On January 27th 1945, soldiers from the Red Army of the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The horrific things these veteran soldiers had witnessed in their fight against Nazi Germany had not prepared them for what they discovered in Auschwitz. Approximately one million people had been murdered in Auschwitz and the survivors were described as ‘living skeletons’. What had occurred in Auschwitz was just one part of the Nazis’ so-called ‘Final Solution’, the name given to the process through which approximately six million Jewish people were systematically murdered. An additional eleven million people were also murdered on the basis of their sexuality, ethnic identity, political background and medical status. How did this happen? How is it that millions of people could be murdered? What led to this happening? The economist Milton Friedman once said:
All of us are affected by the status quo. We tend to take for granted the situation as it is, to regard it as the natural state of affairs, especially when it has been shaped by a series of small gradual changes.
The Holocaust did not happen immediately but was instead the result of a series of measures and actions implemented by the Nazi government which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945. Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in January 1933, having won the 1932 election with only approximately 37% of the popular vote. It did not take long for Hitler to extend his power. In March 1933, the Reichstag (Germany’s equivalent to our Parliament) was burned down. The Nazis claimed their political opponents were responsible, though in reality it seems likely that it was the Nazis themselves who committed the act. But what was crucial in this case was the level of fear which the Nazis propagated. Fear that Germany and its people were at risk from an enemy within, and that the only way to tackle the problem was to grant Hitler unlimited powers in the form of the Enabling Act.
Marketed as just a temporary measure, the Enabling Act was never repealed. It provided Hitler and his Government with a legal justification for persecuting groups of people and crushing the civil liberties which German people had enjoyed up until that point. At first this took the form of censoring publications produced by Jewish people. From there, a gradual increase in restrictions occurred. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, effectively stripping Jewish people of their German citizenship. By 1936, Jewish people had found that they were no longer allowed to vote, and by 1937 they found themselves either barred or dismissed from professions like teaching and they were forced to hand over their businesses. By 1938, Jewish people were forced to carry identity cards and by 1941 they were forced to wear the Star of David.
In that same year, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and it was at that point that different methods for murdering people en masse were tested. Initially, the Nazis tried mass shootings. An organisation known as the Einsatzgruppen followed the main German forces and killed anyone who did not fit in with Nazi ideology, though their methods were considered to be too inefficient and time consuming. By January 1942, during what was known as the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi regime officially determined that they would develop a system involving extermination camps to murder millions of people. The Nazis dressed up their twisted ideas as a form of science; they were not the first and would not be the last government to do so. They applied Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to create a system which claimed that certain groups of people, whether defined by race or medical status, were superior to others and by doing so justified their persecution and criminal actions.
I recall sitting in a lecture at Keele University some years ago. I unfortunately forget the specifics of context, but the lecture dealt with aspects of the Holocaust. The lecturer exclaimed his disbelief that nobody had tried to intervene or stop the mass executions. I remember thinking at the time that it was surely quite easy to explain why such intervention did not happen. It was surely obvious: the Nazis had the full power of government machinery, such as the military, the SS and Gestapo; anyone who did not follow orders would potentially risk being executed themselves, so people were compelled to obey instructions which led to the murder of millions of people. In German legal frameworks there exists the concept of Befehlnotstand, or necessity, where someone may face a situation in which they are required to perform an action and their refusal to do so could lead to drastic consequences to themselves. This was actually used as a defence by those who committed war crimes during the Second World War.
However, the reality of what happened during the 1940s is more disturbing. The Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes was formed in 1958 by the German government to investigate the crimes committed under the Nazi regime. Its research found that, contrary to the implications of Befehlnotstand, there was not a single known case where a German soldier was severely punished for refusing to carry out an order that contributed to the Holocaust. These findings were confirmed in the research conducted by Manfred Oldenburg, who could likewise find no cases where the refusal of either a Wehrmacht or SS soldier to carry out orders led to themselves facing dire consequences. A particularly interesting example where this was the case can be found in the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which operated alongside the Wehrmacht and became a major perpetrator of the Holocaust in Poland. On July 13th 1942, the unit’s commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was tasked with executing a group of Jewish people. An eyewitness testimony records that:
Trapp then made an extraordinary offer to his battalion: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out. Trapp paused, and after some moments, one man stepped forward. The captain of third company… began to berate the man. The major told the captain to hold his tongue. Then 10 or 12 other men stepped forward as well. They turned in their rifles and were told to await a further assignment from the major.
This example is especially revealing. It is quite clear that Major Trapp was not prepared to punish anyone under his command for refusing to take part in mass executions. So, if there was no actual punishment for refusing to perform such horrific actions, why then did nobody say anything? How was it the Holocaust happened? The possible answers to such questions are rather disturbing.
In 1996, an historian called Daniel Goldhagen suggested the Holocaust happened precisely because people enjoyed murdering other people. It is no doubt true to an extent that some people indulged in sadistic depravity and mass murder due to some twisted sense of pleasure. One need only think of figures such as Dr Josef Mengele, who performed horrific medical and scientific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, to find evidence of that. But Goldhagen’s theory has, in the years since, been challenged as an overall explanation for the Holocaust. More recent years have seen the emergence of another, though arguably equally disturbing, theory. A German historian called Sven Felix Kellerhoff has suggested that peer pressure was the key driving force behind the Holocaust. Indeed, the example of Police Battalion 101 also suggests this. The testimony I cited a minute ago not only shows Major Trapp was not prepared to punish a soldier for refusing an order but it also shows how a more junior officer was ready to exert pressure on the men in the battalion. Depressingly, it also shows how only a minority refused to perform the orders. Peer pressure and fear ruled and determined most people’s lack of action and therefore resulted in them following orders without question, even when those orders involved murdering civilians, non-combatants and prisoners of war.
To be sure, there were others who made a stand against the crimes committed by the Nazis. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944 was partly driven by his disgust at the mass murder of Jewish people. Major Karl Plagge used his position as an engineer in the Wehrmacht to save hundreds of Jewish people throughout the war, as did Helmut Kleinicke, whilst Joseph Hartinger tried to use his legal expertise to fight the Nazis during the 1930s. More famously, the industrialist Oskar Schindler used his position to save thousands of Jewish people whilst the Catholic Cardinal Clemens August Graf von Galen openly criticised the Nazis’ euthanasia programme which was responsible for murdering people on the basis of their medical status. Sadly, in the scheme of things, these people were few and far between; there simply weren’t that many who were strong enough to be what we might call upstanders. Most were either directly involved and complicit or were simply bystanders and allowed horrific events to unfold. But why?
Well, perhaps part of the answer lies in the development of vested interests. The Nazi government forged strong links to key industries and key individuals who led those industries. Significant financial incentives might explain why the Nazis secured such levels of support. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, for example, ran a vast steelworks empire and stood to gain massively from the Nazis’ need for weapons. Similarly, I.G. Farben, the company responsible for developing the cyanide gas called Zyklon B, received significant contracts from the Nazi regime for scientific research. Many individuals would also profit from the Nazis’ seizure of property which had been owned by minority groups. But vested interests only partly explain why the Nazis were able to murder millions of people.
The 18th-century French writer, Voltaire, once warned that “anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. Given the sheer scale and volume of propaganda which was produced and circulated by the Nazi government, with key institutions like the media and education being infiltrated and controlled, there is the distinct possibility that those who were complicit may very well have been conditioned into thinking their actions were justified. Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is reputed to have said words to the effect that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. With a narrative or belief system established and promoted by the Nazi regime, people may perhaps have thought their crimes were absolved by virtue of the fact that they were following orders from officials. Perhaps they believed that their own criminal actions were acceptable simply because their peers were likewise engaged in them too. I am reminded of the words of the American writer Robert Anton Wilson who observed how “the obedient always think of themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly”. For some of those who perpetrated the Holocaust, compliance and conformity with the Nazi Government’s ideology, demands and orders was justification enough. But compliance and conformity are precisely what enabled terror to emerge and flourish. One can only wonder what might have happened had more people been prepared to either speak out or take action; the Nazis, after all, appear to have been too intimidated by the influence of someone like Cardinal Galen to arrest him, even though he was openly critical of them.
So where does this leave us? What can we learn from all this? I would like to share with you the concluding comments of a speech that was delivered by US President Lyndon Baines Johnson at John Hopkins University on April 7th 1965. At the time Johnson delivered this speech, the Second World War was still a relatively recent memory and tensions were escalating in Vietnam as the USA was increasing its military commitment in the region. Obviously, this speech was delivered in a different context to that in which the Holocaust happened. However, I believe there is an important and timeless lesson for us all within Johnson’s words and his words were:
Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can do to unite this country? Have I done everything I can to help unite the world, to try to bring peace and hope to all the peoples of the world? Have I done enough?
Ask yourselves that question in your homes – and in this hall tonight. Have we, each of us, all done all we could? Have we done enough?
We may well be living in the time foretold many years ago when it was said: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
This generation of the world must choose: destroy or build, kill or aid, hate or understand.
We can do all these things on a scale never dreamed of before.
Well, we will choose life. In so doing we will prevail over the enemies within man, and over the natural enemies of all mankind.
Johnson would go on to try using the power of the U.S. Government to fix various social and racial issues. I would suggest that an important aspect to Johnson’s speech is his imploration that we, as individuals, look to ensure that we have done everything we can. Have we shown respect, tolerance and understanding to the people around us? Have we tackled things which are unjust? Have we had the courage to ask questions, to challenge that which infringes civil liberties and democratic rights? On January 5th 1967, the then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, made an astute observation that:
Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.
If we sit here and think ourselves far removed from the events of the Holocaust and that such a thing could never happen again, then we are unfortunately deluding ourselves with a false sense of security and self-assurance. Georg Hegel, a German philosopher, observed “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”, the implication being that people never learn from the mistakes of the past. Genocides, attacks on groups of people and suppression of civil liberties have happened repeatedly in the decades since the 1940s, with authorities relying on misinformation, peer pressure and fear to control people and compel them into committing horrific acts. History shows that those who should have taken action or spoken out; indeed people who held positions of responsibility and who should have known better, failed to do so. What is extremely worrying is that those who have been complicit in such crimes, either directly or indirectly, have often entered a state of denial in the aftermath of their actions.
But there is much that we as individuals can do to help ensure the very evil which leads to discrimination, persecution and ultimately genocide happening will never emerge again. Be an upstander, not a bystander. Plato once said, “the price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men”. Be informed about the world, people and powers around you; do not simply accept the narratives you’re given. The individual can question and challenge and, if need be, take action and intervene. It is perhaps difficult to do; to be an upstander might risk upsetting the status quo which Milton Friedman alluded to and result in you being targeted too. But equally, it can make a difference and the community, society and perhaps even the world may just end up better off.
Dr. Paul Jones is Head of History and Politics at an independent school. This article is a speech he will deliver this morning at the school to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
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Of course it could happen again. It could happen here tomorrow. Bozo and Co. have already aroused the worst instincts of the British sheeple. Does anybody think that our covid fanatics would do anything other than cheer if the unvaxxed were loaded into cattle trucks and sent off to camps in Poland? And wouldn’t Covidian Archbishop Dustbin Jellybaby bless the departing train?
Indeed. I’ve always liked to think of myself as a cynic but before covid I would never have believed it possible for what we’ve seen to happen in so called free countries. Anyone who now thinks that the human race has suddenly evolved into angels needs their head examined – and yet most still do think that, which is why history repeats itself and probably always will.
I thought the same, with the view that it can’t because of social media!
Social Media! Canceling and abusing non Wokist comments and those who question the safety of the the vaccines stigmatising and abusing the’ unvaccinated’ ( along with featured columnists in the Mail and the Mirror)?
They are a very big part if the frightening threat to freedom and reason we now face.
Big part but still nowhere near the whole part.
Hi Annie, I don’t say this lightly but it is happening already, not could happen. So much is focussed on what what discovered at the end but the process of control is underway. Assuming the end game is a world, I would say that Trudeau and Macron are leading the charge for the main position should it happen.
Yes there are parts of the world where it is happening – albeit not on the scale of Auschwitz or Rwanda, but laws exist to denominate the unjabbed as some kind of “unclean” and in China they have camps of little prefab cubicles where they are transported to and held in solitary isolation – as shown on MSM [either BBC or ITN, can’t remember] recently. Horrific. It just hasn’t happened here yet, but the Covid Act did contain powers under which “potentially infectious persons” could be detained. I presume that would or could be deemed to be the unjabbed.
And did anyone notice that during PMQ’s in the house of commons yesterday they were ALL wearing little holocaust remembrance day pins in their lapels?
“the scale of Auschwitz or Rwanda”
That is where it ends, different nations are at different points on the roadmap based on their
leadersdictators.“Potentially infectious persons could be detained”.
That wouldn’t be that much of a change. Parents who could potentially harm their children have had them forcibly removed. Christopher Booker used to cover the scandal of the secret family courts.
“potentially infectious persons” could be anyone. That is why it is evil.
“in China they have camps of little prefab cubicles where they are transported to and held in solitary isolation – as shown on MSM [either BBC or ITN, can’t remember] recently. Horrific.”
If the MSM reports it, it must be true. I am still keenly waiting for Saddam Hussein’s WMD to be found. The ones that could be launched against us at 45 minutes notice.
Tank Man stopping tanks entering Tianenmen Square (MSM said)
Uncropped image of Tank Man at Tiananmen Square.
Scepticism isn’t just for Christmas.
Obviously – look to the antipodes and China (scary what’s happening there). I fear for the generations to come if we cannot learn from history. The current evidence is we cannot.
Until the human race evolves history will repeat. We have dangerously evolved our technology way beyond our emotional evolution. Maybe this is the Fermi paradox playing out. I hope we can get through this.
I’m trying to remember who first made me understand that the perpetrators of the final solution were not aliens uniquely bred as monsters for administering pain and cruelty.
They were relatively normal and not do very different from you are I although I am willing to take some comfort in that we can each chose towards which end of a sliding scale of culpability.
“The banality of evil indeed”.
I recommend ‘Ominous Parallels’ by Leonard Peikoff.
He looks at what was taught in Germany and observed what happened when the lessons were put into practice.
What was taught in Germany still dominates the world, it’s German philosophy, its content, that is destroying the world.
My father. Enrolled in Hitler Youth.
Not your fault, probably not his either. It would have taken a very brave youth to have refused.
Not surprising and remember hearing about some part Jewish lad who was in the Hitler Youth and loved it for many years; at least until he was ‘unmasked’ as being part Jewish and forced to leave.
See the film ‘the Wave’ for more recent example in US. Very easy to understand the popularity of a group who do exciting things, feel special and are praised by most.
They are different from you and I. But some personality aspects are not uncommon, that is the problem. Too many people just go with the crowd. The crowd has been benign for a long time now a small number of powerful people are using media to show the crowd bigoted and the followers are joining what they believe is the majority and have thus made it so.
‘We were fools to follow the rules’? No, you were monsters
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/we-were-fools-to-follow-the-rules-no-you-were-monsters/
Laura Perrins
The big danger is that this fake normal stays
Join the friendly resistance before it’s too late
now is not the time to give up
Thursday 27th January 5pm
Silent lighted walk behind one simple sign
“No More Lockdown”
Bring torches, candles and other lights
meet Broad Street (outside John Lewis,
opposite Queen Victoria St),
Reading RG1 2BB
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
And lots of groups in Wales https://www.astandinthepark.org/wales/
If you listen to Senator Johnson’s riveting 5-hour hearing of 24 January, you will begin to appreciate that it has happened. Listening myself, I felt likehow someone in Germany must have felt in the 1930s or 40s hearing about the extermination camps.
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/video/2022/01/live-covid-19-a-second-opinion-ron-johnson-moderated-panel-discussion-with-experts/
The reason why 800,000 died from covid in the USA and 150,000 in the UK is that the medical authorities deliberately prohibited early treatment of the disease using generic drugs. The NIH forbade early treatment, using ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine etc – inexpensive, generic drugs – and instead let the infected wait until they were so ill that they had to go to hospital, when they were prescribed the toxic drug remdesivir and hopelessly inadequate doses of the steroid dexamethasone, then put on ventilators and in many cases left to die.
It has been the same story with the NHS. There was no authorised early treatment and the old in care homes were given medazolam to kill them off.
150,000 did not die from Covid in the UK. Until end 2021 about 6000 according to ONS. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
The rest died either partly due to Covid or just with Covid. I know 1 person who died partly due to Covid (in 80s) and 2 who died from the vaccine (1 20yr old and 1 in her 40s).
The US and UK death toll is a complete fraud. Those quoting it – such as the doctors in the Senator presentation which came across in the highlights like a bit of a shillfest im afraid – reveal themselves as untrustworthy sources if information. If you are not prepared to admit the death toll is a fraud, what else are you letting slip. Ive lost massive amounts of respect for most of the people in this presentation. There is no super killer mega virus. Those saying there is are dragging the human race especially the west into hell.
“What is perhaps more disturbing is the fact that the Nazi regime was neither the first nor the last to facilitate the transformation of physicians into murderers…
If we include murder in the name of scientific advancement, the number of physician perpetrators increases still further.”
Allessandra Colaianni, MD, 2011
Doctors, What Are They Good For? (odysee.com)
Chilling reading and the parallels within the present situation are clearly to be observed. Those who formulated the covid plan and who are complicit in its implementation must be held accountable and brought to justice. It is a heinous ideology and it must be stopped, at all costs.
Out of interest, I though I would see how long it took someone to equate public covid pandemic with the holocaust. Not clear what you are talking about with the “covid plan”. It the pandemic engineered by somebody, a conspiracy? or are you talking about public health measures.
In any case your comparison with the holocaust be beyond the bounds of decency and you should be ashamed. As should the 85 people who agree with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU4GKFLiR_c Not for this Holocaust survivor.
Psst … don’t rob the German establishment of one of its best arguments, namely, that everybody who disagrees with any of its favoured policies is really nothing but a closet Nazi, as exemplied by the fact that people who are being persecuted because of their vaccination status believe they are being persecuted and completely fail to understand that this is just a public health necessity justified by The Science[tm]. As they thus completely wrongly claim to have suffered from state persecution, they’re implicitly in contempt of The Real Victims[tm], hence, no better than The Real Perpetrators[tm].
It’s not comparing Covid to The Holocaust- it’s comparing the subtle actions of people and authorities in ‘nudging’ those actions. X+1 every day is a big number eventually.
People are comparing the covid responses to the early days of the Nazi regime/holocaust. Clearly it is not like the extermination camps. Yet. That is the point. The camps may never arrive or be planned but they are certainly very possible and the most obvious conclusion to the attitude and policies of most Governments (ie not Bolsonaro)
More worrying to me is the calm acceptance of all the losses of freedom and rights by those around me. When the subject comes up, they are all content to think that ‘we’ll get back to normal – eventually’.
I’m reminded of what Joni Mitchell sang: ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’.
It would seem that some people still don’t know, and some of these things have been gone for almost two years.
My husband has turned into ( or perhaps always was) a fanatic pro-vaxxer. I have heard a once highly regarded relative say that he would happily deny medical treatment to those with covid who have been unvaxxed.
I tried to argue that this could be applied to anyone who could reasonably be deemed to have played a part in damaging their own health-care but he wouldn’t have it.
It’s not covid itself that has done this- it was the brainwashing of the public into believing it was the Worst Thing Ever.
That nothing else mattered. When this happens all sense of perspective is lost.
Not even allowing the dying to see their relatives one last time. Letting people languish in care homes, etc, etc, etc…
You’ll never get through to lockdown fanatics- they simply do not realise that getting a virus and dying is better than inhumanity and living a half life.
I’ve come to believe that doing things in the name of the ‘greater good’ is truly evil.
I mean I heard people say Communism was an evil before but now only after living under a version of it I do actually realise why. I understand on a gut level now.
You only had to listened to the pro-vax bigot Jon Gaunt on Neil Oliver’s GB News show last Saturday to know that it could happen again.
Did you notice his two big arguments in favour of masks?
– It’s your duty to wear masks.
– You’ve had long enough to get used to the idea.
I wonder why Farage didn’t challenge him on the poor medical evidence that masks are useful….
Great article, and a salutary lesson. We are half way there already?
Dodgy, we watched the Neil Oliver show with John ogault.
Neil actually blushed (under his shaggy beard)
at Gaunt’s outburst.
I am not aware of Nigel remarking on it, but despite my disgust at Gaunt, we should allow his twisted pov to be heard.
After all, could you imagine the lying bb c allowing one of us realists to talk about the Wuflu or non existent global warming on panorama for instance?
Duty is the key word, he says you’ve no right to your own life, you must sacrifice for others.
Yes – on that score GB News needs to do better.
It is doing better than a lot of the other news outlets, but it needs to up its game on calling out the so called scientific underpinning of a lot of the measures which it is happy to denounce as crazy.
TV is a powerful medium and people need to hear that the science either doesn’t exist or that it is junk.
Because Farage is another bankster shill doing the dirty work of the power structure which needs to be flushed down the toilet of humanity with the Nazis and the Bolsheviks and all the rest of the evil we have endured over time
Interesting article yesterday in TCW specifically about Jon Gaunt’s unacceptable behaviour. Ironically I see that he was sacked by TalkRadio for accusing a guest of being a Nazi!
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/gaunt-the-goader-is-a-blight-on-gb-news/
Hitler was a brilliant propagandist, I think bozo has been taking lessons from him.
‘greater good’ is straight out of the communist manifesto, another term to be wary of, by socialists, is “keeping you safe“.
“Greater Good” is altruism, the morality of sacrifice and death.
Yeah, I’m not into that.
pathological altruism is another motorway away from utopia
Public Health set above individual health 10-15 years ago.
Remember the article here, from a retired individual with public health expertise that pointed out that real public health professionalism has been ignored.
Yes and also the American who pointed out that the administration of Public Health had been removed from Ward Experienced professionals to Public Health College graduates.
Hitler once said words to the effect of ‘it is a good job most people don’t think’. We have seen clearly in recent times that nothing has changed, the vast majority still do not think and will blindly follow any order issued to them, no matter how ridiculous or cruel.
I’ve tried arguing the same with, predictably, the same outcome. I’ve asked where the line would be drawn. Would be refuse to treat someone who went rock climbing and fell on the grounds that it was their own fault? What about someone playing football on a Sunday morning breaking his leg and possibly someone else’s? Apparently it’s not the same. No explanations yet given, just the declaration that it’s not the same. So there. Presumably those that are barred from public life will also be excused paying taxes to fund it?
It is happening
It is happening here and now, just substitute the words anti vaxxer for dirty jew
Anti vaxxer is an invented term, a slur invented by the industrial pharmaceutical complex. The same cannot be said about the other term in your analogy; it is real.
“In 1996 the historian Daniel Goldhagen said the Holocaust happened precisely because people enjoy murdering other people”…. Controversial?
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either-but right through every human heart-and through all human heart’s. This line shifts inside us, it oscillates with the years And even within heart’s overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of heart’s, there remains a small unuprooted small corner of evil.
Since then i have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being, inside every human being. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in it’s entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person”
Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn,
The gulag archipelago.
Apparently the human race is wholly commited to repeating it’s worst mistakes ad infinitum…
““In 1996 the historian Daniel Goldhagen said the Holocaust happened precisely because people enjoy murdering other people”…. Controversial?”
Not controversial, mindless.
The Holocaust happened because Germany’s teachers taught that the rejection of man’s mind was a virtue and that sacrifice was also a virtue.
Throughout my life, I’ve been cursed by this burning desire to step out from the crowd, when I profoundly feel something is wrong. It’s nothing to do with courage or bravery, it’s just an undeniable drive to do what I believe is right. Many times I’ve done so at great cost to myself.
I think the reason people often go with the popular consensus (orders) is more to do with the social nature of our species, people don’t like to stand alone (I do) I think people fear being an outcast (I don’t) that’s why people always qualify their vaccine status with, “i’m not an antivaxxer” but. The only reason I say I am an anti-vaxxer is to be contrary, it’s like I feel emotionally rewarded by being the odd man out. The point I’m making is I don’t think people fear punishment, they fear rejection.
The cock-up theorists unwilling to consider callous or malicious intent of powerful peoples intentions, makes my blood boil sometimes, history is littered with evil leadership that cost millions of lives, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Tony Blair etc… It only happened due to their lackey’s willingness to follow orders without question.
Yes people will laugh at Blair, but his actions & policies have killed a over a million people, & displaced many millions more, destroyed countries and destabilized an entire region, yet most people dismiss this act. The same reason why people allowed the holocaust to happen are the same people that make excuses for Blair eg. Lord Sumption! & defend Johnson’s callous lies, our own TY.
As for Lyndon B. Johnson, he dropped thousands of drums of Agent Orange on Vietnam, the consequences are still felt today. Of course, a holocaust style event can happen tomorrow! There are few world leaders that don’t have blood on their hands, our modern history is littered with atrocities that have been denied, dismissed & discredited another of Lyndon B. Johnson claims to infamy the My Lai Massacre whitewash.
I was lucky enough to be relentlessly bullied at school. Getting a kicking two or three times a week gave me a healthy contempt for my peers, mobs and authoriteh. I have been immune to collectivist dogma ever since.
C S Lewis: “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience“
The phenomenon of people giving themselves moral permission to hurt others is as prevalent today as it has ever been. From burning heretics to cancelling people who express double plus ungood thoughts, it has been with us forever.
The Nazis were particularly good at exploiting this aspect of human nature. Their propaganda was well tuned to the prejudices and concerns of the time. Nowadays it is much more subtle but the Government’s “nudge unit” taps in to the same fears, prejudices, herd mentality, and so on as any more blatant propaganda machine.
Stalin and Hitler would have loved a TV ad that said “I shop my neighbour to protect my mates”!
The young communist fanatics who took the last scraps of food from dying Ukrainian children in the Holodomor felt to their dying day that what they had done was right and just. One of the chief architects, Lazar Kaganovich (who deserves his place in hell with the Himmlers and Berias), was given a fawning obituary in the New York Times when the old monster finally died in 1991.
Humans are bloodlusting creatures and highly centralised governments are the most dangerous formation we have – we see pics of Yemen innocents being blasted by US and UK backed Saudis – we see the Syrians being destroyed by the same terrorist organisations called Western States – we see corporate governments committing bloody crimes everyday and vote for them. The jabs and coercion are another home war – yeah go live on a mountain.
I aspire to do just that.
The down voter always makes me feel at home, thank you.
Bloodlusting creatures? Speak for yourself.
Also, Islam is what it is, without any aid from the US or the UK or anyone else.
The takfiris, the head-choppers, the ‘carefully vetted moderate rebels'(*) have been carefully managed by western military and security forces for use as a proxy force in the Middle East. They have been used for plausible deniable regime change operations in Libya, Iraq, and Syria. They are largely Wahabbists, an extreme sect who regard all non-Wahabbists as apostates, especially Sunni, Shia, Alawaite, and Christians. The other major component is formed of people released from Saudi death row on the condition they join the takfiris. Chinese Uighers also form another component.
The Islamic terrorists in the UK are usually known to the police and security services, often under active surveillance at the time and have no difficulty travelling between the UK and Syria/Libya etc.
(*) a US military officer told congress that they had spent $500 million training an unspecified number of ‘carefully vetted moderate rebels’ and 95% had defected to al Qaeda (admitted by H Clinton to be a US creation).
It’s not the nut jobs that come up with these things that are the problem.
It’s the “anything for a quiet life” appeasers that give ground to them.
The Shoah was a fundamental part of my upbringing, we had a timetabled Holocaust lesson in middle school where our RE teacher would terrify us with the awful details of what had happened to my grandparent’s generation. We were encouraged to assimilate it as part of our identity. But there is, I’m sorry to say, a failure amongst many Jews and Jewish organisations to connect or compare the atrocity with ones that have happened since, and the potential one that’s in the making now, as the author of this excellent article points out. The Shoah, the thinking goes, was unique and in many ways it was in its scale and mechanisation. But humans are humans and any form of ‘othering’ can lead to atrocity – I wish there were more Jewish activists like the brilliant Vera Sharav able to make this connection and not place the Holocaust in its own category of evil.
It’s not a failure, but a deliberate strategy. Establish unique victimhood, milk it, defend it, milk it further.
Funny to see the miscalculation and backfiring of Jewish BLM support.
Maybe that helps to bring about change and a proper reassessment and reorientation in those matters.
Deliberate strategy? Maybe, or is victimhood just another facet of human behaviour?
One of the First World War poets, Sassoon I think, described the events during the biggest slaughters as a holocaust – 300,000 dead in one day at the peak.
I wish to share a story, which hit me quite profoundly, and has left me under no illusions, that good, kind, sincere people would literally throw us and our unvaccinated children into the oven, if they were told to.
Just before Christmas an acquaintance of mine had his second child. Whilst on paternity leave he continued to test himself with lateral flow tests, and on his babies tenth day of life, he got a positive lateral flow. As all good people do, his wife and older primary school aged child tested themselves and they too tested positive. Mild symptoms I am told, nothing too bad, but off to the test centre for a PCR and should we test the newborn? Quick call to the midwife, what to do? Sound advice, do not test the newborn babe, but you and your wife should wear a facemask, in your own home, for the next ten days whenever you are around your newborn baby, that will keep your baby safe from harm.
And as all good people do, this man and his wife did exactly that, they wore a facemask, religiously, for ten days whenever they were around their newborn babe. It was, he tells me, a horrendous experience, but he did it regardless.
If you are capable of following rules to this degree, then where do you draw the line? Are you capable of even seeing a line?
He literally refused to think, that’s why he did this.
He accepted an absurdity and, having done that, can commit an atrocity.
The horror. We can only speculate about what the effect of looking at faceless figures was to the newborn.
Shhh, you’re not allowed to stray from the narrative. There’s much history behind Hitlers rise, he wasn’t the only one with atrocities under his belt, and of course others received the same treatment as the jews. Saying that, I don’t think anything justifies genocide. I also don’t think carpet bombing Germany with incendiary bombs wasn’t Britain’s proudest moment. The blame game isn’t helpful.
Funny how the “blame game isn’t helpful” argument pops up with regularity when this one event is talked about. Almost as if concern trolling is a powerful way to create implicit censorship.
I do question everything & take no sides, thing is with comments that attempt to justify one atrocity with another, there’s always a hidden agenda. My sympathies lay with the innocents that always inevitably pay the greatest price for other people’s willingness to pull the trigger when ordered.
Personally I’ve always felt the ones lead straight to the ovens were probably the lucky ones compared to forced labour, starvation and slow horrible death from disease.
If we were to accept the analogy, the Jews weren’t all innocent, then surely by definition cornubian is suggesting the unvaccinated brought it on themselves? I disagree.
There is no nuanced justification for killing someone for their ethnicity, religion or societal grouping, it’s just plain evil. There simply is no defence for anyone that tries to excuse it in debate.
Ask David Irving.
I think we like to pretend humans are fundamentally good and society gravitates towards tolerance. Neither of these things are true. The Holocaust, and all other genocides and acts of dehumanisation (including what’s happened now) happen because fundamentally people enjoy hating other people.
“Wokeism” for instance is just the current way of allowing people to hate and harm without feeling guilt. In the past it might have been someone having the wrong religion that meant you could kill them, literally or figuratively, with impunity – now it’s having the wrong ideas about race and gender.
The human animal is a particularly unpleasant one, and 90% of the people you know and work with and your kids go to school with would kill you in a heartbeat if they were given the right motivation.
The only reason anyone thinks humanity has “progressed” is because for a brief moment in history most people in the West have had enough food and warmth to be too comfortable to get violent. That changes very rapidly – most societies are never more than 10 missed meals from collapse.
I admire your optimistic outlook.
Wokeism is repackaged Marxism.
Marxism derives from the rejection of reason and the practice of altruism.
Humanity has only progressed by rejecting faith and altruism but that’s by no means a given.
Excellent. I have since the scapegoating of those not taking the vaccines started pointed to this very same lesson from History, always met with snide comments and the stop being hysterical responses, but having been on the receiving end a number of times from members of the public and friends who have ejected me from their groups, or felt it perfectly acceptable to bully and belittle me for not joining the vaccine tribe, combined now with the actions of Mark Rutte, Mario Draghi, Macron, the Austrian leaders, which have all but so far taken the lives of those who did not take the vaccine, to which the EU leadership has turned a blind eye, along with our own Government. Lets not let our own Government off the hook, the unvaccinated are still being treated as “less than”, the Navy is currently in the process of dismissing recruits under the “medically unfit” banner, the NHS is under the sword of threat from Javid, and many care home workers have lost their jobs already. These Men and Women are the new Nazis, its not hysteria or exagerration to say so, they are continuing unchecked in their increasingly violent proclomations against the unvaccinated. Deaths have probably already happened in Italy as a result of Draghi cutting off all funding sources for the unvaccinated, and what are the good people of Italy doing to stop it? along with the rest of the world sweet FA
Good to see there’s some sense out there. “Question Everything”, until you question one single event that happened 80 years ago and then you’ll lose everything.
I’d strongly recommend reading what Alexander Solzhenitsyn has to say in Two Hundred Years Together.
How did it happen?
Centuries of religious worship, followed by Romanticist philosophy.
German philosophy resulted in the Holocaust and, having been exported to the Soviet Union, the Holodomor.
These ideas don’t stop at borders and they still dominate the world.
It’s not conspiracies but ideas that move the world.
The driving forces in Russia were centuries of Orthodox Christianity, followed by the ideas of Karl Marx.
In Germany, the ideas of Marx and his predecessors Kant and Hegel were put into practice.
Of course it could happen.
The only difference between then and now I would say is that social media – for all its faults – means communication between dissenters is better. Throughout this pandemic there has been a large underground movement going on via Telegram etc (and even on Linkedin to a degree) and this has enabled people to question things and tell others it is okay to think all this is weird (and, for instance, spread word of mouth info about vaccine injury etc).
The fact the authorities have been using censorship tactics in tandem with their disgusting health policies shows to me that they know that people talking represents a huge threat.
The kick-back is growing and their plans are unravelling. I live in hope!
“The fact the authorities have been using censorship tactics in tandem with their disgusting health policies shows to me that they know that people talking represents a huge threat.”
That was always the REAL purpose behind the hilarious “social distancing” rules. It was never really about infection control (It’s not what they say it’s about: Neil Oliver).
By making people stand 2 meters apart from each other they wouldn’t risk talking indiscreetly about anything controversial. If you want to do that you’d have to whisper in close proximity to one another.
Shutting pubs, also. Can’t have the peasants revolting.
This is where a certain
trollcommentator here stands as the personification of the late 1930’s German mindset in modern context.Step forth “rational” and explain yourself.
I did that.
Either you’re not familiar with the cluster b personality known as “rational”, or you’re proud to stand by it, as if toxic narcissism is a badge of honour.
I don’t like bullies, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, free speech & all that.
yet you’re proud to downvote when a bully is called out!
He’s not even here to defend himself, so why bring it up?
It was only a matter of time, he has a post on this thread now.
“Georg Hegel, a German philosopher” – Hegel was one of the architects of the Holocaust.
His philosophy begins with endlessly clashing contradictions in his metaphysics, followed by mystic mumbo-jumbo as epistemology and ends with a German dictator beating the daylights out of bordering countries.
I suggest that you widen your perspective from your current obsessions.
I suggest you have a point when you post since you didn’t have a point in the one I am responding to
Robert Mitchum uttered the same sentiment as Goldhagen in the film Anzio. “People like killing people.” … “Only the uniforms change.”
So long as people crave the approval of their peers, and so long as we have a lying media, sure, genocides can happen again and again and again. Collectivism is the problem.
In Germany this week they have made it a criminal offence to wear a yellow star with “unvaxxed” written on it. It “threatens the state”.
I’m assuming the isreali ptb are not marking holocaust day this year as that would be totally hypocritical.
Actually I’ve decided it would be beyond hypocrisy.
Why?
Why am I not surprised that on a site that was conceived by a man who advocates for free speech, and has a banner headline “Question Everything”, my questions posed early this morning have been removed.
Yep.
Add: Lebon, Stanford prison, Milgram and Eisenstein/Girard.
And see recent pieces by Barry Brownstein and Dan Gelernter on the justification of comparisons, a very good one in German on that was Gedenken nur Sonntags at neulandrebellen (“The singularity of the event is abused as a free ride for today.”) and Erich Kaestner’s timeless snowball/avalanche comment (Marian Turski’s ‘Never be a bystander’ speech is also excellent).
We know what’s needed to become a better human being/mankind, who was and is not susceptible to this and what will prevent this:
Observe the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
and as such the main commandement and essence of the Bible, Tora etc.:
“Do not steal (incl.land, money, life, honour, love etc.)!”
and then:
“Don’t give a fig about what others think of you.”
I must say however that our generations have much less excuses to engage in current or future atrocities and discriminations than prior ones, in light of our knowledge, education and access to information about all this than those prior generations had.
I must, as German, also admit that the Germanic people were and still are a particularly nasty species in that regard. That nothing of what its classical writers already observed about that peoples character has really changed can currently be witnessed and is again even more unforgivable today than in the past.
In contrast, the moral deterioration of Britons, Americans&co is steeper, more surprising and more disappointing.
You can’t “other” Germanic people out of the human race. The point made by those you example at the beginning of your post is that we’re all capable of atrocity. We don’t like to admit it, but it’s a fundamental truth.
We are, but the German thoroughness in all things predisposes them to showing a particular cruelty then and the impossibilty to reverse course.
Disproportionally many also quite enjoy this and above all lecturing and denunciating others.
A lot of the older ones are also still racists and most of the post war adults did not really repent from Nazism, certainly not my grand parents and their parents.
Boomers, X, M, Z& co are now of course quite different in that regard at least.
Which is why what happens now is imho so unforgivable.
Every group of humans contain these facets in some degree or other, no single geographical group has a monopoly on atrocity, either past, present, or future.
It’s a feature of the human species, not limited to any particular sub-group of humans.
Let me tell you: the vast majority of Germans fully believed and still believe in the validity of the saying ‘Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen.’ aka their approaches and ideas superiority.
They look down on the Eastern Europeans, don’t take Southern Europeans serious at all, have pity for Britain and abhor the USA, even though or because it’s protecting them, is much wealthier and its big corporations are running rings around theirs since decades.
Coupled with their thoroughness and the high value put on obedience (Gehorsam), which also ever more inflates the highly regarded bureaucracy, that missionary zeal always was and will be a dangerous mix, although thankfully, the last 2 lost wars instilled a high dose of pacifism in them as well- hence also the embrace of everything EU (credited for peace, irrelevant militarily, nicely bureaucratic and will eventually be shaped as per German demands anyway, likely then finally lending its foreign policy more weight).
That’s all I am really saying in that regard.
Also, they were as such really made for todays identity politics and cancel culture and even shaped and shape its major themes to a good part (see the German Greens early anti-nuclear campaign and electoral success).
They were and are also never convinced capitalists or in favour of liberalism, preferring a strong, minding and powerful state and bureaucracy instead (Vollkaskomentalitaet).
Manchester capitalism is a swear word depicting sheer horror there, as is neoliberal, and Thatcher and Reagan were and are still regarded as villains by most. The liberal party FDP (which has now gone full authoritarianism and big state) was only ever pseudo-liberal and marginal anyway (same as France), though often punching above its weight political personnel-wise, due to PR and its need for coalition governments.
You speak for all Germans? LOL
I didn’t get the impression you describe from the many Germans I’ve worked with, if I had to sterotype Germans it I could only do it in the context of sense of humour, they don’t get Brit humour at all, it’s probably a language thing. Besides that they’re just the same as anyone else I’ve worked with from all over the world.
Do you speak German? Have you worked alongside German-speakers in their native countries, in the small towns; sat with them at lunchbreaks or at their Stammtischen?
I have, and I couldn’t argue withJay Bee’s general characterization. People when they’re at home and at ease among their native colleagues say very different things from when they’re projecting an acceptable picture of themselves to foreigners.
I’ve worked closely with German Navy Divers, EOD teams, and cutoms officers. I find anybody, from anywhere in the world, pretty open and natural when we have each other lives in each others hands, we worked hard and played hard, nobody was treated as a “foreigner”.
My Best Man was German, I’m far from fluent, I speak enough to get by, and by that I mean ordering food/drinks/politeness and a few lines to get the junge damen kichern
German philosophy is the villain.
“You can’t “other” Germanic people out of the human race.”
Exactly. Such statements are an expression of what is condemned.
The ‘holocaust’ of death in central Africa (c. 20m in Belgian territory) during the late 19th-early 20th centuries wasn’t German in origin, and Jews are not immune from the same impulses, as seen in Palestine.
This is an issue about humanity and society.
The long march through the institutions has ensured the facilitators of the Covid farrago a clear run at anything they may crave to try to achieve. When we look back in a few years time and realise that Mengele had nothing on the agencies that have locked us up, cajoled us to take un-tested medicine and killed the elderly and infirm, we have not emerged from the dystopian nightmare yet but will look back in anger and dismay.
Our only hope is that justice is met out to the perpetrators and foot soldiers of the Covidian era.
This was just posted on RMonotti’s Telegram channel:
LETTER TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY FROM LONDON’S JEWS FOR JUSTICE
Monday 10th January 2022
Dear Rev. Welby,
On behalf of the organisation Jews for Justice I am writing to express our concern at your recent comments that it is somehow immoral to take a personal decision not to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
I will not lecture you on the principles of bodily sovereignty and Christian inclusiveness, but I will alert you to the lessons of Nazi Germany.
The current ‘othering’ of the unvaccinated precisely reflects the ‘othering’ of Jews in 1930s Germany.
I speak not of the Holocaust but of the events that preceded the Holocaust.
The German parliament abolished the constitution on 23rd March 1933, allowing Adolf Hitler to take complete control. Two years later the Nuremberg Laws excluded Jews from citizenship and introduced a ‘citizenship certificate’ for the rest of the population in order to ensure their compliance to the regime.
On 23rd March 2020 the British Prime Minister overrode the (unwritten) constitution and placed the entire country under house arrest without precedent. A little less than two years later the introduction of mandatory vaccinations for health workers and vaccine passports for the public at large will exclude the unvaccinated from the full rights of citizenship and ensure the compliance of anyone who does possess such a passport with the diktats of the regime.
National Socialism in Germany subjugated the rights of individual citizens to the collective will of the state; exactly the same is now happening here in Britain.
It is impossible to deny the parallel between the first two years of the Nazi regime in Germany and the last two years in Britain.
Furthermore – although public hostility to Jews in Nazi Germany was evident from the beginning of the regime in 1933 – Jews were not sent to concentration camps in any large numbers until 1938, nor enclosed in ghettos until 1939, nor forced to wear yellow identifying badges until 1941; and it was not until that same year of 1941 that concentration camps became extermination camps.
So it was not evident in the mid-1930s where hostility to Jews in Germany would eventually lead. But we know what happened, and it is our duty to ensure that we learn the lessons of history.
The function of our organisation Jews for Justice is to use our unique position as British Jews to warn the public at large how history is in danger of repeating itself. This is our sacred duty to our ancestors who died in the Holocaust.
In Nazi Germany, the confinement of Jews within ghettos and their ‘evacuation’ to concentration camps was justified by the regime on grounds of public health, in particular the threat of typhus. The very same ‘public health’ justification is being used today to restrict the civil liberties of those who choose not to be vaccinated.
People in public life such as yourself who stir up hostility to the unvaccinated are no different from those Nazis who stirred up hostility to the Jews in 1930s Germany. If you cannot see the parallel it is because you are closing your eyes deliberately.
You will also be aware that the German churches were conspicuous in their failure to speak out against the crimes of National Socialism. You are repeating that mistake.
Finally, we are appalled that you should recently have compared the silence of politicians on the subject of ‘climate change’ – a hypothetical future threat, based entirely on modelling – to the silence of politicians on what was happening in Germany in the 1930s, yet have yourself been totally silent about an actual, global attack on human rights, which threatens the immediate destruction of liberal democracy in Britain and around the world.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Barr
(on behalf of Jews for Justice).
I like the sound of those guys! I want to join!
I believe Israel has the highest overall IQ on the planet.
I find it both astonishing and comforting that the same people railing against covid ‘atrocities’ are mostly the same as those sceptical of climate change.
The comparisons are so obvious I find it simply staggering that more people haven’t woken up to what’s going on: cancellation in the media of dissenting voices, unnecessary legislation, fear porn narrative, government officials afraid to speak out, restrictions on freedoms, scientific corruption and, of course, a hypothesis based on computer modelling that’s entirely detached from reality.
Yet faced with these obvious and blatant facts not only is our government pursuing the covid and climate change narratives they are discriminating against those of us prepared to speak out.
Whoever said we learn from history is an idiot.
And one tiny observation of human nature. Go to almost any blog controlled by Disqus or Vukkle etc. which are policed by algorithms that cancel and report ‘offensive’ terms and you’ll find these blogs littered with disguised obscenities e.g. b@5t@rd, fvkk, w@nk3r, and so on. Yet the DS seems to have no restriction on terms we use, and obscenities are few and far between.
Doomsday cultism is common to lockdown and green ideology.
Given there are so may diverse groups in the UK who have come from areas in the world to escape persecution in addition to those internally who have had first hand experience due to gender, race, age, religion the list goes on. They are well aware of the signs but its a case of while someone else is getting the attention they feel secure hence the silence but its the same side of the coin. In a similar way that people in a high position whose background is from a persecuted group seem to forget the struggle they or their forbears had to contend with because they know their privilege is tenuous and by fitting in with the narrative they feel accepted. But they forget that they are only being used and are shocked when they too become a target.
A brilliant letter.
Absolutely first class.
The churches could and should have been beacons standing up against this madness.
The fact that they not only did not but have actively colluded with it speaks volumes. Did they ever, I wonder, ask themselves “what would Jesus do?”
Did they ever pray asking God to give them guidance. I can bet my bottom dollar that if they did and he answered that prayer it was not to tell them to close their churches (threatening those priests who did not comply with the sack), ban the singing of hymns and insist that their congregations should be masked.
Tweet by Maajid Nawaz
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1486508908093087751
Utterly huge convoy/protest in Canada, and no-one will know about it unless they read sceptic websites.
This putdown of the now whingeing rule followers and enforcers fits in well here too. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/we-were-fools-to-follow-the-rules-no-you-were-monsters/
“I have to say I am perplexed at all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when it comes to the ‘we followed the rules but Johnson and the rest of them didn’t’ complaint. Examples include: I feel like such a fool for not being able to say goodbye to my dying wife/dying mother/missing my dad’s 90th birthday. Indeed, this was a terrible tragedy and suffering imposed on you by people who should have known better, people who should have known that ‘I was just following orders’ is a very unattractive defence.
So no, you don’t look like fools now for following The Rules and The Science. You look like monsters.
In my eyes the government were monsters for imposing the cruellest rules from the very beginning. That’s why I opposed them.
That’s why the Rule Followers’ howls of rage have such a distinctly hollow ring. As Kathy wrote last week, ‘Partygate reveals not just the charade they so willingly bought into, but how much they relished lockdown for its own sake; and, damningly, how it was their own unthinking compliance with Johnson’s irrational and cruel sanctions that left elderly people, including their own parents, dying isolated and alone.’
Yes, the vicar is right to be ashamed of his behaviour at those funerals. He was wrong to do such a thing, not because Boris Johnson might have been having a birthday party at the same time, but because it is wrong to do such a thing. Morally wrong. If there are laws that ask you to inflict such cruelty on the vulnerable, you ignore them. That’s my rule, and I follow it come what may.”
The point Kathy made in her final paragraph was the same one Brendan O’Neill made on GB News last night. Which of itself, was fine, up to a point, “don’t criticise Bojo for having a birthday party criticise the rules”.
Yes, BUT, and it is a big but, this overlooks the fact that the 17 now parties, that we know of, show that the rules were never needed because there wasn’t anything really deadly to be quite so terrified of that would have justified those rules.
That is the point which lifts the whole lid off the pandemic. And still no one on the media, mainstream or otherwise, makes it. It is about time they did.
For the last 20 years I have been a “pro-safe-vaxxer” which in most peoples eyes is an “anti-vaxxer”.
I have argued about the perils of most vaccinations for children and the millions paid out by vaccine injury courts on social media and in the main stream media.
The vitriol and hatred particularly from the liberal/left Guardian and BBC readers has been evident for the last 20 years.
The last 2 years has been hell for anyone pointing out the absurdities of masks, lockdowns and experimental jabs.
Multi-trillion dollar corporations and the billionaire Global Elite own the main stream media, politicians and the medical and scientific institutions and dictate the narrative.
The vast majority of the population have been brainwashed into believing whatever the Global Elite want them to believe.
Truth has disappeared and history will repeat itself if people do not rise up in greater numbers against this tyranny.
https://yvymaraey.blogspot.com/2022/01/canadian-tvs-fascist-indoctrination-of.html?m=1
Hitler-Jugend 2.0 in Canada
How anyone can deny the parallels between then and now is beyond me. You only have to see the venom in comments aimed at ‘anti-vaxxers’ in newspapers and so on to see the hate building.
It’s always a little problematic making comparisons between one present-day, or historical, event and the Holocaust. The deliberate extermination of millions of people, planned and carried out in intricate detail and ruthless industrial efficiency, by tens of thousands of sometimes highly-trained and educated men and women, is probably unique in history.
There was only one Hitler, there was only one Nazi Germany, there was only one Holocaust. A vaccine passport isn’t the moral, legal, or human-rights equivalent of the Judenstern, no matter how fervently one makes the argument that it is.
That said, the tragedy of the Holocaust does provide lessons, applicable today and into the future, as to the mechanisms by which institutions, bureaucracies, and societies permit grave injustices to occur.
One common theme, when looking at any series of widespread crimes of social injustice, is that the perpetrators “thought they were doing the right thing.” That’s true for the Klansmen grinning for the camera in front of the bodies of those they’d just lynched. It was true for the South African policemen beating, gassing, or whipping school kids in Soweto. And it is true today for the people in UK shops telling you to wear a mask or asking about your vaccine status. All moral wrongdoing, for sure, but not really equivalent.
No one equals it. Comparisons to the era are entirely justified and necessary.
You must stop the snowball before it becomes an avalanche. (Kaestner)
The misguided and exclusive victimhood exploitation plus today’s authoritarianism have led to and will otherwise lead ever more to ‘the uniqueness of the event being used and abused as a free ride for today’.
Fair enough.
But I’d be wary of calling people pushing for mask or vaccine mandates Nazis. That is likely to end up being counterproductive. For one thing it hands to those people the factual high ground. They are not actual Nazis. They might be misguided, and woefully incorrect on the scientific basis for their behaviour. But Nazis they as sure as hell aren’t.
To me, the principle most helpful, and effective, is that of proportionality. Employ weapons that are a) least likely to cause unnecessary collateral damage and b) are most effective in degrading the opposing forces’ ability to continue resistance.
The best weapon to be deployed against mask mandates is the smile. This is a weapon they (literally) cannot use against you.
Employing a smile, and good manners, when responding to mask-mandate people, forces them into a position where they begin to question their own motivations.
Just say “No, that’s something I’m not going to do any more.”
Nobody wants to be a Nazi. Arguing with “that’s something I’m not going to do anymore” forces them to make a choice I don’t think most people in Britain, 2021 are willing to make.
Some of them actually are. Sturgeon for example is a literal national socialist. She also sees no limit to the State. We know she has no problem with wielding power abusively, or corrupting state institutions to do her dirty work.
Well calling them that is certaimly an exaggeration, mainly made to make the point.
I do think calling them fascists is entirely appropriate, in particular as past fascism was also really a left, utilitarian and corporatism project, like today’s is.
And for every sceptic ever calling a Covidian a Nazi, there are 10 Covidians calling a sceptic a Nazi, certainly in today’s Germany.
“It’s always a little problematic making comparisons between one present-day, or historical, event and the Holocaust”
True – the industrialization of mass murder was unique. But it is the underlying social/psychological preconditions that form the parallel.
And there have been other events that have been parallel in their scale and effects relative to the particular population under threat, such as the depredations in central Africa under colonial regimes, or the ‘othering’ of native Americans in the 19th century and the indiscriminate napalming of Vietnam and Cambodia. The same impulses could be seen when India gained independence in 1947; Myanmar … it doesn’t take much to add to the list.
That is why the collapse of ‘western’ civilized values currently – what we had taken as a new norm (if not perfection) – is a sign of the underlying fragility of what has been taken for granted as ‘past’ on this coninent.
A vaccine passport isn’t the moral, legal, or human-rights equivalent of the Judenstern,
You’ve missed the whole point of the article – which was that Nazi government began in 1933, but the Judenstern didn’t appear until 1941. There were a lot of steps along the way.
Also to be technical, Russia killed approx. 4 million Ukrainians in 1932/3 by appropriating the harvest, although Stalin told Churchill at Yalta that he’d manage to slaughter 10 million. Demographic studies suggest he was simply boasting, but in terms of the ‘ruthless industrial efficiency’ you mention, it’s unparalleled.
Obediience to Authority by Stanley Milgram is essential reading. This book opens your eyes to the realities of human behaviour and what changes affect how detached people can be when causing harm to others. The big problem for me is that after long reflection and study of history, I realised that this behaviour is a necessary attribute for the survival of our species. Sad.The majority will obey, the few will resist and will win though….. eventually.
Deleted.
Can’t help posting this here too: https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/26/why-the-masked-and-the-unmasked-have-disdain-for-each-other/
“That more than half of our country willingly obeys completely irrational orders raises the question: What irrational orders from the state would they not obey?”
Therefore, you can tell from masking alone who is and would be more prone to participating in atrocities and who would be less prone.
There is an assumption among the general population that governments are filled with kindly individuals who have nothing but the best interests of the population at heart. This assumption has developed on the back of ignorance and complacency. People today seem to think that they are much more enlightened and even better than past generations and so something like the holocaust can not happen again. Anybody who has spent any amount of time studying modern history should know that nothing good has ever come of governments obtaining large amounts of power and will understand how easily tyranny can be implemented. The British public have demonstrated over the last couple of years that something like the holocaust could happen in the UK today.
Agree.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/wakey-waaaakey/
“My friend’s hypnosis is founded on the belief in authority. Thus, he defends Edward Heath, Tony Blair, Theresa May and Boris Johnson with equal stolidity for having done their best in ‘a very difficult job as our Prime Minister’.
This is echoed in James Saunders’s satirical masterpiece The Pedagogue, written some 60 years ago: ‘Can one assume that having come so far along the road to our ultimate fulfilment, whatever that may be, we are to be abandoned by the authority we have selected for ourselves? Whichever happens, whatever comes to pass, let us bear this in mind; there is that which has our best interests at heart; which takes care of us.’
This mass, innate belief in authority is, of course, an open door for every gangster without a criminal record.
A varnish of respectability is applied to those who walk through that door. They acquire an immediate and recognised authority. You can tell how they feel about that when they talk about being ‘in power’. Whatever happened to being ‘in office’? We don’t hear much about duty these days.
So what we’ve allowed to happen is for those in power to believe they have the authority to do what they like.
They have long forgotten, nay suppressed, the fact that sovereignty rests with the individual.
Yet we willingly abrogate that sovereignty to those we put in power. Now they have authority over us. Those in power then make laws.”
What the pandemic has proved is how easy it is to control a population and how quickly democracy and liberty can be replaced with dictatorship. The arguments that there is no parallel between the Holocaust and today’s events in the UK and around the world miss that central point. Erich Fromm’s great book Escape from Freedom explains the psychological aspects behind the rise of Nazism and his analysis explains perfectly how pandemic thinking has been shaped. Anyone who thinks demonising the unvaccinated – and limiting their access to a normal life – isn’t utterly frightening has already been captured.
This article captures precisely why many of us in the immediate post-war generation have seen so many red lights as what we understood as fundamental ‘lessons learned’ have been pushed aside – particularly in the realm of medical ethics and the resolution to outlaw the Mengele’s of this world.
The ease of compliance with fear propaganda has been truly shocking to behold.
This is the paragraph which stood out for me. Just replace ‘Jewish’ with ‘unvaccinated’. (Having watched Yasmin Alhibi-Brown on TV demanding that the unjabbed wear badges).
‘Marketed as just a temporary measure, the Enabling Act was never repealed. It provided Hitler and his Government with a legal justification for persecuting groups of people and crushing the civil liberties which German people had enjoyed up until that point. At first this took the form of censoring publications produced by Jewish people. From there, a gradual increase in restrictions occurred. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, effectively stripping Jewish people of their German citizenship. By 1936, Jewish people had found that they were no longer allowed to vote, and by 1937 they found themselves either barred or dismissed from professions like teaching and they were forced to hand over their businesses. By 1938, Jewish people were forced to carry identity cards and by 1941 they were forced to wear the Star of David’.
YAB has publicly stated that she wants whites to be “A lost species”.
Not sure where Jews would fit in her hierarchy of whiteness.
Opinions of people who are unwilling to distinguish between Germans, French, Poles, Italians, Irish and English because few of these distinctions remain in their overwhelmingly English speaking fishbowl named USA don’t matter for the rest of the world. Someone from Africa could doubtlessly compile a similar list of peoples whose members all believe to be different from each other while US-wokies want to reduce them all to black.
Would it be crass and insensitive to ask why bozo chose Auschwitz liberation day to finally lift most of our last restrictions?
Would it be further crass and insensitive to note that at least Auschwitz drove Partygate from totally dominating this mornings BBC News channel (mutted) yet again.
Brilliant article – and terrifying too. The problem is the boiling frog syndrome. Once the die is cast – that the unvaccinated are “other”, that they are a threat to the health of the community – all it takes is the very gradual turning up of the heat (Macron, Trudeau). The Nazis were masterly at setting the tone of the propaganda according to their audience. This isn’t so necessary with Bio-fascism because the middle classes and the intelligentsia were/are fellow travellers (if not actual policy makers) from the start. The “science” is and will be the blanket justification for all measures, from vaccine passes to cancellation of passports, to camps, to …
Question Everything…except this?
Each and every one of us has a moral obligation to apply common sense and refuse to comply with rules and laws that are cruel or wrong. Every single person who blindly followed the stupid rules is partly to blame for the disaster of the last two years. And this article explains exactly why that individual responsibility is so incredibly important.
Totally agree. “When laws become unjust, resistance becomes duty” (about the only quote missing in this very poignant article)
Apropos the ‘slippery slope’ issue – first vaccine passports then vaccine mandates, mask guidance then mandates etc – the author neglects to mention that the Nazis opened the first Concentration Camps in 1933 soon after they came to power. Initially they were for ‘enemies of the state’ like Communists and Trade Unionists. Jews were not a targeted group until later. Hence the wonderful and terrifying poem by Martin Niemoller. It is not unreasonable to think that, despite the lifting or restrictions, we have already emboldened the political, corporate and and technocratic elite. First Covid. Next Net Zero? The slippery slope we have seen in history seems doomed to repeat itself.
What do you call the organized effort to deny effective medical treatment to millions of patients world wide? What do you call the world wide organized suppression of cheap effective drugs? What do you call the ongoing organized censorship of doctors and scientists whose research and experience support the use of these drugs, and show the harms of other interventions, including the “vaccines?” What do you call the organized, world wide lockdown, that destroyed businesses, deprived families of income, deprived children of education, deprived citizens of regular medical care, deprived citizens of basic human rights? What do you call the imposition of a near universal vaccine passport and testing system that deprives the unvaccinated of freedom of movement, freedom from harm? How would you characterize a medical pharmaceutical industry that sanctions the murder of innocents? I’d say we are already well along this road to holocaust hell.
As is often the case with selective memory in humans who have experienced something shameful, after 1945 hardly any Germans had known what had been going on in their country, while in France almost everybody had been in the Resistance.
Can we say that we should ensure capital punishment is available for crimes against humanity, and that the accused should receive a fair trial, and that if found guilty they will then be hanged by the neck until very dead indeed? Hell, I’ll even throw in a decent full English and a damart vest, but then I’m a humanitarian.
The world is so upside down that a person who opposes lockdowns and vaccine mandates needs to prove that is not David Irving.
The Nazis dressed up their twisted ideas as a form of science; they were not the first and would not be the last government to do so. They applied Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to create a system which claimed that certain groups of people, whether defined by race or medical status, were superior to others
They did not. The base for their racial theories came from the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberplain which were – at their time – widely praised in Europe. An almost hackneyed example of the same for the UK would be the so-called white man’s burden. Antisemitism has also been widespread in Europe ever since at least the middle ages. The so-called Drefuss-Affair would be a prominent, French example from before the first world war. That some people were born criminals was also universally held to be true at that time and eugenics were – at least conceptually – very popular. One also shouldn’t have to point out that US seggregation laws – nothing but assertions of racial unequivalence – were still in force after the second world war ended that there was at least one well-known, involuntary medical experiment with black people which ran into the 1970s.
I’m afraid but the idea of a German singularity of somehow genetic evilness simply doesn’t fly.
Ok, so if we unjabbed are the Jews circa 1935 (we are) then what should we do that they didn’t? (Serious question)
“Sure it could never happen again”
It IS happening, right now. Do not be fooled by the easing in some countries. Unless the people behind the covid lies, the killing through counter-productive NPI and Pharma and the destruction of economies are uncovered, exposed and prosecuted it has not ended only paused. For it to be over the majority of citizens need to see and understand the truth. We have been systematically lied to and treated as cattle.
One problem I have with this article is that it doesn’t look for rational reasons why this horror happened at that time and that place. The assumption is that it was monstrous and irrational, and we have to look at political manipulation or inside people’s psyches for the reasons. I don’t blame the author. It’s a very hard thing to do. Over the years I’ve spoken to several people who were there, in that civilized, cultured world of central Europe at the time, and their explanations always end with “you weren’t there, you don’t know what things were like.”
But their explanations for why long-standing anti-Jewish bigotry took such a terrifying turn centre on the unique conditions in Germany and the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire. You had the conspiratorial theories of Jewish bankers benefiting from the Great War and unemployment; you communists fomenting more chaos, and the fact that the incredibly high literacy rates among Jews resulted in their disproportionately high representation among the movers and shakers of communist movements; and finally you had something unique to that time and place – every desperate, penniless, unemployed refugee from the chaos and the slaughter ending up in what was by comparison still wealthy Germany and Austria. And it was easy to label all those beggars on your streets as Jews. Indeed, some of them might have been.
You had one or two of those “reasons” for anti-Jewish bigotry all over Europe. You could have heard complaints in any canteen or dole queue. But in Central Europe, at that time, uniquely it all came together.
To be clear, I AM NOT EXCUSING THE HOLOCAUST OR ANTI-SEMITISM. But the fact that I have to put that in capital letters is one reason why the question rarely gets explored from this angle. I think it should be, because the alternative assumption – that people have to be manipulated to behave so stupidly and abominably – just ignores the fact that stupid or abominable behaviour requires no more than the necessary conditions.
At the 1936 Olympics, black American athletes disproved Nazi theories of Arian superiority right in front of the eyes of thousands of people, and they didn’t recognise it. Events on the sporting field disproving The Science. And thousands of spectators not seeing it. Sound familiar?
Dr Colin Alexander of Nottingham Trent uni. delivered a lecture a couple of months ago on genocide. We (the UK) were at the time on stage 4 of the 10 steps to genocide – that is of the unvaxxed people of course. He did say that historically many societies had been this far along the path before stepping back. Maybe we have stepped back in England – for now. Stage 5 involves setting up the infrastructure like the ‘green pass’ adopted by much of the EU. There has never been any historical evidence of any society ever stepping back from stage 5 and genocide follows as night follows day.
A holocaust is happening right in front of our eyes right now ( only slowly, as adverse reactions to the experimental drug cocktails will take a little time to do their worst). The mother trucking bastiges ( hello, moderator) are working like their Hugo Boss clad predecessors, but with smoke and mirrors, not ovens and gas chambers.
We have our own Enabling Act – the Coronavirus Act 2020 – still in force until the 12th of never.
As expressed your comments about Major Trapp of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 prove nothing. Maybe those 12 or so dissenting soldiers were walked around the corner and shot, or given suicide missions or transferred to a Strafbattalion (PenalBattalion). We just have no idea. The fact that he berated the Captain for berating the man again could just be because he wanted the troublemakers to feel they could speak up.
Reminds me of the scene in ‘The Killing Fields’ or where the Spartans encourage the Helots to put forward their best men as leaders and then killed them.
Maybe that did not happen to the German dissidents but maybe it did.
I have just watched a Zoom presentation on the very subject of what has transpired over the past two years and comparing it to the measures used in occupied Europe by the Nazis. It will shock you.
This article about second world war atrocities is eerily relevant to the Covid War. Instead of a line of Einsatzgruppen firing on civilians, there is mass colllusion by Big Pharma bought medical systems to deprive the ill of proven life saving (but generic and so not profitable) drugs, and forcing dangerous treatments on patients. Or the masked cohorts in special injection centres giving people an unproven gene editing concoction that has already killed and maimed large numbers. Not so dramatic as uniformed Nazis, but who’s to say the death toll from what’s gone on during the past two years won’t end up being higher than the wartime Final Solution.
We now have a “Quiet” Vaccine Holocaust with “Impunity” !
What an absolutely excellent speech. Thought provoking, inspirational and some great quotes. Thank you.
While I can’t and won’t suggest our government are anything like the Nazis, they have used propaganda and distorted data to justify the removal of our basic freedoms in a situation where they didn’t know best. They imposed some disgracefully unjustifiable restrictions and had the police roaming the streets to penalise people for non compliance. Some local authorities despite their lack of resources found enough to employ groups of people to apply fines to people carrying out their fellow citizens normal lives. These are disgusting actions of any government in what was once when those who survived a war against much more severe actions but having some similarities of our enemy returned to a free country. A country where it now seems how easy it is by a so called (but not) conservative government backed by an even more severe socialist non-opposition to destroy our freedoms overnight. This precedent is extremely dangerous for those who value and care about our freedoms and we desperately need politians in power who care enough about it and have the guts to abandon the Tories and develop a political force that protects it for the future of everybody in the UK.
Thank you Dr. Paul Jones for one of the best articles I’ve ever read in dailysceptics/lockdownsceptics.org newsletter.
I always like to think that there are some enormous positives that can be taken even from the biggest mistakes or crimes that mankind commit. We should have learned from the history you illustrate, and maybe we did for a while, but here is another chance for everyone and especially the young generation to be reminded and learn from what we are experiencing today. This article needs to be read out to all the school children in the land in the coming months and years to help them understand that the adults who are supposed to be leading, guiding and protecting them have the capacity to do the opposite. They need to be careful who they trust, be reasonably sceptical and not assume that those in power make the right decisions.
I certainly wouldn’t wish to trivialise the Holocaust, especially after watching last night’s programme on BBC2.
However, seeing what has transpired in this and other countries over the past two years it is not difficult to see how the Austrian corporal and his accolytes attained power.
I’m just hoping that the British people show more resolve in fighting this current totalitarianism that the Germans did in fighting the Naziz in the 1930s.
Good news from across the Atlantic in the land of the maple leaf.
Thought-provoking article thanks.
And yet I think we are only a small part of the way to understanding the Holocaust, and like atrocities.
A study of the last two years promises to enlighten us further and shed more light on the dark recesses of the human soul.
Paul Jones – thank you. I really appreciate this article.
I’ve noticed it has now become commonplace to condemn people for daring to draw parallels between the current situation in which we now find ourselves and German Nazism and the Holocaust.
Following those tragic events, a new mantra was born: “Never Again”. If we are serious in our commitment to one day achieve “Never Again,” it starts with trying to understand how Nazism and the Holocaust happened and to speak out when we see similar things happening again. To put Nazism and the Holocaust off limits as a unique event with no possible parallels, and condemn those who speak out when they see patterns repeating, is to insult the memory of the Holocaust’s victims and to reject the aspiration of “Never Again”.
Dear Darling Censor,
Not only have you proven yourself to be superficial and condescending in your judgment, but you’ve proven yourself totally lacking in a sensor of humor or anything resembling intelligence. Good luck to you. You do belong with the New World Order. If you haven’t been vaxxed, I suggest you get the full dose and get labeled “boosted.” No one wants you “boosted” out of this world more than me.