Nazi Best Quotes

Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.

For your information, Dolores, Rudi gave me full leave to do what I think is best for our children.

The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

I’m Ron Redish, one of the many news puppets that tell you what to believe and what to think. If a run-of-the-mill person, who isn’t a trusted and official news anchor like myself, says something that differs from the official news, you can be sure it’s misinformation or a flat-out lie. Such a person is for sure one or more of the following: a sexist; a racist; a misogynist; a Nazi; is part of a different political party than yourself; a terrorist, domestic or otherwise; a conspiracy theorist—or whatever label works best for you in shutting down your freethinking mind and hating the person so you won’t listen to them. Take your pick. Feel free to mix and match.

One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime. Maybe that's enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If only I could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.

My great-grandfather, Dad often told us, saved his best wines for special occasions. He was killed when the Nazis invaded Paris. The Nazis ended up drinking his wine. Lesson: you never wait. When I was growing up, we used only the good plates. We used the best linens. We drank out of Waterford crystal. When my father died, his wine cellar was nearly empty.

Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I'm sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.

Noah, however, was a son of a bitch of a captain who ran a very tight ship. Only pairs of the best and the brightest were allowed to climb the plank—perpetuate the species, repopulate the planet, and all that Nazi nonsense. Would Noah have allowed a lesbian zebra aboard, an unmarried hedgehog, a limping lemur?

It was Sir Winston Churchill, in the midst of Nazi bombings, who said to the people of London, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."' He was the one who offered the best definition of success I've ever read: "Success is moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that – don’t you? – when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It’s too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then.

Cherry Loot told Sergeant Burke, “I’m gonna make the best of this fuck-a-monkey show. Don’t mean fuck to me if it’s illegal, unjustified, and sinful. Today we’re heroes, tomorrow we’re the Nazis. You never know. Nobody on this ball knows shit.” It was an attitude refreshing if not outright inspiring.

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise. Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

One of the credos of my life is taken from Viktor Frankl, a Jewish survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who was a psychiatrist and author. In his highly influential book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he related that after the war someone asked him if he ‘hated the German race.’ He responded that he did not because in his view, ‘There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.’ That is how I divide the world. Not between Muslim and non-Muslim, black and white, or American and non-American, but between the decent and indecent. The issues I raise about Islam are not about the decency of Muslims, but about whether Islam in its traditional Islamist configuration is more or less likely than the American value system to produce good societies.

science at its best was a flower of Western culture, unbiased, apolitical, transnational, open, and progressive. It destroyed superstition and cant. It threw at least a little light into the darkness. And it worked.

There are good Germans. There are bad Jews. I think it is best to look at each person as an individual and to not group people together because of their race or religion. If we start doing that, we might just find we are as bad as the Nazis, right?

If the question is ‘How do we stop enormous evils in the world?’ the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently ‘War.’ Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed ‘war is not the answer.

Strengthened by the experiences of almost two decades in the various capitals, the Nazis were confident that their best “propaganda” would be their racial policy itself, from which, despite many other compromises and broken promises, they had never swerved for expediency’s sake.

A state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day become lord of the earth. May the adherents of our movement never forget this if ever the magnitude of the sacrifices should beguile them to an anxious comparison with the possible results.

Many great thinkers are said to be misanthropes, usually because they did not embrace all people around them as the greatest thing since sliced bread (which is actually a terrible thing: it massively reduces flavor if you keep it more than a day, which the shipping process by very nature imposes). This enables us to write off their opinions as “subjective,” with an airy wave of our hand and the all-knowing proclamation, “You know he was a misanthrope” or “Her misanthropy kept her from knowing the good in humanity.” This dismissive outlook is designed to protect the meek among us, who might be offended by the knowledge that recreational heroin use is actually a somewhat illogical outlook (to avoid absolute categories, we say “for most,” since for some people, dying of heroin addiction is the best solution). Misanthropy goes into the file with evil, terrorists, hackers, Nazis, pot smokers and Montana cabin-dwellers – people who have rejected society, and thus cannot be trusted.

Hitler, always at his best when he detected weakness in an opponent,

I've never been afraid of the American Nazi Party, on the grounds that anybody dumb enough to pick a name like that is not a serious threat. Any real fascist movement that's a threat, that's serious and really endangers us, would call itself the Red, White, and Blue Christian American Party, or something like that. They wouldn't be dumb enough to call themselves Nazis.

He feels that most high-placed Nazis are refusing to face facts vis-à-vis their economic plight. By doing so, they accelerate the tendency toward greater tour de force adventures, less predictability, less stability in general. The cycle of manic enthusiasm, then fear, then Partei solutions of a desperate type—well, the point he got across was that all this tends to bring the most irresponsible and reckless aspirants to the top.” Mr. Tagomi nodded. “So we must presume that the worst, rather than the best, choice will be made. The sober and responsible elements will be defeated in the present clash.

And second, in the fight against the Nazis, refugees like Cohen and the Clarks ultimately helped turn the tide of the war. Nazi Europe based its whole identity on forming an in-group that violently excluded these people. America, when it honored its best values, welcomed them. It's the American way: welcoming strangers, seizing the practical gains of diversity, finding common cause between aristocrats and thieves.

As a Jewish kid during those times, I fought to live every day. I didn't have a choice. As an influential Nazi, Schindler did have a choice. Countless times he could have abandoned us, taken his fortune, and fled. He could have decided that his life depended on working us to death but he didn't. Instead, he put his own life in danger every time he protected us for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. I am not a philosopher, but I believe that Oskar Schindler defines heroism. He proves that one person can stand up to evil and make a difference. I am living proof of that. I recall a television interview I once saw with scholar and writer Joseph Campbell. I've never forgotten his definition of a hero. Campbell said that a hero is an ordinary human being who does "the best of things in the worst of times". Oskar Schindler personifies that definition.

Because of the failed take-over bid by Walt Disney Studios of Harvey Comics in 1955, the Disney studio began a rumor that Casper was the first child experimented on, and subsequently killed by, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Then came Eichmann’s last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past.

At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I’d ever had.

Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people. Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being.

We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant creates false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, and Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with such lying stories. Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play, narratives that privilege the majority and oppress minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed. This, now, is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and what, if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them. Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.

There were slave traders, Nazis, and Communists who were compassionate in their personal lives, but all of them told, and most of them believed, some great lie that enabled them to participate in a great evil. Black slavery was made possible in large measure by the lie that blacks were innately inferior to whites.

In The Ethics of Our Fathers, a book of the Talmud, Rabbi Tarfon says: "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." By the end, this is how I came to feel about my work. Dismantling the rise of fascism is best not left to lone vigilantes, nor to the punitive mechanisms of the state, but to people working together to stamp out hate wherever it arises. In the meantime, I cook like a Jew: paprika, dill, onions, garlic, warm broth, and company. The herring is optional, but love is not optional. It is what we must marshal to break the back of the beast. To do so, we must break bread together: a prickle of salt, a pat of melting butter, a bite, a kiss, a homily in the mouth about what's worth fighting for.

And finally, when unhappy people try to help others by founding or joining social movements, they often do more harm than good. There are good reasons to fear social movements made up of unhappy people who want to bring about social change. Those left-wing and right-wing social movements that have destroyed tens of millions of lives were not composed of happy people. They were composed of unhappy people who blamed their unhappiness on others (for Nazis, Jews; for Communists, capitalists) and who looked to movements of radical social change as a source of both happiness and meaning. While there are times when the social order is so oppressive (living under a totalitarian regime is the best example) that personal happiness is essentially impossible, in relatively free societies the sources of one’s unhappiness are far more likely to be personal than social.

Every evening they announce that they want punch our nose, us and all the other Nazi pigs. Sure, you want to, but doing it is something rather different, gentlemen! The whole affair has a certain tragicomic tone. The Jews talk as if they were really strong, but soon they have to move their tents and run like rabbits from the approaching German soldiers. Qui mange du juif, en meurt! One could almost say that anyone with the Jews on his side has already lost. They are the best pillar of the coming defeat. They carry the seed of destruction. They hoped this war would bring the last desperate blow against National Socialist Germany and an awakening Europe. They will collapse. Already today we begin to hear the cries of the desperate and seduced peoples throughout the world: “The Jews are guilty! The Jews are guilty!” The court that will pronounce judgment on them will be fearful. We do not need to do anything ourselves. It will come because it must come. Just as the fist of an awakened Germany has struck this racial filth, the fist of an awakened Europe will surely follow. Mimicry will not help the Jews then. They will have to face their accusers. The court of the nations will judge their oppressor. Without pity or forgiveness, the blow will strike. The world enemy will fall, and Europe will have peace. "Mimicry", Das Reich, 20 July 1941

Stripped of their power, small details spoke volumes to Dolibois. Göring was terrified of thunderstorms. Keitel was obsessed with sunbathing and staring at his reflection in Ashcan’s only mirror, in its entrance hall. Robert Ley was repeatedly reprimanded for masturbating in the bathtub. Joachim von Ribbentrop, named by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda as the best-dressed man in Germany for nine consecutive years, was a lazy slob. Day in and day out, John Dolibois interviewed them.

…All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to the dispensary… After the prisoners had been examined the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further. The finished products were turned over to Koch’s wife, who had them fashioned into lamp shades, and other ornamental household articles.

Liberalism to them represents “rootless cosmopolitanism,” in the old Nazi phrase. They are willing to do business with anyone, move anywhere, and imagine that the good life of peace and prosperity is more than enough to aspire to in order to achieve the best of all possible worlds. They don’t believe that war is ennobling and heroic, but rather bloody and destructive. They are in awe of the creation of wealth out of simple exchanges and small innovations. They are champions of the old bourgeois spirit.

My great-grandfather, Dad often told us, saved his best wines for special occasions. He was killed when the Nazis invaded Paris. The Nazis ended up drinking his wine. Lesson: You never wait. When I was growing up, we used only the good plates. We used the best linens. We drank out of Waterford crystal. When my father died, his wine cellar was nearly empty. “Your dad used fancier words,” Augie tells me. “I prefer a line from Groucho Marx.” “That being?” “‘I shall drink no wine before its time. Okay, it’s time.

I can think of one reason why I can’t escape comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut. And it ain’t because my work is so indebted to his own. It’s because Vonnegut was the same as me: another con artist ripping off the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. A bunch of people have talked shit about Céline. I don’t blame them! Besides being one of the best writers of the Twentieth Century AD, he was also a rabid anti-Semite who collaborated with the Nazis. But I can’t judge! I too have collaborated with Nazis! I was published by Penguin Random House!

2.​Of course religion is not the sole source of dogma in the world. There’s political dogma, as well as cultural & ethnic dogma. There’s even, on occasion, scientific dogma. But science contains the methods and tools within itself to ferret it out, so dogma in science doesn’t last long when it arises. Consider also that scientists hardly ever wield power. So when science becomes dogma in a country, it’s usually because a political system that is itself dogma has adopted it. Nazi Germany and communist Lysenko Russia are, perhaps, the best example of this.

The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia headed for even greater disaster. 'Charge the cockpit or you die!' cried the pro-Trump intellectual right. 'I'd rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,' said the pro-Trump left. When people believe that the world is heading off a cliff, they are receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: 'What do you have to lose?' But if the media and intellectuals put events into statistical and historical context, rather than constantly crying 'crisis,' they would make it clearer what the answer to that question is. Revolutionary regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when a charismatic leader forces a radical personal vision on a society. A modern liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it's better to solve problems than to start a conflagration and hope for the best.

A German inmate, Andreas Pfaffenberger, deposed at Nuremberg on this. …All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to the dispensary… After the prisoners had been examined the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further. The finished products were turned over to Koch’s wife, who had them fashioned into lamp shades, and other ornamental household articles.78

When Kurt Eisner was released from Cell 70 in Munich’s Stadelheim gaol under a general amnesty proclaimed in October 1918, there was little indication that he was soon to become one of Germany’s leading revolutionaries. Best known as a theatre critic, he personified the bohemian lifestyle associated with Munich’s Schwabing district, close to the city centre.1 His appearance advertised his bohemianism. Small and heavily bearded, he went around wearing a black cloak and a huge, broad-brimmed black hat; a pair of little steel-rimmed spectacles was perched on his nose.

The best-known sign of the success of state Shinto is the fact that Japan was the first power to develop and use precision-guided missiles. Decades before the United States fielded the smart bomb, and at a time when Nazi Germany was only beginning to deploy dumb V-2 rockets, Japan sank dozens of allied ships with precision-guided missiles—better known as kamikaze. Whereas in present-day precision-guided munitions the guidance is provided by computers, the kamikaze were ordinary airplanes loaded with explosives and guided by human pilots willing to go on one-way missions.

Have you swallowed all that war stuff?" "No, of course I--" I was so committed to refuting him that I had half-denied the charge before I understood it; now my eyes swung back to his face. "All what war stuff?" "All that stuff about there being a war." "I don't think I get what you mean." "Do you really think that the United States of America is in a state of war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?" "Do I really think..." My voice trailed off. He stood up, his weight on the good leg, the other resting lightly on the floor in front of him. "Don't be a sap," he gazed with cool self-possession at me, "there isn't any war." "I know why you're talking like this," I said, struggling to keep up with him. "Now I understand. You're still under the influence of some medicinal drug." "No, you are. Everybody is." He pivoted so that he was facing directly at me. "That's what this whole war story is. A medicinal drug. Listen, did you ever hear of the 'Roaring Twenties'?" I nodded very slowly and cautiously. "When they all drank bathtub gin and everybody who was young did just was they wanted?" "Yes." "Well, what happened was that they didn't like that, the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts. So then they tried Prohibition and everybody just got drunker, so then they really got desperate and arranged the Depression. That kept the people who were young in the thirties in their places. But they couldn't use that trick forever, so for us in the forties they've cooked up this war fake." "Who are 'they' anyway?" "The fat old men who don't want us crowding them out of their jobs. They've made it all up. There isn't any real food shortage, for instance. The men have all the best steaks delivered to their clubs now. You've noticed how they've been getting fatter lately, haven't you?

The captain was amusing. He said that he himself couldn't draw and proved his words by drawing his own house for his prisoner to see. It was just such a house as the babies drew in the kindergarten: a square box with four square windows, a door and two chimneys, each with a neat curl of smoke. "That's best I can do," said the Captain, laughing. Max laughed with him for politeness' sake, though inwardly he was shocked that an important man like the Captain made a fool of himself. "Vater does not draw," he said kindly, "nor does Mutti; but they are both very keen on photography. Perhaps you are good at that?" "Not brilliant," said the Captain.

...Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender. Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits—not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness...

You think I wanted to hurt you? No. No! No, the only thing I knew was that you, Juliana Crain, were the only hope any of us had. You asked me if you were in the films. You are, you were, over and over again. Sometimes... I'd see you in the background somewhere... a protest, a speech, a war zone, maybe. Some place that mattered. I started knowing where to look. You could never stay out of it. Some of the people you knew... I started seeing them, too, revolving around you like an atom. But... they would change... different behavior, different relationships, different points of view shaped by their lives. But you were always you. You and your unnatural consistent mind. What if I hadn't seen this film? Well, I got to know a woman who would bet on the best in us, who bet on people, no matter what the world said about who they were, who they should be. That woman would do anything to save a sick boy... a Nazi boy, even... because she would believe he deserved the chance, as slim as it might be, to live a valuable life. And I knew that was the key, the only way to make sure that your sister's father wouldn't prevent that boy's father from stopping a war. Dixon died in an alley so that son of a bitch Smith could live. San Francisco is still here. Millions of people will live because of the choice you made, the goodness in you, Juliana. One selfless act of love and hope. That's what I put my money on. 

For more than two hundred years, on the topic of human population, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, basing itself on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. When I began researching this book I thought of Malthusian theory, eugenics, Nazi genocide and modern population control as separate and distinct episodes in human history. I am no longer so sure. I think there is some persuasive evidence that a direct, if meandering, intellectual thread links the Poor Laws, the Irish famine, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the one-child policies of Beijing. In all cases, cruelty as policy, based on faulty logic, sprang from a belief that those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak.

Anti-Semitism is akin to nationalism and its best ally. They are of a kind because a nation that, without territory or state power, has wandered through two thousand years of world history is a living refutation of the whole nationalist ideology that derives the concept of a nation exclusively from factors of power politics. Anti-Semitism has never had roots among workers. It has always been a middle-class and small-peasant affair. Today, when these classes face their greatest crisis, it has become to them a kind of religion, or at least a substitute for religion. Nationalism and anti-Semitism dominate the German domestic political picture. They are the barred organs of fascism, whose pseudo-revolutionary shrieks drown out the softer tremolo of social reaction.

Mmph,” the officer glanced up from their South African passports, green mambas, her best friend Keletso called them, because they’d bite you with visa fees for all the countries you’re not allowed to sommer just go to. “And you’re returning to South Africa after your vacation?” “Yes, that’s where we live,” proud of the hard fact of it. Away from everyday Nazis and school shootings so regular they were practically part of the academic calendar along with prom and football season, away from the slow gutting of democracy, trigger-happy cops, and the terror of raising a black son in America. But how can you live there, people would ask her (and Devon, her American husband, especially), meaning Johannesburg. Isn’t it dangerous? And she wanted to reply, how can you live here?

half-century before, at Stalin’s direct order, NKVD executioners slaughtered fifteen thousand Polish military officers and threw the bodies into rows of mass graves. The month-long operation in Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk was part of Stalin’s attempt to begin the domination of Poland. The young officers had been among the best-educated men in Poland, and Stalin saw them as a potential danger, as enemies-in-advance. For decades after, Moscow put the blame for the killings on the Nazis, saying the Germans had carried out the massacres in 1941, not the NKVD in 1940. The Kremlin propaganda machine sustained the fiction in speeches, diplomatic negotiations, and textbooks, weaving it into the vast fabric of ideology and official history that sustained the regime and its empire.

In the end only the urge for self-preservation can conquer… Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish…. Nature… puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry… The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel…” For Hitler the preservation of culture “is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle, do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard—that is how it is!”12

He knew how to work a crowd and how to package himself as a celebrity. It didn’t matter what the press said about him, he told an associate. “The main thing is that they mention us.” Now let us contemplate one simple but remarkable fact: the Nazis charged entrance fees to Hitler’s speeches! Is there any other politician of the twentieth century who would be considered worth spending money to hear? Churchill at his best, perhaps, though not on so regular a basis as Hitler or with his frequency. Churchill wasn’t the polished performer that Hitler was—just think of the difference in their body language. And before Donald Trump, perhaps, it’s impossible to imagine any modern American candidate for office asking people to pay for the privilege of listening to him try to win their political support.

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Schnall’s strong reaction to the failed replication of her own work provoked a mixed reaction from the psychological community. While many psychologists were bewildered by her response, a number of prominent US psychologists voiced support for her position. Dan Gilbert from Harvard University likened Schnall’s battle to the plight of Rosa Parks, and he referred to some psychologists who conducted or supported replications as “bullies,” “replication police,” “second stringers,” McCarthyists, and “god’s chosen soldiers in a great jihad.” Others accused the so-called replicators of being “Nazis,” “fascists,” and “mafia.” Rather than viewing replication as an intrinsic part of best scientific practice, Gilbert and his supporters framed it as a threat to the reputation of the (presumably brilliant) researchers who publish irreproducible findings, stifling their creativity and innovation

Here’s an imaginary twin pair that would be God’s gift to behavior geneticists—identical twin boys separated at birth. One, Shmuel, is raised as an Orthodox Jew in the Amazon; the other, Wolfie, is raised as a Nazi in the Sahara. Reunite them as adults and see if they do similar quirky things like, say, flushing the toilet before using it. Flabbergastingly, one twin pair came close to that. They were born in 1933 in Trinidad to a German Catholic mother and a Jewish father; when the boys were six months of age, the parents separated; the mother returned to Germany with one son, and the other remained in Trinidad with the father. The latter was raised there and in Israel as Jack Yufe, an observant Jew whose first language was Yiddish. The other, Oskar Stohr, was raised in Germany as a Hitler Youth zealot. Reunited and studied by Bouchard, they warily got to know each other, discovering numerous shared behavioral and personality traits including . . . flushing the toilet before use.

conservatives (or conservative nationalists) who became Nazis out of what Hermann Rauschning calls “the best of motives.” Rauschning joined the party in the early 1930s and became the Nazi mayor of the city of Danzig, believing in “the eternal values of the nation” and “a political order rooted in the nation.” He had a personal relationship with Hitler but soon discovered that his aims for Germany were not the Nazis’ aims, and in 1934 he left the party and fled to Switzerland. National Socialism, he had concluded, was not a conservative movement but a revolutionary one, “the destroyer of all order and all the things of the mind.” The only thing it understood was force and it held to no beliefs other than the acquisition of power and then more power. Rauschning was prescient enough to see that there was nothing to prevent the unscrupulous, nihilistic Hitler from forming an alliance with his supposed archenemy, Stalin. In a widely read book, The Revolution of Nihilism, published in 1938, he issued a warning that many did not wish to hear. The West, he said, had to prepare for “a clear, open, absolutely unflinching struggle” against the Nazis. For “nothing, not even the threat of world war, will deter them from their course.” Then

For the first time after the Great Purge, Stalin had a great number of high and highest officials executed, and we know for certain that this was planned as the beginning of another nationwide purge. This would have been touched off by the “Doctors’ plot” had Stalin’s death not intervened. A group of mostly Jewish physicians were accused of having plotted “to wipe out the leading cadres of the USSR.”30 Everything that went on in Russia between 1948 and January 1953, when the “Doctors’ plot” was being “discovered,” bore a striking and ominous similarity to the preparations of the Great Purge during the thirties: the death of Zhdanov and the Leningrad purge corresponded to Kirov’s no less mysterious death in 1934 which was immediately followed by a kind of preparatory purge “of all former oppositionists who remained in the Party.”31 Moreover, the very content of the absurd accusation against the physicians, that they would kill off people in leading positions all over the country, must have filled with fearful forebodings all those who were acquainted with Stalin’s method of accusing a fictitious enemy of the crime he himself was about to commit. (The best known example is of course his accusation that Tukhachevski conspired with Germany at the very moment when Stalin was contemplating an alliance with the Nazis.)

My father’s hopes were high for his return to Jaffa when the Swedish nobleman Count Folke Bernadotte was appointed on May 20, 1948 as the UN mediator in Palestine, the first official mediation in the UN’s history. He seemed the best choice for the mission. During the Second World War Bernadotte had helped save many Jews from the Nazis and was committed to bringing justice to the Palestinians. His first proposal of June 28 was unsuccessful, but on September 16 he submitted his second proposal. This included the right of Palestinians to return home and compensation for those who chose not to do so. Any hope was short-lived. Just one day after his submission he was assassinated by the Israeli Stern Gang. Bernadotte’s death was a terrible blow to my father and other Palestinians, who had placed their hopes in the success of his mission. Three months later, on December 11, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which states that: refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Bütün Sol’un gözünden kaçansa, insanın hayvanları tahakküm altına almasını meşrulaştırmak için kullandıkları argümanların-yani hayvanların sözde akıl ve dile sahip olmadığı argümanının- emperyalistlerin yerli halkları katlederken ve erkekler kadınları sömürürken kullandığı argümanla aynı olduğuydu. Tür ayrımcısı görüşe sahip hümanistler bu yüzden ironik olarak kendi hakimiyetlerini güçlendirirken bu tahakkümün kökenlerini anlamak için hayvansal bakış açısına yaklaşamıyorlar, ve böylece geçerli bir özgürlük politikasını geliştirecek bir duruma sahip olamıyorlar. Cinsiyet ayrımcılığı, ırkçılık ve engelli olmamanın üstünlüğü gibi ayrımcılıklara ek olarak tür ayrımcılığı da hem anti-semitizmde hem de Nazizmde doğrudan bulunuyor. Nazilerin Yahudileri ve entelektüel ve fiziksel anlamda “uygunsuz” buldukları diğerlerini böyle görmesi firavunların hayvanlarla aynı görülmesine dayanıyordu, ayrıca ırk ıslahı da “aşağı” hayat formları tarafından “kirletilmemiş” “saf” ve “üstün” bir ırk yaratma arzusuna dayanıyordu. Dahası, hayvanlara yönelik gaddarlıklarını meşrulaştırmak için insanların başvurduğu “Güçlü olan haklıdır” ideolojisi de Nazi ideolojisinin merkezinde yer alıyordu. Hitler’in temel bakışı, doğanın mücadele yasasına göre işlediğiydi ve dünya görüşünü de şöyle özetliyordu: “güce sahip olmayan hayatta olma hakkını kaybeder”. Bu bakışın kökleri insanların hayvanların hakimiyet altına almasında bulunuyor.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled The Times and The BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England's greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England's class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they. Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, Anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.

We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.

In Belarus, as elsewhere, local German policy was conditioned by general economic concerns. By 1943, the Germans were worried more about labor shortages than about food shortages, and so their policy in Belarus shifted. As the war against the Soviet Union continued and the Wehrmacht took horrible losses month upon month, German men had to be taken from German farms and factories and sent to the front. Such people then had to be replaced if the German economy was to function. Hermann Göring issued an extraordinary directive in October 1942: Belarusian men in suspicious villages were not to be shot but rather kept alive and sent as forced laborers to Germany. People who could work were to be 'selected' for labor rather than killed - even if they had taken up arms against Germany. By now, Göring seemed to reason, their labor power was all that they could offer to the Reich, and it was more significant than their death. Since the Soviet partisans controlled ever more Belarusian territory, ever less food was reaching Germany in any case. If Belarusian peasants could not work for Germany in Belarus, best to force them to work in Germany. This was very grim reaping. Hitler made clear in December 1942 what Göring had implied: the women and children, regarded as less useful as labor, were to be shot. "This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of 'subhumans,' only to import millions of other 'subhumans' to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves - had they not been abroad killing 'subhumans.' The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves, had they not been abroad killing.)

Our political system today does not engage the best minds in our country to help us get the answers and deploy the resources we need to move into the future. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence in the same way that markets have unleashed our collective productivity. “We the people” must reclaim and revitalize the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. The traditional progressive solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills. In an age where information has more economic value than ever before, it is obvious that education should have a higher national priority. It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education. Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well-educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different, one from the other. It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed. In the 1930s and 1940s, many members of the Nazi Party in Germany were extremely well educated—but their knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, and philosophy simply empowered them to be more effective Nazis. No matter how educated they were, no matter how well they had cultivated their intellect, they were still trapped in a web of totalitarian propaganda that mobilized them for evil purposes. The Enlightenment, for all of its liberating qualities—especially its empowerment of individuals with the ability to use reason as a source of influence and power—has also had a dark side that thoughtful people worried about from its beginning. Abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the leavening influences of everyday experience. Time and again, passionate believers in tightly organized philosophies and ideologies have closed their minds to the cries of human suffering that they inflict on others who have not yet pledged their allegiance and surrendered their minds to the same ideology. The freedoms embodied in our First Amendment represented the hard-won wisdom of the eighteenth century: that individuals must be able to fully participate in challenging, questioning, and thereby breathing human values constantly into the prevailing ideologies of their time and sharing with others the wisdom of their own experience.

The best way to differentiate between the two left-wing antagonists is to designate the volitional contingent the ‘free Left,’ and its authoritarian horde as the statist or Fascist Left. The free Left, like the Free French during World War II, comprises anti-authoritarians who felt as though their long-established realm had become occupied by foreign invaders. A logical progression would be to simply remain faithful to the original left-right classification and lump the entire menagerie of authoritarians (Nazis, Fascists, and Communists) into the reactionary ranks of the statist Right.

The best intelligence the British received came through German activity at Vemork. As early as April 1940 Jacques Allier had alerted his British allies to Nazi efforts in uranium research using heavy water from the plant.

Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

Though many moving individual instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews are recorded, such as the seven Poles who smuggled arms into the Warsaw Ghetto and several thousand Poles who hid Jews, Poles overwhelmingly reacted to the Nazi genocide of the Jews with, at best, indifference, and often, support. Only with Polish cooperation could the Nazis have murdered over 90 percent of the more than three million Jews of Poland. And it was not coincidental that the major Nazi death camps were located in Poland.

As the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in Germany in 1933, preparing the ground for the horrors of the Second World War, both the United States and Britain benefitted from the arrival on their shores of philosophers and scientists fleeing for their lives. Eventually, the United States would be the first nation to develop a nuclear weapon using the science brought there by German refugees, including Albert Einstein (1879–1955). When the war was over and the US and Soviet victors moved in to cherry pick the best Nazi scientists to come and work for them, the United States got Wernhervon Braun (1912–77). Braun was the physicist and rocket designer who created the deadly long-range V-2 rocket that rained death and destruction on London. But he was not merely a rocket designer; he was also a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer. The Americans grabbed him before the Soviets could, giving them the edge in ballistic missiles with which to project thermonuclear weapons at targets several thousand miles away. Braun was responsible for the rocket science that made the United States the first nation to put a man on the moon.

Compulsory, class-based education of young people by teachers in preparation for exams is one of those universal things nobody ever questions. We just assume that’s the way learning happens. But a quick reflection on our own experience shows that there are all sorts of other ways to learn. We learn by reading, by watching, by emulating, by doing. We learn in groups of friends, we learn alone. Yet almost none of this is called ‘education’ – which is always a top–down activity. Is the classroom really the best way for young people to learn things? Or has the obsession with formal education crowded out all sorts of other, more emergent models of learning? What would education look like if allowed to evolve? When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years. There they are held, on pain of punishment, in cells called classrooms and made, on pain of further punishment, to sit at desks and follow particular routines. Of course it is not as Dickensian as it used to be, and many people emerge with brilliant minds, but school is still a highly authoritarian and indoctrinating place. In my own case, the prison analogy was all too apt. The boarding school I attended between the ages of eight and twelve had such strict rules and such regular and painful corporal punishment that we readily identified with stories of prisoners of war in Nazi Germany, even down to the point of digging tunnels, saving up food and planning routes across the countryside to railway stations. Escapes were frequent, firmly punished, and generally considered heroic.

On 4 March 1946, the Denazification Committee estimated that they had the resources to prosecute a tenth of the cases at best.

In the welter of horror and haste that was Dunkirk, someone paused to put the hands of the two dead boys together, so that even in their death, they were not divided. “Such good boys they was,” the old woman repeated sorrowfully. “But, there, miss,” she added more cheerfully, “we must all make sacrifices in these days, mustn’t we?” I said, I hope with some humility, that we must. And I have often wondered since if the brotherhood of man has ever been more movingly described than in those words, “We did the best we could. We left them side by side, with their hands touching.

As the war drew to a close, Schmitt had no idea what new difficulties he might encounter, though he surely must have suspected that the Allies would hold him accountable for his Nazi collaboration. In April 1945, the Russians oc­cupied Berlin and arrested Schmitt at his home. During several hours of interrogation, Schmitt told the Russians that his relationship with National Socialism could best be understood in reference to the experiments of the German scientist Max von Pettenkofer. Schmitt explained to his baffled interrogators that at the beginning of this century, Pettenkofer had argued that the susceptibility of a person to illness was more important than a bacillus in causing infectious disease. To prove his point, Pettenkofer stood before his students and drank a glass of water containing a culture of cholera bacteria; he remained healthy. "You see," Schmitt concluded, "I have done exactly the same thing: I drank of the Nazi bacillus, but it had not infected me." While it is unknown what effect this story had on the Russians, Schmitt was released and allowed to return home.

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.” Heinrich Himmler

When the U.S. Census Bureau sponsored a contest seeking the best automated counting device for its 1890 census, it was no surprise when Hollerith’s design won.

the house, her adoptive family had her committed to a state mental institution. The State of Virginia sought to have her forcibly sterilized. The 8-to-1 majority decision was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of the most respected judges in American history. It reads like something out of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto, Mein Kampf. Which, in fact, was partly inspired by the American eugenics movement. Justice Holmes wrote: We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not

Allan liked Pat best because he was a Nazi sympathizer. Allan called mixing the races “mongrelization,” and liked David Duke—Pat appealed to him.

Van Meegeren’s best fakes should never have fooled a soul. Instead, they fooled the world. The real question with Van Meegeren is this: How did the experts get it so wrong?

The problem is that, even in the case of paintings that cost millions or tens of millions, science seldom comes into play. The best tools don’t help if no one uses them. “Nobody bothers to take the time or spend the money to go to the scientists,” says Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an expert on fakes.

The emergence of trans-exclusionary radical feminism [TERF] in the 1970s, with its own version of trans panic, is only one of many trans-misogynistic echoes in recent history. TERFs... didn't invent trans misogyny, nor did they put a particularly novel spin in it...portrayal of trans femininity as violent and depressed could have been lifted from the British denunciation of hijras in the 1870s, or from Nazi propaganda about transvestites in the 1930s... Recent work by historians has cat doubt in his popular TERF beliefs ever were outside a few loud agitators... If anything, TERFs, whether in the 1970s or in their contemporary "gender-critical" guise, are better understood as conventional boosters of statist and racist political institutions... TERFs, like the right-wing evangelicals or white supremacists who agree with them politically, are not the lynchpin to trans misogyny; rather, they are at best one of its latest manifestations.

First, the frenzy to buy art meant that paintings turned up out of nowhere, every day, and sold with no questions asked. Second, the Nazis had endless reserves of cash. Third, Hitler and Goering were rubes who fancied themselves connoisseurs. (In Goering’s case, at least, his chief art expert was no great shakes, either.) Fourth, the Nazis were not the only ones in the market. Faced with the hideous prospect of Dutch masterpieces falling into German hands, Holland’s art establishment and its great industrialists flung money at the sellers. Best of all, from a schemer’s point of view, all the wheeling-and-dealing went on at hyperspeed, with no time for reflection or second thoughts. With ordinary paintings, this urgency posed no great danger—faced with a middling work, one could make only a middling mistake. But make the purchase of a lifetime in haste and you might well make the mistake of a lifetime.

the occupation years carried one last, special danger for art buyers. No buyer could make a side-by-side comparison of a newfound painting and an established work, because the best pieces from Dutch museums had been hidden away for safekeeping, out of reach. For a con man in the art line, times like these would never come again.

Vermeer’s mortal remains have slipped from sight. He was buried in Delft’s Oude Kerk, the Old Church, but the precise location has been forgotten. Someone made a best guess years ago and inscribed the name “Vermeer” on a stone. There tourists pay homage, though just what the stone conceals no one quite knows.

Bredius had been fighting to keep Vermeer’s best work away from the upstart Americans for thirty years, since his long-ago tug of war over The Milkmaid. Hannema, the director of a museum yearning for a place at a table dominated by haughty Amsterdam and the mighty Rijksmuseum, was desperate to win this one-of-a-kind jewel for himself. Hannema had an extra incentive, though he hardly needed one. Nearly a century before, Rotterdam had kicked away a chance at one of the best-loved Vermeers of all, The Lacemaker. Through all the succeeding Decades, the pain of that loss lingered on.

Astonishingly, most experts had no such qualms. With the exception of Duveen and a tiny handful of others, the leading scholars of the day all shared Bredius’s opinion that Emmaus was a masterpiece.* They focused their attention on the Vermeer touches they liked best and ignored or downplayed the others.

I suppose my unwavering devotion and love for my girlfriends motivated me to delve deeper into the realm of psychopathy and uncover the truth of what I experienced and managed to survive. And remember. Speelwalking. I can see myself wandering around on Barcelona streets, aware of danger but still unaware how large their web was and is. Infinite. Growing. Like Space. I feel compelled to share it with others. Timothy. Cannot. Timothy is dead. Age 16. In the Cagmayer house on the Prairie. What can I do? I tried my best and even more than I could. Devoted. Hoping in her return home. It seems that the three people I met in three consecutive years were all psychopaths from broken families, from psychopath parents. Perhaps nazi grandparents. Most likely. Fascist. Criminals. Juicy or not. This is the 21 ST century. “United colors.” “Of Benetton.” All the colors and all the “fasc-ion.” The mafia of short and evil people wasn’t only international as I thought. It is global. I only sensed it yet before. I survived a pandemic of Evil Eyes in Spain, in Europe. So far. On this planet.

How come Hitler is a bigger villain than the British monarchy, when Hitler invaded only 11 countries, while the British empire invaded 90 percent of the globe, that is, over 170 countries, and caused multiple times the massacre than the Nazis did! And while modern Germans are well aware of the nation's horrific past, and try their best to right the wrongs, like civilized, conscientious humans ought to, in barbarian britain however, over half the population still stand proudly behind the monarchy, let alone recognize the animal filth it represents, which till this day is unparalleled by any other animal regime. Now to the reason why Hitler is officially a villain, but not the British monarchy. Hitler invaded white countries, while the British empire invaded mostly colored countries - and since colored life is cheap, but white life is priceless, Hitler is branded a villain, while the Brits are designated "explorers" and "bringers of civilization", a tradition which has been proudly inherited by the modern day British Empire - the United States of America.

Michael had carried a knife, and slept with a baseball bat, because he thought his parents had been replaced by surgically altered Nazis who had murdered them and wanted to kill him.

In early 2018, Spacey’s American Beauty performance was even left out of an Academy Awards montage celebrating past Best Actor winners. By then American Beauty had become a perpetual target for critics, who questioned the film’s Best Picture bona fides: How could a movie about a bored suburban creep win in a year of Election and Being John Malkovich? But the elements that made American Beauty seem so fantastical back in 1999 make it all the more relevant in 2019: its self-entitled pervert; its angry, screen-addicted teen; its fuming Nazi-lover next door. Like many of the movies of that year, American Beauty plays like an accidental warning of what was to come. You just had to look closer.

After the war, Ernst Heinkel, Willy Messerschmitt and the chief of Germany's fighter forces Adolf Galland colluded in the construction of a highly one-sided account of the Me 262's history, designed to celebrate the genius of German technology, whilst at the same time demonstrating the incompetence of the Nazi leadership. In their account, popularized in best-selling biographies and television interviews, it was the meddling of Hitler, Goering and Milch that robbed Galland and his valiant fighter pilots of a weapon with which they might have protected Germany against the merciless onslaught of the bombers. This was a myth that appealed to numerous themes in post-war German political culture: regret at the chance of a victory wasted, the consolation provided by the supposed superiority of 'German technology', the self-righteous commemoration of the horror of Allied bombing.

Waiting on God I believe in the sun, even when it’s not shining. And I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it. I believe in God, even when he’s silent. Inscription on a wall in Nazi Germany

Sitting at the table were three Russian prisoners of war that had been assigned to work on her husband’s farm. Hesitantly, we sat down with these men. I couldn’t understand a word they said and I couldn’t know the awful circumstances under which I would see them again. We stayed at the farm that entire day and she let us sleep in a nice large bed, tucked under the eaves of the attic. It would have been perfect except that we didn’t have any pillows or blankets but at least there wasn’t a corpse in bed with us! The nights were getting cold this time of year, besides the Russians had made me feel considerably uncomfortable. When I asked her about her neighbors she avoided the question and so I thought it best to continue our search, in hopes of a better place to stay.

The Zookeeper’s Wife is the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Polish Christian zookeepers who, horrified by Nazi racism, managed to save more than three hundred people. Author Diane Ackerman writes movingly about Polish émigré Eva Hoffman’s psychic earthquake of having to shed her name in order to save her life: “Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our names takes them a tiny distance from us—but it is a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters.” Suddenly Eva Hoffman’s given name, and that of her sister, no longer exists even though “they were as surely us as our eyes or hands.” The new names were actually “identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves.” DISCOVERING WHO YOU ARE Our names, our identities, our figuring out “This is who I am” are a huge part of discovering our dreams. And haven’t many of us said, “I’ll start dreaming once I wrap up with X, Y, or Z project.” At the same time, we are asking ourselves, “Why do I keep putting things off? There’s so much to do but I can’t get anything done.” Perhaps we have it backwards. Perhaps having goals for ourselves is not something to do after we’ve wrapped up X, Y, and Z projects. Perhaps daring to dream is a goal we need to pursue now, because it’s key to getting those X, Y, and Z projects done. Psychologist Timothy Pychyl writes in an article titled “Teenagers, Identity Crises, and Procrastination” that if we can’t answer the questions “Who am I?” and “What am I?” we’re more likely to procrastinate. In other words, the more people know who they are, the less likely they are to procrastinate. Pychyl explains the interconnectedness between identity and agency as follows: “Identity is that knowledge of who we are. . . . Agency is the belief that we are in control of our decisions and responsible for our outcomes. . . . It means we make a difference, we make things happen, we act on the world. Thus, being an active agent depends on identity, or knowing who we are.” Perhaps, then, the best thing we can do is to put our busyness to the side, and instead focus on our identity and our dreams—or, as management consultant Robin Dickinson said after he read Pychyl’s study, “Focus on your To-Be List, before the To-Do List.” When we return to that to-do list we might just find we’re actually beginning to get things done.

Randy says, “You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is ‘to prevent future Holocausts.’ ” Avi laughs darkly. “I’m glad it’s obvious to you, my friend. I was beginning to think I was the only one.” “What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust all the time.” “Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.” “I take it you do not share this view, Avi?” “Look at Bosnia!” Avi scoffs. “Human nature doesn’t change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “So what hope is there?” “Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts, we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking attention.

Hannah Arendt, the best and most philosophically inclined of the commentators, is also, in regard to her ultimate conclusions, the worst, i.e., the most perversely wrong-headed. In a final warning, she singles out for special attack the attitude which she regards as a major source of the Nazis’ evil and of their success: an unswerving commitment to logic. The Nazis, she says, and the masses attracted to them, were “too consistent” in pursuing the implications of a basic premise (which she identifies as racism); they gave up the freedom of thought for “the strait jacket of logic” or “the tyranny of logicality”; they did not admit that complete consistency “exists nowhere in the realm of reality,” which is pervaded instead by “fortuitousness.

Perhaps the sentiment was best expressed by noted Holocaust survivor turned Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal: “for evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.” More