Matthew 23:37-38
"During the years of the Weimar Republic Carl von Ossietzky's political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison. He was released in 1932. Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began.
On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in Spandau prison. He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg. He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross. Burkhardt described Ossietzky as 'a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.'"
Jesse, In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky, 16 June 2012
"Tell my friends that I have come to the end. I hear my wife tried to visit me. We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.
I only wanted peace."
Carl von Ossietzky, German Journalist, winner in absentia of 1935 Nobel Peace Prize, died after a long brutal imprisonment on 4 May 1938
"Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight. He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power. He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war. In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world. It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work."
Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956
"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, we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism
Stocks wobbled today.
Gold rallied, as the Dollar fell.
Silver moved lower with equities.
VIX rose.
Earnings may dominate the stock market action, with tech and the miners reporting results this week.
It is hard to believe some of the things that are happening, even if one forecasted them, and anticipated them. What are we becoming?
The moral cowardice of the West is, once again, our shame.
"But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
Hilaire Belloc
Have a pleasant evening.
