Sunday, March 1, 2015

Yes Dear Children.........

Yes dear children there is an evil in the world.  It is a disease that infects the mind.  A plague that springs back no matter how many times we think we have killed it.  The infection is spread by evil men who seek power and control by sowing its spoors in the minds of the poorly educated, the weak willed, the lazy, the naïve.  They convince these poor people that their nation's problems, even their individual problems, are not because of their own ignorance or human failings.  Their problems exist because they have allowed some outsiders to exist among them.  These outsiders aren't like us.  They don't look like us.  They don't eat the same foods as us.  They don't worship the same as we do. Why they even speak their own language! 

We like to think that society has made progress, especially in these last few decades.  But have we really?  We talk about diversity but it's a sham used to disguise even older prejudices.  Yes we've made progress, we're more sophisticated in our bigotry now.  We accept people of all colors and creeds just so long as they agree with our brand of political orthodoxy.  We even accept Jews!  Just so long as they aren't those evil Jews that we can label as "Zionists".  Hell we might even accept their right to exist just so long as they don't do it in their own nation!  And especially as long as they don't dare to defend themselves!  We opened our arms to them (and their money) when they marched beside us during the civil rights and anti war movements of the 1960's but should their most basic right of existence be threatened we turn our backs to them at best, or worse, repeat the libels of the past.   The worst of us are those who refuse to condemn the repetition of these ancient libels even as we recognize them for what they are and know full well where they lead.

Many a nation and people in this sad old world are in trouble today and it is because WE, WE THE PEOPLE, have failed ourselves.  We have failed to guard our liberties, we have failed to be responsible for ourselves.  We have taken the easy road of listening to and  electing corrupt and greedy people who have plied us with false promises that they will guard our liberty, that they will be responsible for us, that they will provide for us at someone else's expense. 

Well now all those false promises are being exposed as the naked and deceitful lies they always were and what do we do?  Do we blame these corrupt and greedy people for their deceits and lies?  Do we purge those that stole our liberties, that led us into dependency?  No, we buy right back into the oldest of lies from the same deceitful mouths. 'It's not our fault, it's the "outsiders", it's the "tribe", it's the "Zionists."'  Underneath it's all just new use of old words for the same old scapegoating and Jew hatred that is thousands of years old. 

In the aftermath of the Nazi horrors of  the Holocaust the entire western world joined with Europe's surviving Jews in the cry of "Never Again" and the founding of the modern state of Israel.  But now, just as our national cemeteries fill with last survivors of "the greatest generation," that evil that they so sacrificed to overcome is born anew.  I don't think it is mere coincidence, but rather the fulfillment of prophesy; "Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."  Brecht on Theatre (1964) edited and translated by John Willett.

The German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died at the hands of the Nazis fighting this evil.  He warned us as well.  "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." 

Are there bad people in this world?  Yes.  Are some of them Jews?  Yes.  But it's not anyone's characteristic as a Jew or a German or a Russian or an American or white or black that makes them bad or even evil.  It is their personal decision to embrace evil that makes them so.  If we want to find the causes of the worlds problems and their solutions, we had best start with a long gaze into the mirror and remove the splinter from our own eye first.  Anyone who tells you that the solutions lie in victimhood, and condemning others for who or what they are by the accident of their birth is an idiot and a fool or a deliberate agent of evil seeking to lead you into its trap.

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