"If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control. As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body." The White Rose, Munich 1942
"In 1927, a Virginia court determined Carrie Buck would be the first person sterilized under Virginia's new law, because she was said to be incorrigible and had a child out of wedlock. After appeals, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where in an 8-1 decision, Buck v. Bell upheld the Virginia Sterilization Act, saying it did not violate the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.
Six years after the Supreme Court decision, Hitler's Nazi Party enacted its own version, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. This led to the forced sterilization of more than 2 million Germans over the next 12 years."
Hadamar: The Forgotten Holocaust
"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.”
"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, Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
"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
"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' was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else."
Theodor Adorno
"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."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it. If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way.
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, 1933-1934
"A small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.”
Paul A. Lombardo, Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
“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.”
Mark Twain
“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis
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.
People craft romantic images and myths 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.
Stocks were trading weakly today on geopolitical news, China-related inventory problems as some tech multinationals like Apple, and the generally fallacious nature of the US economy.
The US Dollar strengthened.
Gold was lower, and silver was hammered.
There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday.
“There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action. All simple souls must admire and respect one another, saying: 'Let us each proceed along our path to the same goal, united in purpose and by means of God's order which, in its great variety, is in us all.'
To escape the pain caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, and give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.”
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, L'Abandon a la Providence divine
"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life."
Léon Bloy
"And thenceforward he went there daily, and after him went increasing numbers. It seemed that out of every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and that every groan on the arena found an echo in thousands of breasts. Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.
When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one, — happiness and love."
Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, 1905
There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls Report on Friday.
I will be having some minor surgery on Tuesday.
I do not know if it will be disruptive, but will play it as it comes.
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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