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"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 blindness towards sin?
The model for the identification, sterilization, and finally the slaughter of the weak 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 who you consider to be life unworthy of life, or 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 may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
William Wilberforce
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