'I have received a letter written on the Führer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another… I should not want to leave any doubt, gentlemen, as to the aim of today's meeting. We have not come together merely to talk again, but to make decisions, and I implore competent agencies to take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy, and to submit them to me.'
Hermann Goering.
As described in Brad DeLong's marvelous blog, Goering's statement followed the infamous Kristallnacht. Also, shortly after the Kristallnacht Martin Sasse, bishop of the Thuringian Evangelical Church and leading member of the German Christians movement, published a compendium of Martin Luther's writings ; Sasse "applauded the burning of the synagogues" and the coincidence of the day, writing in the introduction, "On 10 November 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words "of the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews." Diarmaid MacCulloch argued that Luther's 1543 pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies was a "blueprint" for the Kristallnacht.
Interestingly and regretably to the world's shame one of the few public demonstrations of opposition to Kristallnacht was led by, William Cooper, an Aboriginal Australian whose people also had experienced racial based extermination attempts by a Germanic people, who along with a delegation of the Australian Aboriginal League marched through Melbourne to the German Consulate to deliver a petition which condemned the “cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany.” German officials refused to take the document.
However, lest we forget and thereby minimize the true evil of right wing hate, in addition to the Jewish Holocaust, Gypsies were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen [mobile killing units] on the Eastern Front. The total number of victims has been variously estimated at between 220,000 to 1,500,000; even the lowest number would make the Porajmos (Gypsy genocide) one of the largest mass murders in history. Homosexuals were hunted down like vermin and over 12 million Poles simply were slaughtered to make room for the planned expansion of the German race.
Hate knows no bounds, once begun it becomes an all-consuming bonfire eventually consuming the haters along with the hated.
Recently in another Daily Kos Diary I commented on VDARE's activities at CPAC and the failure of any political leader to condem it.
Perhaps we have degenerated from "It could not happen here" to "Could it happen here?" to "Is it happening here?"
We should keep in mind, "The last refuge of scoundrels is not patriotism but the claim that no one could see it coming" applies to more that economists explaining away their gross failings when their predictions prove terribly wrong.
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Today's quote:
"Why would anyone be morally bound or wish to be morally bound to a civil society that does not share the goal that it’s citizens deserve a fair distribution of wealth, income and power? If the civil society is not dedicated to that end what else could it possibly be dedicated to? What is freedom, to those without wealth, income or power?"
Trenz Pruca.
See also:
Papa Joe's Tales, Fables and Parables.
This and that...