The Silent City

Beautifully expressed truth about a very ugly subject:

I think it fundamentally wrong to think that love and admiration for totalitarianism died in the Fuherbunker with Adolph Hitler. It almost immediately shifted its affections East to Uncle Joe. For him, no sacrifice was too great. Did America have atomic secrets? The highest duty of the most enlightened was to share them with Joseph Stalin in the interests of world peace.

Nothing can disguise the fact that six million Jews died, not in the Middle East, but in ovens which burned in the very heart of Europe. In countries that prided themselves in culture; that listened to Mozart; read books and vaunted their universities. When Golda Meir said with relief, on the occasion of the foundation of Israel that "For two thousand years we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words" she was speaking of escape from a darkness within the very center of Western civilization.

Yet nothing great or wonderful is safe forever, and that darkness, that love for savagery, that admiration for the brutal, that was believed to have died beneath the ground in 1945 is on the march again. It is crawling out of books, lofty towers, places of culture in precisely the manner Camus warned us against. He said that the evil may be beaten, but it is rarely beaten forever; "that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

But we may not speak of it. And therefore it begins.

Read the whole thing.

Comments

[Ymarsakar]

Link

I get an interesting feeling whenever I watch things like that. There's a slight change in my reactions after learning some things about killing with bare hands.

Boyd's OODA cycle is born out well in the video example as well. It matters not how good your weapons are, if your brain is slow and weak in will.