The greatest evil is the ignorance, passivity and acceptance of evil as something normal.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
-Winston S. Churchill-
“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.”
Victor Hugo
“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”
Victor Hugo
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmund Burke-
"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.”
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer-
"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder?"
That's such an interesting discussion. I think most evil is through the ignorance or apathy of individuals. Racial violence happens because uninformed people believe in populists who are out for themselves and don't have the knowledge or awareness to know differently.
Those we blame we give power to, ideas and people, and we cease responsibility towards ourselves. Some of the greatest evils today are done by small groups of people wanting to make more money saying "im just doing it for the business" without care of the consequences.
Most of the time evil isn't malevolent, it's stupidity. At least that's my take 🙂
If we all analyse our karma, knowing we buy the good and bad possibilities of everything we do or don't do, we can be mindful of the effect we have.
1) He understood what the masses wanted: bread and pride. He essentially promised to "make Germany great, like it once was", to modify a campaign slogan of RWR.
2) His speeches were constructed to bring people along with mood, language and tempo.
He would begin with longer, more complicated expressions, and deliver the words more quietly [this latter might have been more a pre-Putsch delivery; Speer refers to it in his Erinnerungen.].
As he talked, the phrases got shorter / less complicated, the tempo increased, and his own demeanor kept pace with the tempo.
He ended up bring people from where theywere to where hewanted them to be.
The results of his speeches are written in unspeakable cruelties and horrors, hatreds, confiscations, and the blood of persons of all ages killed in many ways, both near to far from München and Berlin. His speeches helped to destroy Germany, redraw maps, create a Communist empire of occupiers who blighted a vast region of Europe for 44 years, create an American empire, and reshape the world.
So you say ; frankly ,I doubt it.But even assuming that is true ,they didn't DO the things that Hitler did .
Churchill hated Asian Indians and he starved millions to death.
FDR was so racist he segregated the military and wouldn't allow Black Americans to fight White Nazis. Hitler had a racially integrated military force. BTW, FDR didn't allow German Jews into the country.
Not taking up for those aspects of those men ; I'm just saying that whatever else they did ,they didn't start death camps.
Death camps were started by Americans. The Nazis got all of their bad habits from the Americans. Did you know that during the Civil War the Union put escaping slaves in concentration camps where tens of thousands died? And don't forget about all of those Indian reservations.
