Insights from Those Who Do Remember

On Remembrance day, hear from three wise men who’ve been here before.

I wrote this for Remembrance Day - 11/11/2024 - because that made it extra topical … then my programme crashed and I had to write it all again!

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“It has been said that for evil men to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing.” - Reverend Charles F. Aked¹

We cannot understand Totalitarianism, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard...because what happened can happen again...For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened.” - Primo Levi

Before I lay out some thoughts from the “three wise men” who have been “here” before, what does “here” mean?

The Current Situation

There are three groups of people in the World today.

• The first describe themselves as “awake” - (not to be confused with “woke”!) - who think that those in power have malign intent; that we have just lived through a collectivist takeover.

  

• The second group are completely unaware of this, because they are still unaware of the blinkers (U.S. “blinders”) restricting their view (figuratively speaking) - what they are allowed to see - what is held up in front of their faces - by their TV, YouTube, Google, Tik-Tok, FaceBook, newspapers … the mainstream media, in other words. Somehow they do not know yet that it is all carefully selected and censored. They haven’t discovered uncensored media (like Telegram groups and Substack) and chosen genuine journalists. They suffer from what Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman called WYSIATI – “What you see is all there is”.

“Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?” - Solzhenitsyn

• The third group are vaguely or subconsciously aware that they may have glimpsed something very unpleasant out of the corner of their eye, but their wishful thinking has determined that it’s probably nothing. They are the “willfully blind”. There are many doctors in this group.

Now I’ve always been very “live and let live”. It would go against all my instincts to take someone by the scruff of the neck and hold their face close to the turd in the room until they acknowledge its existence. I’m not sure that instinct isn’t just cowardice though. And anyway – what can you show them?

Well, I’ll tell you an unequivocal fact you can point out, which - with a little background knowledge (most of which people already have) - alone can be sufficient:

Your government mandated vaccines

(… or – depending on where you are - something very close: massive pressure, or implying that they would be mandated, or pressuring companies to mandate them for employees).

A Matter of Principle

Now, if you haven’t been taught that mandating a medical intervention is wrong, On Principle, it’s easy to miss its significance, and indeed, most people did. They haven’t been remembering, every 11/11, what we should have learned from the wars, “lest we forget”. The need to understand it is urgent, as your government, like every other, broke that principle.

“Our duty is not just to remember, but to ensure that such horrors can never happen again.” - Primo Levi

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[I’ve explained as clearly as I could, this vital principle that we should have been remembering on Remembrance Day, in a previous article: What’s Wrong with “The Greater Good”?. I recommend reading it if you haven’t. But - recognising that many people won’t do that …) in case you haven’t read that, or need a recap., I’ll restate briefly, before looking at insights from my “Three Wise Men”, who have been in this situation.]

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There are two ways we learn that coercing people to do things “for the greater good” is wrong:

1. from the behaviour of those who have done this in the past; and

2. every time a group of medical ethicists consider the matter, they have codified it.

1 The Record of Collectivist Governments

After a major war, people are very keen that their loved ones should not have died for nothing, and that we learn “never again” lessons from the experience. We humans are pretty dim though, it turns out, and we really need to remind ourselves of the important lessons annually at least.

After World War II we tried some Nazi doctors at Nuremberg. The doctors’ defense against the charges of carrying out experiments on unwilling subjects was basically

1. it was not illegal: there were no laws against it (in Germany or other countries). And

2. it was for “the greater good”: while the people experimented on may have suffered, society as a whole stood to gain from it.

This made things difficult for the prosecutors. “Hmm; these points are correct: guidance but no law; and we don’t want to let you get away with portraying something that seems so wrong as something noble”.

So “we” (the “good guys”) broke our own legal principle – that you cannot break a law that does not exist (in place since Roman times) - and convicted them of breaking a law we just made up. In fact we made out that it was so clearly wrong that the penalty was hanging for several of them. Essentially, our response was

Whilst voluntarily doing things for other people's benefit is a wonderful human attribute, you should not force anyone to suffer for others. The "greater good" argument doesn’t trump the principle that all humans must be respected!

Well, however obvious this was claimed to be in 1947, by 2021 not only had almost everyone forgotten the lesson, but they couldn’t work it out for themselves.

In fact it’s not obvious at all: humanity got this wrong several times in the twentieth century, just to hammer the point home for the benefit of us coming afterwards. (“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”).

The reason it’s not obvious is that most people (97%, they say) have a strong co-operative instinct – to help others. Unfortunately the psychopaths and sociopaths who make up the other 3% are famously over-represented amongst CEOs and politicians ... “All power tends to corrupt …” and they weaponise our instinct to do things for others against us.

If a government claims to have the authority to tell you to do things for “the greater good”, big mental alarm bells should sound: that is a collectivist government - one that believes society is more important than the individual. (How insidiously plausible that sounds. No wonder people keep getting duped). But let’s look at their record.

• The Bolshevik takeover in 1917 led to the murder of the Russian middle class with weapons and famine.

• The Nazis weren’t much better – eugenics; Brownshirt thugs beating up dissenters; killing civilians …

Then came the Nuremburg principles. But because we humans have short memories and are “hard of thinking”, we also had

• Mao’s revolution in the 1950s in China (when they murdered the middle class - weapons and famine); and

• Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” in the 1970s in Cambodia (weapons, famine … you get it).

In fact, in that century of wars – the twentieth century –

six times as many people were deliberately killed by their own government as were casualties of war!

Stop thinking that governments have your interests at heart. The record shows them to be more harmful than war! The reason the US Second Amendment – the right to bear arms - is there, is to try and guarantee that citizens can protect themselves from their government.

You cannot give politicians the power to mandate vaccines (or any other medical treatment). Even if they don’t abuse that power at first, they will do so.

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In fact in 2020 they did weaponise that narrative. You – the good guys – were up against not only a virus but the scapegoats you were supposed to hate. This time they weren’t “enemies of the revolution”, “lice-ridden Jews” or “class traitors”, they were

“those antivaxxers. The only reason they won’t take a vaccine is because they don’t have your noble instinct to help others. They are just selfish. (How easily people were induced to hate)!

[sarcasm] There definitely wasn’t any other reason for not taking the brand new technology injection, like

• no long term safety studies could have been carried out (or, as it turned out, no studies at all on most of the stuff produced); or like

• having sufficient understanding of the physiology or research to predict that mRNA in lipid nanoparticles was going to produce blood clots and damage to the immune system etc etc, in short do more harm than good (a consequence becoming even more obvious with time and recognition);

• it couldn’t be that they were aware of the big drug companies’ long criminal record of casually killing and maiming people;

• certainly not because they were aware of corrupt politicians making lucrative deals with drug companies who had nothing to lose;

• nor because they knew enough history to understand the nature of governments – particularly one that has surreptitiously just declared itself to be collectivist;

• surely not because of the systematic changes to laws in 2009 in countries the World over, which advertised the coming “medical martial law” (a prediction which came true in 2020).

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.” - Solzhenitsyn

“There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is hate that is not in us, it is outside of man.. We cannot understand it, but we must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Consciences can be seduced and obscured again - even our consciences. For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.” - Primo Levi

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Just to be absolutely clear: doing things for others, for the greater good, voluntarily, is great. Forcing people to do something for others is granting the forcer too much power.

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Your government – and, by an extraordinary co-incidence, almost every other government in the world - took that power for themselves, in 2020. In Australia, the UK, Canada and many other countries there were modern “Brownshirts” beating up people who voiced disagreement. They censored anyone straying from The Narrative^TM. They destroyed the livelihood and reputation of anyone with good credentials – medical, biochemical, legal, or ethical – who was speaking against The Narrative. They have done away with trial by jury and most of your human rights. Almost wherever you are, you now live in a country in which you can be locked up in a “gulag”, prison, mental institution or your own home for an arbitrary “crime”, without any trial, for an indefinite period, where you can be forcibly “medicated”. Didn’t you notice the changes to the law?

You think that you’re not doing anything wrong, so they won’t come for you.

“First they came for the Communists; but I wasn’t a Communist so I didn’t speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists; but I wasn’t a Socialist so I didn’t speak out.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists; but I wasn’t a Trade Unionist so I didn’t speak out.
Then they came for the Jews; but I wasn’t a Jew, so I didn’t speak out.
Then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak out for me.”
Martin Niemöller (a dissenting Catholic priest)

Collectivist governments – those preaching “the greater good” – were disasters every time.

“Governments were never moral beings.” - Solzhenitsyn

2 Medical Ethics

Those who study medical ethics have repeatedly told us that patients need formal protection from the state. It wasn’t just the 1947 Nuremberg Principles. For example

1981 - The World Medical Association formulated the Treaty of Lisbon, which re-iterated the following three medical principles (amongst others) inspired by the Nuremberg Code :

1. the right of informed consent before any medical intervention (notice – not just experimentation - any medical intervention);

2. the right to patient confidentiality (including from the state); and

3. medical treatment must be in the interest of the individual patient - not society generally. (Explicitly the opposite of The Greater Good argument).

1997 - there was the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, which reiterated these three principles.

2002 - there was the European Charter of Patients' Rights, which reiterated these same principles.

2005 - The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, in which they said (quoting)

• "Any ... medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information …

• The privacy of the persons concerned and the confidentiality of their personal information should be respected. …

• The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society."

So these three principles are essentially international law, to the extent that such a thing exists.

Whilst society at large may have forgotten these principles, doctors and nurses are schooled in these principles as part of their medical education. But it would be unrealistic to expect all doctors to uphold those standards, unless society at large does the same.

The important question in 2021 wasn’t "should I get a vaccine or not?" That’s entirely up to the individual. It was "should we mandate vaccines … ever?!" The fact that that question came up at all tells you something important about society, and about your government, and what they have planned. If their record is anything to go by, hunger will be more common - as death is already - unless it can be nipped in the bud, with many more people aware of what’s going on.

Three Wise Men

Let’s get some advice and insights from people who have lived through a collectivist takeover. My principal actors here are Milton Mayer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, although others will make an appearance.

Milton Mayer was a priest who lived through the Nazi government’s takeover, and after WWII he wrote “They Thought They Were Free” in which he analyses how he and others had gone along with it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” (amongst many other books) in which he reflects on what he learned when he was locked up for being a dissident in Russia.

Primo Levi was an Italian Jew, who was confined for years in Auschwitz in WWII. After the war he too wrote many books in which he pondered what he learned from the experience, e.g. “If This is a Man”.

Ideas aren’t proven to be true simply because they were said by someone famous; but all three have a reputation for wisdom, and certainly reflected at length on their experience of their collective regime. It seems a good place to start.

Truth and Lies

“In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.” - Solzhenitsyn

Lies are a characteristic symptom of a collectivist state.

“We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.” - Solzhenitsyn

“The first casualty of war is the truth.” (Old adage).² You don’t have to dig far into WWI and II to find distortions in the mainstream account. For example, see James Perloff on the five lies needed to get the USA into five wars;

read “The Secret Origins of the First World War” by Jim MacGregor & Gerry Docherty, or listen to James Corbett’s interview with the authors.

“The road to healing begins with acknowledging the truth.” - Levi

“Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.” - Solzhenitsyn

“The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn't know [the nature of the Nazi regime]. They didn't know because they didn't want to know; but they didn't know. They could have found out, at the time, but only if they had wanted to very badly.” - Mayer

“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn't want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.” - per Mayer

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?” - per Mayer

To be sure: foretelling the future is fraught with difficulty.

Researchers are surely some of the most valuable members of society. They are one type of seeker-after-truth, whether medical, scientific, journalistic or historical. One of those historical researchers is James Bacque who wrote “Other Losses” and “Crimes and Mercies”, trying to educate the Western world about the “good guys” in WWII not being quite the paragons we would like to think, specifically our genocides and Death Camps.

“We have followed heroic leaders into disastrous wars while we have largely ignored the people who acted from kindness or wrote the truth. Having made false gods, we have made a god of falsity. If the truth will set us free, we must first set free the truth.” - James Bacque

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of a newspaper columnist, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and retired physician who practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. He has been called the “Orwell of our time.”

“Political Correctness is Communist propaganda writ small. In my study of Communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of Communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore the less it corresponds to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.  A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.  I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to.” - “Theodore Dalrymple”

My reaction, therefore, to obvious nonsense - “wokeness”, or mutilating children’s genitals e.g. - is to dismiss it briefly, and ignore it as far as possible, so as not to give it “air time”.

“Real problems sooner or later are resolved; on the contrary, pseudoproblems are not.”
― Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve

Those of you have read “1984” by George Orwell … (some wag recently said that the book was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual) … will recognise the importance (and current prevalence) of “newspeak” - giving words new meanings, making it difficult to discuss anything sensibly.

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.” - “Theodore Dalrymple”

Principles

“Just following orders” ... Presumably the first thing that brings to mind for most people is Nazis; but recently we’ve seen following “hospital protocol” diktats from above. So in the US, Doctors just followed orders and gave people with a chest infection Remdesivir, a drug known to be toxic. Minimal research by those doctors would have revealed that rather than the wonder-drug Fauci claimed, its only use had been in a trial. There its use had had to be stopped early as it was causing kidney damage. First, of course, the new protocol called for sending elderly patients with chest infections away untreated, telling them to come back when they were having difficulty breathing! It’s hard to believe, but most of them really did follow those instructions.

“This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders, and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend the people against evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of evildoers and against the people!” - Solzhenitsyn

If you haven’t been following alternative media, real journalists, you may be unaware of the current prevalence of “lawfare”. It’s a simple matter to waste all the time and money of people doing something constructive against the regime with litigation, even if they are patently innocent.

In 1944, an investigator, proud of his faultless logic [...] told Babitsh: "Investigation and the process are merely juridical figuration, that can't change your destiny, which has been determined beforehand. If it is necessary to shoot you, you'll be shot, even if you're completely innocent." - Solzhenitsyn

“In his instructions on the use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Latsis wrote: "In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? … These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused." - Solzhenitsyn

“The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.” - Solzhenitsyn

If you have chosen some reliable writers on Substack and Telegram (the uncensored media) you will be well aware of the following.

“The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.” - “Theodore Dalrymple”

Freedom

“National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.” - Mayer

“Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed.” Mayer

Compare with Harriet Tubman’s

“I freed a thousand slaves: I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” — Harriet Tubman

Intolerance

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” - Solzhenitsyn

Fear inhibits Reason, and hence Justice

“We must remember, not out of hatred, but out of a commitment to justice.” - Levi

“Justice alone knows liberty, equality, and fraternity, and justice is a human virtue arising from man's human capacity to reason. We cannot make sense out of justice by looking at the moon or taking dope or building battleships. We can make sense out of justice by using our reason to discover that justice, like wisdom, is better than rubies.” Mayer

“It is a sensible military tactic to recognize the enemy before you shoot. The common enemy is the animality in man, and not the men here and there who are behaving like animals at the moment. Neither science nor prayer nor force will save us. What will save us is the reason that enables men, in ancient Israel and modern America, to choose between guns and butter, and to choose well. When we have produced men of reason, we shall have a world of reason, and the Hitlers will disappear. As long as we produce men of force we shall have a world of force, and the Hitlers, whoever wins the wars, will carry the day”. Mayer

The Fabian or “boiling frogs” approach

“The rule of law” is not adequate defense against a collective government. They quietly change the laws.

“If the last and the worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. If, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. ” - Mayer

Did you make a stand at the masking fiasco, the ridiculous “social distancing”, the ever-changing arbitrary rules about going out of your house? Many did, but it wasn’t easy, either to see or do, in many cases. You had been well primed to obey by the time the injections were inflicted. Were you among the tens of thousands who met on the streets to protest against changes to laws?

“One day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you lived in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hatred and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” - Mayer

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was, in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.” - per Mayer

Inaction

“Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.” - Solzhenitsyn

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.” - Albert Einstein³

The quotation at the beginning of this article (evil … triumph … good men … do nothing) is often attributed to Edmund Burke. He may indeed be the originator, but the closest Burke came to it with certain attribution was

“No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” - Edmund Burke

Similarly, in 1867 the British philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill delivered an inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, in which he said

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

“And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to ... was ‘expected to’ participate [in] that had not been there or had not been important before.  It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do.  You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time” - per Mayer

This next is important, and should spur us on.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If ... if ... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” - Solzhenitsyn

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” - Solzhenitsyn

“You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.” - Solzhenitsyn

“I think," says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, "that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, then in Italy, we said to one another, 'That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.' But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it at all, I still say, with unbelief, 'Germany? — no, not Germany.” - per Mayer

Left-wing or Right-wing are irrelevant: it’s Collectivism!

This was a point I too made in Why You Should Stop Using the Concepts "Left-wing" and "Right-wing".

“If I believed that force would ever build a better world, I would be a Marxist revolutionary. But I have no more faith in poor men's animal instincts than in rich men's. And I want no proletarian revolution until the proletariat has demonstrated devotion to reason, which the rich, with larger opportunities to cultivate that virtue, have so universally failed to achieve. I favour the underdog against the upperdog, but I favour something better than a dog above both of them”. - Mayer

Group-think

Group-think is on display everywhere; masks being the very symbol of it. Everyone clings to their tribe: pro or anti Trump - and every other false dichotomy you are invited to choose in, like abortion, or diet; free speech or vaccines.

“Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe.” - Mayer

“The masses of the people could not be held back from Nazism, so powerful was its appeal, and this same priest, who would not leave his people, went with them to Nazism, too.” -Mayer

Humanity and Inhumanity

“We must teach the next generation the importance of empathy and compassion.” - Levi

“In the face of evil, we must strive to remain human.” - Levi

“Evil is not confined to one era or ideology; it lurks within the hearts of men.” - Levi

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.” - Solzhenitsyn

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I hope some of these quotations will continue to echo and resonate in your mind, and are of some help when you consider your attitudes, interests and actions, and the world we shall leave our descendants.

We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation

• 'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' One must foresee the end clearly and certainly in order to resist!

• When bad men combine, the good must associate!

• In the face of evil, we must strive to remain human.

1. I say a little more about this attribution at 3, below.

2. The sentiment was expressed by Samuel Johnson in 1758 in “The Idler”, and more succinct versions evolved and were in wide usage (unsurprisingly) by 1915.

3. Click on the number to the left to go to the comments about “good men doing nothing”.