"We live in a world where love itself is condemned. People call it weakness, something to grow out of. Some are saying: 'Let each one become as strong as he can, and let the weak perish.' They say that the Christian religion with its preaching about love is a thing of the past. The neo-paganism [of the Nazis] may well cast off love but, in spite of everything, history teaches us that we shall be the victors over this. We shall not forsake love." Titus Brandsma, executed at Dachau, 26 July 1942
"All my life I have been fighting against the spirit of narrowness and violence, arrogance, intolerance in its absolute, merciless consistency. I have also worked to overcome this spirit with its evil consequences, such as nationalism in excess, racial persecution, and materialism. In regards to this, the National Socialists are correct in killing me.
I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me – and in the end, that is a man's duty."
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Executed in Plötzensee Prison on 23 January 1945
As journalist activist Carl von Ossietzky put it, 'we cannot hope to affect the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.'
Heroic virtue shines across the vast seas of history like beacons to those in the troubled waters of general deception.
Stocks were led by a narrow group of big cap tech related stocks, with the NDX 100 driving all the gains.
Tomorrow we will have the CPI data, which *could* move the market. Some of the yield related futures are pricing in a four rate hike year. A strong CPI number may encourage that.
Gold and silver showed some mild strength, not as a flight to safety, but mostly off a slightly weaker dollar.
When traded as currencies, the precious metals are decoupled from their fundamental supply and demand dynamics as commodities.
Next week will be Jay Powell's first FOMC meeting. The Fed is widely expected to decide on a 25 bp rate hike.
This Friday is a stock option expiration. We may see some shenanigans on the precious metals related stocks.
The CBOE put-call ratio is back to the pre-meltdown levels.
Corruption and deception remain the coin of the realm in the halls of power in New York and Washington.
"We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."
Carl von Ossietzky
"In the [60 Minutes] interview, Kroft asks [Michael] Lewis: 'What’s the headline here?' Lewis responds: 'Stock market’s rigged. The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism is rigged.'
Kroft then asks Lewis to state just who it is that’s rigging the market. Lewis responds that it’s a 'combination of these stock exchanges, the big Wall Street banks and high-frequency traders.'
It’s just shy of eight years since Lewis wrote the definitive book on the corrupted structure of Wall Street, and yet, Congress has taken no meaningful action to reform it.
Congress has taken zero meaningful actions to reform Wall Street since it brought the U.S. to its economic knees in 2008 because much of Congress is receiving large chunks of campaign dough from Wall Street and its outside lawyers, as well as from hedge funds that drop $10 million to a Super Pac as casually as paying for lunch at Milos.
The failure of America to reform its campaign financing structure has corrupted Congress in its ability to reform Wall Street. In turn, the lack of reform of Wall Street has left the U.S. with a dangerous financial system...”
"We cannot look to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."
Carl von Ossietzky, German editor of Die Weltbühne, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935
"It would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse."
William Dodd, historian and US Ambassador to Germany, 1933
There isn't any recovery. Or at least the false recovery that has been erected is showing great holes through its painted canvas and thin veneer of distorted statistics.
The Fed will still raise interest rates at least once or twice, for 'technical reasons' that have nothing to do with the real economy and everything to do with their own financial engineering practices and the desires of the financiers.
The credibility trap remains a powerful snare for the pampered princes and princesses. How can they admit what is wrong without endangering their own privileged positions and undermining the 'authority' that they so undeservedly enjoy?
And so by example and by continuing reinforcement, lies and deception have become the generally accepted way of doing business in the land of the exceptional. Exceptionally self-deluded that is.
The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.
"All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the
founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been
extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have
befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high
intelligence with low desires."
Thomas Babington Macaulay
"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men."
John Perkins
"Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or a government by wealthy elites.”
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
"Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different States, which are employed altogether for their benefit."
Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address
"We’re told that we’re a polarized society, right? That’s the way the ruling classes have manipulated people for more than two thousand years: divide and rule. The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door."
Ralph Nader
"We cannot look to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."
Carl von Ossietzky
Stocks took a dive today in a 'risk off' session that smelled like the rinse to yesterday's wash.
I hope you saw the article I linked on the sidebar that disclosed that the Fed provided north of a trillion dollars in liquidity to the global Banks during the stock market slump in March.
Gold and silver fell off today, a little surprising with regard to gold, but adding to the suspicion that this was not a conventional risk off day.
The Dollar took the 99 handle and then some.
VIX bounced back higher.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
The Banks and their systems seem to be the new dreadnoughts in the latest form of US international 'relations.'
"God is there within ourselves, and there he reveals himself to us. He wants to be seen and recognized there. He is, after all, nowhere more clearly knowable to us than in the ground of our being.
We live in a world where love itself is condemned. People call it weakness, something to grow out of. Some are saying: 'Love is of no importance, we should rather develop our strength; let each one become as strong as he can, and let the weak perish.'
Again, they say that the Christian religion with its preaching about love is a thing of the past.
This is how it is: they come to you with such teaching, and even find people who take it up willingly.
The neo-paganism [of the Nazis] may well cast-off love but, in spite of everything, history teaches us that we shall be the victors over this. We shall not forsake love.
Take the days as they come, the good with a grateful heart, and the
bad for the sake of those which follow, because misfortune is only a
passerby.
I see God in the work of His hands
and the marks of His love
in every visible thing. Do not yield to hatred. We are here in a dark tunnel, but we have to go on. At the end, an eternal light is shining for us.
Not my will but yours be done."
Titus Brandsma, Dutch priest, executed at Dachau, 26 July 1942
Brandsma had been vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology from the time Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. By speaking out and writing against it many times before the Second World War, he was finally arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis in their infamous Dachau concentration camp where he died.
For weeks since his arrival into Dachau concentration camp just outside Munich, Brandsma had been starved and savagely beaten regularly. His body depleted of strength, Brandsma became infected with camp plague. Refusing to go to the camp hospital called by camp prisoners 'a hell within hell,' Brandsma was eventually admitted.
Its doctors, having no mission to heal and restore their patients often used them, as they did Brandsma, for cruel medical experimentation. In the end, the camp doctor assigned to his case ordered that his patient, now dying of terminal renal failure, be given a lethal injection.
Watching all of this was a Nazi nurse of Dutch origin who hated all religion, especially the clergy. As she observed Father Brandsma, she would sometimes mock him and his religion. This prompted him to often engage her in conversation, asking why she hated the faith so much.
The nurse, who administered the injection to him, survived the war and testified to Brandsma’s cause of death that afternoon in the summer of 1942.
She was never able to forget him. She remembered his last moments, that he prayed for and forgave her, and that he reached into his tattered pocket to give her his only personal possession. It was a crude rosary made and given to Brandsma by another Dutch prisoner who also had been executed.
She had returned to the faith which she had abandoned for the Nazis.
Titus Brandsma was recognized as a martyr and saint on 25 November 2021.
"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength. But it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."
Léon Bloy
“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and and should do is to seek truth, and to serve it when we have found it.
The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves defeated in our innermost selves?”
Maximilian Kolbe
"The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their destruction; and of course they do so. Is this a sign that the Germans are brutalized in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake?
Isn't it a riddle and awe-inspiring that things can be so beautiful, despite the horror? I've seen something wondrous peering through my joy in the beautiful, a sense of its creator.
Only people can be truly ugly, because they have free will to separate themselves from this song of praise.
It often seems they will drown out this hymn with cannon thunder, curses, and blasphemy. But I have realized they will not succeed. And so I want to throw myself on the side of the victor.”
Sophie Scholl
"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 Carl von 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. It is also wholesome for mankind today, since the fatal illusion against which he fought has not been removed by the outcome of the last war."
Albert Einstein, 1956
"And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you. But you'll go on anyhow.
But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."
Martin Luther King
"Thankfully few are literally called today to the actual martyr's crown. But we are all called act for the truth even if there is some social and economic cost, and to take up our cross and follow, each day, in our own small ways, denying ourselves for Him.
That is all most of us can do-- be still, and faithful, and wait on the Lord in our calling.
And we must not add to or assist, in any way, the evil in the world, especially by condemning or harming those who stand up against its onslaught. That is Pilate's sin, to ask 'What is truth', and then turn away and lie, if only to ourselves, while looking truth in the face, for the sake of our own willfulness and ease.
It is a sin against the Spirit, and one that will not be easily forgiven.
It is shocking to have seen how many are willing to rise up in hate and anger, and fall away, bending to the darkness of this world, the proud and greedy and the lawless, and for what? For so little.
We may believe what we will. But we will be held accountable for our beliefs."
"We cannot look to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."
Carl von Ossietzky, German editor of Die Weltbühne, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935
"It would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse."
William Dodd, historian and US Ambassador to Germany, 1933
I am reading a new book titled Hitlerland, by Andrew Nagorski. Thank you to reader Andrew for recommending it. He knows I am very widely read in this period of history and find it fascinating both from an economic, sociological, and political perspective.
I was prepared for a rehashing of things I have already known and read, and I must admit I was initially put off a bit by the title which sounds frivolous. I was pleasantly surprised, even a bit amazed.
The book is highly original, and extraordinarily factual, in that Nagorski spent an extraordinary effort investigating eyewitness accounts, many of them unpublished, by Americans who lived there during the period in Germany from the Weimar Republic to the rise of Hitler and the beginning of the Second War.
He inserts minimal personal opinion and analysis into the writing, being more the journalist than the historian. He does treat the after-the-fact accounts with the proper regard for posturing and self promotion. He does have some very charming vignettes as well that make it a highly readable book.
It is well done, a 'must read' for anyone who wishes to understand that period of time from the perspective of those who lived it. It adds a new dimension to a much written about period of time. Remarkably so.
If there is anything that was surprising, it is the abject misery and despair of the German people during the Weimar Republic with the hyperinflation, and how few people actually saw the worst to come politically, after a false economic recovery, with the Crash of 1929. One knows these things, but they do not really understand them, not having lived it.
Personal accounts help in this. This is why I found the book, When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson so helpful in this regard, as well as Ken Burns masterful documentary, The Civil War.
The fear of the Socialists and the Communists in particular is a key driver for the events of that time, and is not to be discounted. The cynical dealing and irresoluteness of the Weimar politicians is another factor. There were open fights in the streets on a regular basis, although they were often surprisingly 'orderly' as this book relates. Some of the passages are quite amusing for those familiar with the German penchant for orderliness, even in the midst of urban warfare.
The capacity for self-delusion and a bad compromise is amazing, especially during periods of confusion, fear, and distraction. And the moral base in Germany at that interwar period was already notoriously relativistic and given to occultism, odd theories, and Nietzchean extremes. And after war, hyperinflation, and a new Depression, their spirit and will to resist evil was simply exhausted, especially when it was backed by systematic terror and force.
We ought not to be too critical of those people, many of the Americans included, who did not see the worst coming. Did you see the recent financial collapse coming, and what has followed? Do you even understand it yet? History may be amazed at your ignorance. And yet all the signs of trouble were there during the period from 1999 to 2007.
Some people were warning of the credit bubble, the imbalanced financial sector, and widespread fraud. And the American people were distracted by a 'war on terror,' and not the collapse of their lives and savings after the decimation from a brutal world war that left the flower of their youth dead, crippled, or broken.
And then in Germany there was another Crash, and the onset of Great Depression, and the people thought, no, not again. Anything is better than this. And so the bargain with the devil was made, and after a brief blaze of false glory, hell followed.
This is not to excuse anything that was done, or permitted to happen. Far from it. But it is to place this sort of tragedy within its human context, and to remind us that we are all capable of such confused cowardice and acquiescence in the face of evil. We must remain steadfast and resolute against it, especially before resistance demands the type of heroism of which few are capable.
The consensus of those who met Hitler was that he was a most ordinary person, with little charisma or appeal. Dorothy Thompson called him 'the very prototype of the Little Man.' He seemed nondescript, but inwardly mad, illogical and ineffective, and they were incredulous that he could rise to power.
A key tenet of the Nazis was the rejection of objective fact and reason in favor of the passions of 'the blood' and of instinct. Truth was not an impartial consideration or serious limitation to conclusion and action. That is a familiar refrain amongst ideologues and the more extreme elements of both left and right on the political continuum.
There are a few heroic figures in this book, and prominent among them is the Pulitzer prize winning journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer, whom I had never heard about before this, which is a shame. I will let you read about him for yourself.
I had not realized how badly the prospects of the National Socialist party had fallen in the years after Hitler's imprisonment for the abortive putsch and before his sudden rise to power as chancellor. They were essentially done. But they served a purpose as a cat's paw for those wealthy bankers and industrialists who feared the Communists and Socialists, and for cynical Weimar pols who were too busy fighting for power amongst themselves to see the rising threat of fascism.
I had not remembered that during the Night of the Long Knives not only the SA leadership was taken on shot, but old political rivals as well, some of whom were retired from political life. Hitler's ruthlessness was exhaustive, and examples were often made. Again, we ought not to discount the regular use of domestic terror as party policy from the very onset of its ascendancy.
That rise to power was supported by the fresh fears and concerns brought on by the Great Depression which knocked Germany back off course, and the craven weakness of spirit of the politicians of his day. In the manner of Mussolini he gained power almost by default, and then secured it with a brutal iron fist. I am now convinced that without that terrible economic collapse after 1929 to provide a ready platform, he would have died a relatively forgotten crank.
One thing that I wonder about often is the attention given to Hitler because of his abominable atrocities, and the relatively little time spent on his role model, Mussolini. I have read a bit more on him, and he was despicable, a ruthless thug. The early Nazis were referred to by the Americans as the fascisti.
Here is a brief excerpt from the accounts of the American journalist Edgar Mowrer. It is not anything I had not known from other readings but gives one a sense of the style in which Nagorski allows events to unfold through the words of his witnesses to history, and how he weaves their testimony into a rich tapestry.
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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