Editor's notes:

This Thursday we will complete 15 years of weekly vigils for Peace at the Rolla Post Office.

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This newsletter will be distributed on Monday February 7 for personal reasons.

Webperson's note:

If you are having trouble reading this, it is posted at
http://tomsager.org/Peaceletters/peaceletter020822.html

“Gustave Gilbert was principal psychologist at Nuremberg. He also wrote a book containing psychological profiles of all the main Nazi defendants, Nuremberg Diary. All of them tested out very high in IQ, and even the abominable Julius Streicher was decidedly above average. So despised was Streicher, the other Nazi accused even refused to sit at the same table with him at lunchtime. Pretty interesting book, I've read it twice”

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.”
          —George Orwell (1945 preface to Animal Farm, suppressed until 1972)

“The Holocaust isn't about race. It's not about race. It's about man's inhumanity to man.”

“A race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society.”

“While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.”

“scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways.”

“others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic.”

“Although still used in general contexts, race has often been replaced by less ambiguous and loaded terms: populations, people(s), ethnic groups, or communities, depending on context.”

“At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilized races of man [meaning Europeans] will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races [meaning Africans, Asians, Americans and Australians].”

“Europe's destruction of the ‘inferior races’ of four continents prepared the ground for Hitler's destruction of six million Jews in Europe.”

“Hitler was driven throughout his political career by a fanatical anti-Semitism with roots in a tradition of over a thousand years, which had often led to killing and even to mass murder of Jews. But the step from mass murder to genocide was not taken until the anti-semitic tradition met the tradition of genocide arising during Europe's expansion in America, Australia, Africa and Asia.”

“It is we who have suppressed this [knowledge of ceaseless genocide]. We do not want to remember. We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism. That is what is most comforting.”

“And when what had been done in the heart of darkness [Africa] was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.”

“You already know that. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”

Note: the phrase “you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty” is from the Leonard Cohen song, A Singer Must Die.

Note: 15 years ago, I wrote an article, Three Murderous Myths, that contains insights I would have liked to include here, but I omitted them, as I wish to keep this relatively short. If I were to rewrite Three Murderous Myths today, other than specific references to events of the day, there is little that I would change.

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