Good morning, all. I hope everyone is enjoying a lazy August. At the bottom of this piece are some recent works, including Marc’s and my summer podcast book series. If you’re like me and always looking for the next read, I think you’ll love it.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers to hear of my growing concern with the mainstreaming of extremist ideas at the centre of the Democratic Party, with similar talk creeping, almost inexorably, into the GOP as well. But we homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for 300,000 years. And there is nothing new, as my dad liked to say, under the sun. That said, ignorance of history is rampant, and some who spout insidious evil do not hear or recognise its echoes. In the interest of illuminating those echoes, I share some quotes below. I've taken out some identifying words, but otherwise left the quotes as I found them. There's an answer key at the bottom. Let me know how you did.
“Liberalism has taught the West to turn its principles into tactics to deceive the people. The west dubs this ‘democracy,’ though it has become evident enough how ill men thrive on a political diet of...”
“The spirit of our National Socialist idea has to overpower the spirit of liberalism and false democracy if there is to be a third Reich at all! Deeply rooted in organic life, we have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals, violating the deepest levels of our being! We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!
“The structure today fraudulently called a state knows two kinds of people: citizens and aliens. A citizen is generally any person born within the frontiers of the state—and this takes no consideration of race, so a Negro, Jew, Pole, or Oriental can be declared a German citizen... Scarcely anything can be more stupid than our state citizenship law, which allows all this rotten poison to be incorporated into the nation every day.”
“We National Socialists want the economic revolution involving the nationalization of the economy…We want in place of an exploitative capitalist economic system a real socialism, maintained not by a soulless Jewish-materialist outlook but by the believing, sacrificial, and unselfish old German community sentiment, community purpose and economic feeling. We want the social revolution in order to bring about the national revolution.”
“The Capitalist system with its exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money he possesses, instead of by their internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a word by German Socialism.”
“If we call these money-powers ‘Capitalism,’ then we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is also the battle of money and law. The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party.”
“But the capitalist idea of profitability actually becomes an economic nonsense in the branches of our economy that today rule everything, in the banking and stock-exchange system. The fact of the ruling position of the banks proves most strikingly the economic senselessness of the capitalist idea. With the ‘productions’ of the banks and stock-exchanges never yet has a child been fed, never yet has a freezing person been clothed, in general never has even the smallest requirement...”
“The uber-capitalist economic system is not merely unjust, it is grossly immoral. It is a system driven by greed and the maximization of corporate profits, completely detached from the needs of ordinary people. We live in a nation where three individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of our society, while millions of workers struggle to put food on the table, pay rent, and access basic healthcare. This is not a functioning democracy; it is an oligarchy. There is nothing more American than questioning the systems that have failed us and demanding the fundamental changes we need in order to create a society that works for all, not just the 1 percent.”
“The myth of the free market is used to hide a reality where a handful of giant conglomerates control our healthcare, our media, our energy, and our political system. Capitalism is working exactly as intended for the wealthy, but it is failing miserably for the working class who have seen a massive transfer of wealth upward over the last fifty years.”
"Capitalism is unbridled greed. It is built on exploitation and the idea that some people are disposable... We have to be willing to call out capitalism as the root cause of so many of the crises facing our communities—from housing to healthcare to environmental degradation."
“Housing is a human right, not a vehicle for speculative corporate wealth. When we allow real estate developers and private equity firms to dictate urban policy, we aren’t running a city for its residents—we’re running an investment portfolio. We have to de-commodify basic needs.”
“The nation must sacrifice and give up a measure of material property in order to gain culture, skill, and powers of united production; it must sacrifice some present advantages in order to insure to itself future ones. If, therefore, a manufacturing power developed in all its branches forms a fundamental condition of all higher advances in civilisation, material prosperity, and political power in every nation... how can anyone possibly undertake to prove by arguments only based on the mere theory of values, that a nation ought to buy its goods like individual merchants, at places where they are to be had the cheapest—that we act foolishly if we manufacture anything at all which can be got cheaper from abroad—that we ought to place the industry of the nation at the mercy of the self-interest of individuals—that protective duties constitute monopolies, which are granted to the individual home manufacturers at the expense of the nation?”
“Cheap labor has become a ‘drug’ that too many American firms have become addicted to. It can inhibit innovation because it’s too easy to make a product more cheaply than to innovate.”
“Until you [have immigrants assimilate], you’ve got to be careful about any additional immigration, in my view. We cannot have an immigration policy where what was good for corporate bottom lines dictated our national borders while ignoring whether our schools, our hospitals, and our communities could actually handle the weight.”
“You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.”
“What we have literally doesn’t work anymore. ...we have a system where global capital, the international business community, and powerful foreign agents control the leadership. We have moved from a republic into what can only be described as the imperial phase of empire, where power is increasingly concentrated in the executive branch while Congress loses its strength and lawmakers are completely disregarded on significant national decisions.”
“Somebody needs to begin work immediately on one question, which is what unites all of us. ...We must stop mass migration, stop fighting unnecessary wars, and focus on rebuilding our own domestic production. We have abandoned our moral foundation, and by doing that, America did not just weaken its global standing; it undermined the very ideals that once made it exceptional.”
“We are not yet free of peril from the Arabs, who long seriously threatened our existence, and their creation, [Islam], is the greatest of all hindrances to every progress of civilisation, hanging like a sword of Damocles over our slowly and laboriously rising culture in Europe, Asia and Africa.”
“But the Teuton has not, unfortunately, kept up his guard. Magnanimously, he conceded to alien blood those same rights which he had gained for himself as a result of his great sacrifices through the centuries. He carried tolerance of religious diversity and scientific speculation into areas where he would have done better to lay down strict limitations; the areas involving the creation of the national state and of the folkish type... Surely it is obvious that there is no equivalence of rights as between the stock market manipulator and the heroic man; or those who follow the immoral and non-Germanic laws of the Talmud cannot be accorded equal rights in shaping the national life.”
“According to the Syrian Christian preacher Ephraem (4th century) Jesus’ mother was a Danaite woman (that is, someone born in Dan) and he had a Latin as father. Ephraem sees this to be not unhonorable and adds: ‘Jesus thus derived his ancestry from two of the greatest and most famous nations, namely, from the Syrians on the maternal side and from the Romans on the paternal.’”
“It is not lost on us that Mary, too, was a Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation. In the Qur’an, she cries out in anguish, ‘I wish I had died before this and had been long forgotten’”
I’ll put the answers in the first comment.
WTH Should I read this summer? Twenty Times I Almost Died by John Spencer
WTH Should I read this summer? The Arab Case for Israel by Husain Abdul-Husain
Why France Has No Right to Lecture the US on Human Rights, with Brett Schaefer
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