"When we are the victims of an illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but reality. It is the same with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or duty. Once a certain group of people has been placed outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally than murder. As soon as men know they that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or encourage killers with approving smiles." Simone Weil
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.
“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."
"Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."
Erich Fromm
Perception management and propaganda are the way in which the powerful speak to the rest of the people, and bend them to their will.
It becomes a process that dehumanises everything and everyone it touches, trapping them in deep wells of selfishness and subjectivity.
They think that they have no blood on their hands because they murder the weak and the helpless with money and fraud, rather than with knives and gas, and mislead and destroy many more souls with their lies and deceptions.
It would have better for them if they had never been born, so hard the judgement will be that is given to them.
Infancy
Vile Adolescence
"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
"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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