What’s Done by Normal People

Thousands dead in Syria from earthquake elicited not a shred of empathy in Uncle Sam’s damaged conscience. Ten years of sanctions degrading life, even ending it for innocents in Syria, will continue while Syrians dig out the bodies buried under the rubble.
Much of the civilized world is calling for the end to decade long sanctions designed to remove President Assad. Since we’re lavishing weapons of war on some highly authoritarian countries, it’s not because of his authoritarian rule. It’s linked to his alliance with Russia and Iran, two of our biggest imaginary enemies.
So instead of removing sanctions and offering assistance to Assad’s government in a monumental relief effort, we’re committed to ‘No relief for Syria till Assad is gone, Syrian humanity be damned.’ Or to paraphrase former president George H.W. Bush…”Wouldn’t be prudent.”
Besides refusing any relief of assistance to Syria, the US claims we’re not impeding private NGO humanitarian efforts. But according to the New York Times, US sanctions policy means Syria “is not able to receive direct aid from many countries.” While sanctions have exemptions for humanitarian goods, many banks block transactions with aid groups in Syria out of fear of America’s wrath.
Ignoring humanitarian disasters for countries we hate is nothing new for America. Last June our sanctions on Afghanistan stalled relief efforts when an earthquake struck there, killing over a thousand. Even the UN reported US sanctions complicated aid deliveries. Since the Taliban whupped America, sending us fleeing our 20 year defilement of Afghanistan, those sanctions remain in place, putting 6 million Afghans at risk of famine. Revenge is sweet for America…deadly for Afghanistan.
US sanctions afflicting over 20 countries is a national disgrace. But when they’re used to degrade countries we hate suffering natural catastrophes, it’s particularly grotesque.
Walt Zlotow became involved in antiwar activities upon entering University of Chicago in 1963. He is current president of the West Suburban Peace Coalition based in the Chicago western suburbs. He blogs daily on antiwar and other issues at www.heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com.

(LifeSiteNews) — If there is any insight from the Holocaust that should stick with us, it is this: “Evil is done not by people with diabolical ideas and personalities,” but “by very normal people,” as a young father put it in the “Never Again” docuseries.
David Veale was compelled to confront this fact because his grandparents worked for Nazi Party member Wernher von Braun’s lethal V-2 rocket project, which as Veale pointed out, was responsible for many deaths. According to Veale, they were brought to the U.S. as part of Project Paperclip, a secret intelligence program that imported Germans, including many Nazis, to work for the U.S. government.
In a film for the last segment of the “Never Again” docuseries by Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav, Veale shared how his grandparents’ involvement in this deadly enterprise disturbed him and shaped his understanding of evil.

“How does a whole country go crazy? In retrospect, I think most people would agree that is what happened in Germany,” Veale said. He feels that today the U.S. and other places around the world have similarly become unhinged.
This has been seen not only in extreme lockdown measures depriving people of fundamental rights and triggering mental health crises but in outright medical murder, as father Scott Schara testified to in the film.
Reflecting on the work of his grandparents, Veale shared, “The thing that strikes me as important to understand is that evil is not as it’s portrayed on television or heard on the news where they go after the extremes,” portraying “everyone on the right” as a “KKK member,” and everyone on the left as someone who “can’t figure out their own gender.”
He believes that his grandparents never stopped and reflected on whether what they were involved in was right or wrong, but simply reflexively did “what was asked” of them. “You don’t have to be evil to do evil. You don’t have to decide to do wrong things, to do wrong things. You simply have to comply,” he observed.
Veale sees a similar modus operandi at work today, as unjust COVID “containment” measures have been implemented with overwhelming obedience.
“Human nature is one of cooperation and groupthink,” Veale pointed out, adding that we tend to “defer to others on matters” in which they claim expertise.
“The norm is the abdication of personal responsibility. It certainly was at Nuremberg and I think it is elsewhere now. Right at this moment,” Veale said.
Perhaps nowhere is this more astoundingly seen than in the testimony of Nazi official Rudolf Höss, who as head of Auschwitz, the deadliest and most notorious Nazi concentration camp, oversaw the executions of what he estimated were 2.5 million inmates.
One might think that a man with such a massive role in the evil scheme of the Holocaust would be a full-blown psychopath. On the contrary, Höss admitted during his post-war trial that he experienced pangs of conscience “when the mass transports arrived — especially when we had to exterminate women daily.”
According to the state prosecutor, Höss had never personally struck or abused an inmate, and he was usually absent when killings took place, although had cruelly ordered 800-plus prisoners “unfit for work” to stand outside in sub-zero temperatures, leading to the deaths of over a hundred of them.
Needless to say, his sense of human compassion was woefully lacking, and irrelevant even if it existed at all. Nevertheless, in his prison memoirs, Höss wrote, “I had to appear cold and heartless during these events which tear the heart apart in anyone who had any kind of human feelings. … Coldly I had to stand and watch as the mothers went into the gas chambers with their laughing or crying children. … I was never happy at Auschwitz once the mass annihilation began.”
Even more revealing, Höss testified during the trial that “everyone” with whom he worked who were involved in extermination of Jews and other inmates “had the same unspoken question: was this necessary?”
“They came to me a number of times and spoke about this. All I could do was tell them that we had to carry out orders without permitting ourselves any human feelings,” Höss said.
It’s the same old story: The orders came from on high, leaving “no choice” but to follow them.
Of course, these pangs of conscience did not make Höss any less culpable. But they do shine a light on the architecture of evil. The reminder that pressure from “authority” is enough to drive many, if not most, into complicity with or outright participation in evil should lead us to ask what we personally must do to make sure we have no part in human rights abuses, even through negligence.
It begins with responding first to the “lesser” offenses. Artist and activist Monica Felgendreher explained in the film how the Jews were gradually oppressed by the Nazi regime. In 1938, Jewish doctors were deprived of their titles. They were “no longer allowed to visit theaters, cinemas, concerts and exhibitions,” or to “move about in certain areas, at certain times.” Then in 1939 came curfews; in 1941 came confinement to ghettos and mandatory Star of David identifiers; in 1942, they were banned from public transport, and purchasing meat, eggs and milk.
Felgendreher observed that as of 2020, our society crossed a threshold disturbingly similar to that of the 1938 German-occupied Jews: “Unvaccinated, untested healthy people were no longer allowed to take part in public life, and [use] the shops, cafes, restaurants, clubs, cinemas, hairdressers, medical practices, hospitals, old people’s homes, schools, universities, cinemas, theaters, offices, courthouses, hospitals or public transport.”
The activist is one of many who have been forcefully silenced after merely attempting to peacefully protest or ridiculed after simply asking questions regarding the mainstream COVID narrative, or protocols.
Felgendreher shared how during a street protest, when she wore a sign around her neck that read “Stop this Genocide,” a man filed a complaint to the police claiming that “Holocaust denial” was going on. She had already tried to explain to him how she felt there was a “duty to warn” the public upon seeing parallels between the pre-Holocaust period and today.
Indeed, it is our duty to warn of, and to peacefully prevent human rights abuses as much as is possible, whatever the repercussions. As soon as we enable or help carry out human rights abuses because of self-interest, we do something far worse than suffering any abuse, and that is becoming complicit in evil.
Considering the freedoms that are at stake right now, any complicity in societally imposed abuses will not only weigh on our conscience, but will have unprecedented devastating consequences for ourselves and our posterity.
As ex-Pfizer executive Dr. Michael Yeadon put it, “What’s the consequence of knowing that what’s going on is wrong and saying nothing? The answer is catastrophe. You will lose your freedom. And our children. And our grandchildren. And there’ll be no recovery.”
“Can you please consider the downside of knowing it’s wrong and saying nothing. Because I think it’s so ghastly. You must feel obliged to speak out. Please, please, please,” Yeadon implored.
As for the possible future nightmare scenario of a permanent digital tyranny, Yeadon warned, “Don’t let it happen. I think it’s really close now.”