live in a society that must be economically and physically tough. They hardened the peoples' hearts, slowly but surely. The needs of 'the State', which was really a gang of self-absorbed sociopaths caught in the will to power and riches, resembling thugs and gangsters, were judged to be the highest priority.
The Nazis believed that male homosexuals were weak, effeminate men who could not fight for the German nation. They saw homosexuals as unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. The Nazis held that inferior races produced more children than 'Aryans,' so anything that diminished Germany's reproductive potential was considered a racial danger.
Of course all of this line of thinking found its full fury in some of the most horrific organized mass killings in human history, primarily of the Jews, and to some extent the Slavs. Although it certainly included other non-Aryan groups like gypsies. It was a terrible and horrible act. It is hard to imagine where and how far it might have gone if it had not been finally stopped.
But people also tend to forget that although there was organized murder on a large scale beyond any question, the camps were also important hubs of slave labor, with the weakest being murdered outright, and the rest slowly worked to death in the war factories and special projects. Always the decisions had a strong economic element of 'practicality.' It was the triumph of utilitarianism and madness.
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.
This is how a nation and a people can begin their long and painful descent into barbarism and bestiality: by a program to stifle dissent, and then to use the media and the journals to harden the hearts of the people with fear, and corrupt practical ideas about who is or is not 'worthy of life,' marginalizing the poor, the vulnerable, and the different.
People craft romantic images 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.
...and then they come for the others: the dissidents, the different, and the other.
And sometimes, for those who just happen to be where we do not wish them to be.
Once people have been sufficiently desensitized, over time made utterly apathetic to the condition of their fellow human beings, and provided an official rationale in the form of symbols and slogans, for murder, torture, and even the most heinous crimes out of fear and a taste for violence, almost anything is possible.
And in the end, the people are driven mad by their apathy and their complicity. First they imagine themselves as other than human, as some type of superior being. But as that illusion falters, and the romantic allure of their symbols and slogans become tattered, they find their otherness merely as beasts.
Great worldly power can at first appear to be awe inspiring, almost beautiful, in its scope. How can we possibly oppose something so majestic, so shocking, so vast in its scope and reach. But as we draw closer, we may at times perceive the smell of decay, and corruption, the rot beneath the appearance of the glamour. And perhaps, drawing close enough, we may even catch a glimpse of the diseased eyes and evil leer behind the mask. But by then, alas, we are his.
The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled.”
"He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."
J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist
People do not wake up one day and suddenly decide to become monsters, giving birth to unspeakable horrors.
And yet throughout history, different peoples have done truly monstrous things. The Americans were pioneers in forced sterilization and state propaganda. The British invented concentration camps, and were masters of predatory colonization. They even turned a large portion of the capital of their Empire into a festering ghetto through the Darwinian economics of neglect.
None have clean hands. No one is exceptional.
What do they have in common? They all take a walk down a long and twisted path, one cold-hearted and 'expedient' decision at a time, shifting responsibility by deflecting the choice for their actions on their leaders.
There is always some crackpot theory. some law of nature, from scientists or economists to support it. What else could they do? It is always difficult, but necessary.
They cope with their actions by making their victims the other, objectified, different, marginalized. And what they marginalize they cannot see. What they cannot see, by choice, is easily ignored.
And so they destroy and they kill, first by neglect and then by more efficient and decisive actions.
They walk slowly, but almost determinedly, into an abyss of their own creation.
But they all seem to have one thing in common. First they come for the old, the weak, the disabled, and the different, in a widening circle of scapegoats for their plunder.
"There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.
I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and rags.
But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with all the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on.
The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.
As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in brief:-
"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme . . . that condition which the French call la misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."
In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be imagined."
A war on the weak and the different often takes on a bipartisan flavor, and is at its most virulent at the extremes of the right and of the left. Ideology trumps morality.
As you may recall, many of our neo-cons came from the far left, making an almost seamless migration to the far right.
Unless one understands the nature of such extremism as being essentially statist, and antithetical to individual life, one cannot see the nature of their otherwise strange interconnectedness and convergence.
The extremes of the left and right can sometimes be kindred spirits, particularly in their disdain for the merely human, in light of the needs of the policies of the State and its models of perfection.
"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
"In this way people are thrown aside as if they were trash."
Francis I
The Aktion T4 Programme provided the expertise, the administrative practices, and the bureaucratic rationales required to build the mass extermination facilities and the camps.
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.
You may try to help them, but they are sub-human, and stubbornly beyond redemption. It is a difficult task, but someone must do it. As the superior few, we must do those hard things for the good of all. It is our destiny. 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 in the will to power, the desire of a select few to determine the value of all life, and to define both good and evil, with themselves as the ultimate good. And 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.
"The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings.
It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life."
Rabindranath Tagore
“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.”
“It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.”
Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
“I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
Adolf Hitler
Übermenschen: The One Percent
"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.
Their fundamental belief simply has to be that society must not exist for society's sake, but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which the best type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being..."
Friedrich Nietzsche
“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
“Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind.”
Leonard Darwin
"On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe."
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport."
William Shakespeare, King Lear
"If you pour yourself out for the hungry, and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your gloom will become like the noon day sun."
Is 58:10
"Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things...
Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake."
"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success."
Lord Acton
Just when you think the oligarchy could not become any more audacious.
'Slow mobility' as used in this essay from this recent issue of The Economist implies a natural class structure amongst people.
It suggest that a child would only slowly, and not usually, rise above the station of their parents and grandparents, presumably in terms of wealth, education, and opportunity. If you are born to poor parents, you are likely of an inferior genetic quality, poor stock, your success unlikely, and your servile station or poverty pre-destined.
The reason for this is because the children of 'the elite' will have 'inherited the talent, energy, drive, and resilience to overcome the many obstacles they will face in life.'
These inherited gifts are supplemented, of course, by the easy opportunities, valuable connections, and access to power. And a virtual freedom from prosecution does not hurt either, in case they have inherited a penchant for sociopathy, or something worse, along with their many gifts.
And by inference, the children of the poor will not do well, because they are genetically inferior. These are the pesky 47% who deserve to be cheated and robbed by the elite, because of the inherent superiority of the one percent. There is no fraud in the system, only good and bad breeding, natural predator and prey.
This line of thinking rests on the assumption that society today is a naturally efficient meritocracy, despite the enormous advantages of the children of 'the elite,' because they would have succeeded anyway.
I succeed, therefore I am. And if you do not, well, we shall have to do something about that drag on the efficiency of the economy and the maximization of profits. Ah, the burdens of the aristocracy, and their far flung sahibs.
This essay concerns me greatly, because such thoughts echo throughout the Anglo-American culture of late. They are whispered in the evolving mythos of those favored few who enjoy certain völkisch advantages, presumably justified by the nature of their blood.
We have seen this kind of sociology before, as the justification for the widespread looting of wealth, the ransacking of nations, and the neglect, ghetto-ization, and murder of marginalized people.
Never again. Until we allow it, because we think it serves our purposes. But the madness serves none but itself.
"Many commentators automatically assume that low intergenerational mobility rates represent a social tragedy. I do not understand this reflexive wailing and beating of breasts in response to the finding of slow mobility rates.
The fact that the social competence of children is highly predictable once we know the status of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents is not a threat to the American Way of Life and the ideals of the open society.
The children of earlier elites will not succeed because they are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and an automatic ticket to the Ivy League.
They will succeed because they have inherited the talent, energy, drive, and resilience to overcome the many obstacles they will face in life. Life is still a struggle for all who hope to have economic and social success. It is just that we can predict who will be likely to possess the necessary characteristics from their ancestry."
Mr. Clark is now a professor of economics and department chair until 2013 at the University of California, Davis. His areas of research are long term economic growth, the wealth of nations, and the economic history of England and India.
"During this time, a growing professional class believed that scientific progress could be used to cure all social ills, and many educated people accepted that humans, like all animals, were subject to natural selection. Darwinian evolution viewed humans as a flawed species that required pruning to maintain its health. Therefore negative eugenics seemed to offer a rational solution to certain age-old social problems."
David Micklos, Elof Carlson, Engineering American Society: The Lesson of Eugenics
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.
There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.
It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil.
Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.”
“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
William Wilberforce
"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."
"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 at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
Most people are unaware or simply overlook the actions of the German government that began in 1939, in which the State, with the active cooperation of the medical and legal professions, began the systematic murder of people who were physically and mentally inferior, at least according to the judgement of the State.
It was this decision, and its willing acceptance by the thought leaders and intellectuals of the day, in defining who had the right to live based on their ability to serve the State according to its own needs, that laid the groundwork for the death of compassion, and the murder of over ten million people in the name of unnatural selection.
Once the State has the power to say who is a worthwhile human being and who is not, no one is safe.
We do not often hear about Aktion T4, the euthanasia program, because the weakest have little or no constituency, and are sometimes overlooked because others think that their own causes, or their own pain, is more significant.
What good is it to fight for the right of a child to be born, and then to promote a policy of social Darwinism, a survival of the fittest as if people were animals, forcing them to compete with slave labor in foreign lands in the name of The Market? Or to embrace a healthcare system that holds parents hostage, as they bankrupt themselves while frantically trying to care for their sick child or their loved one, in the name of The Market?
Despite a lucky few inhuman policies and a system of privilege virtually condemn the unfortunate child to a lifetime of desperation and poverty, to be caught in the infamous 47% of the country that struggles to live and to merely survive, and to raise their children, often from hand to mouth.
These are the working poor, the elderly, the disabled, who are sanctimoniously condemned and caricatured for not being able to outwit the abuses of the law and resist the perversions of the powerful that allow the select few to cheat and rob them at every step of the way. This is no deep economic mystery; it is a crime.
It was the professional class, the doctors and the lawyers, who willingly sanctioned the murder of the innocents in Germany. And for that great crime against God and Man, which almost no one protested against, the country was brought low and laid to ruin.
And it is a terrible trap to think that we today are so different, so exceptional, that we are not capable of permitting the same thing to happen all over again. After all, we are only doing what is necessary, what is required, because The Market says.
In their desire to escape the pain and complexity of being human, men can make themselves into beasts, one step at a time. And then there is hell on earth.
Aktion T4 was the name used for Germany's "Euthanasia programme" during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination".
The programme officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.
During the official stage of Action T4, 70,273 people were killed, but the Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German and Austrian physicians continued the murder of patients after October 1941 and that about 275,000 people were killed under T4.
More recent research based on files recovered after 1990 gives a figure of at least 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people killed by medication, starvation, or in the gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.
The name T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English as Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care.
This body operated under the direction of Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.
"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
“Then shall He say also unto them on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal desolation prepared for Satan and his angels. For I hungered, and ye gave Me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in; naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick and in prison, and ye visited Me not.’
Then shall they also answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see Thee hungering or thirsting or a stranger, or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister unto Thee?’ Then shall He answer them, saying, ‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me.’
Look in the mirror, Narcissus, and see what you are becoming.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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