Thursday, November 6, 2008

Looking on the Bright Side

In honor of Nader Enthusiast I will try to look on the bright side. Here goes.

Those of us who pay attention have been a little freaked out about the KBR contract to build concentration camps. We have been so sure that we are a threat to the Man that we will be rounded up and shipped off in the very near future.

Ha! This election sure fooled us! Turns out we are absolutely no threat to the powers that be. Millions of people who long for peace and believe in preserving the environment and want all the little children of the world to be fed were easily persuaded to vote for a man who promises to enlarge the military, and invade more countries and talks about clean coal and nuclear power and votes for subsidies to the grain producers who dump grain onto third world countries in order to wipe out their small farmers and push GMO seeds onto the rest. They paid absolutely no attention to those of us who pointed out reality.

In the book "They Thought They Were Free", Milton Mayer talks about a preacher in a small town in Germany who gave a rip-roaring sermon against Hitler every Sunday all through the entire Third Reich. Nothing ever happened to him. His sermons were ineffectual and he was allowed to continue.

So, we don't have to worry about the concentration camps! Oh, happy day.

5 comments:

Flimsy Sanity said...

Are you talking about this guy: On August 3, 1941, a Catholic Bishop, Clemens von Galen, delivered a sermon at Munster Cathedral attacking the Nazi euthanasia program calling it "plain murder." The sermon sent a shockwave through the Nazi leadership by publicly condemning the program and urged German Catholics to "withdraw ourselves and our faithful from their (Nazi) influence so that we may not be contaminated by their thinking and their ungodly behavior." As a result, on August 23, Hitler suspended Aktion T4, which had accounted for nearly a hundred thousand deaths by this time. The Nazis retaliated against the Bishop by beheading three parish priests who had distributed his sermon, but left the Bishop unharmed to avoid making him into a martyr.
Source

wagelaborer said...

aaggghhh-I can't find my book! But I'm pretty sure it was a protestant minister, he preached weekly, not monthly, and there was no retaliation.

wagelaborer said...

By the way, your link was fascinating. I deal with people on these drugs all the time. And I give phenergan a lot for nausea, thorazine occasionally for hiccups and haldol for violent behavior.
Many years ago, when I was in nursing school, I went to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, CA for training. It is a giant mental hospital.
In orientation, the nurse was talking about electrical shock. I really knew nothing about it, but remarked that it seemed harsh, and she turned and started screaming at me that it was damn liberals like me that messed up a good treatment.
Who knew that was a liberal positon? But I'll always remember the hatred she spewed on me. Kind of like an Ann Coulter.

wagelaborer said...

And reading the history of the brutality towards the mentally ill, added to the brutality towards rebels, heathens and heretics, makes me realize how far we've come. I get so upset about torture and murder, but at least there is widespread agreement now that it's wrong, instead of widespread regarding it as entertainment.
And now we're working on the treatment of animals. So there is improvement in humanity.
I think that each generation comes indepently to believe that some people just shouldn't breed. Yestereday I was talking to a young African American who told me that her cousin, a crack addict in Chicago with 7 kids, should be sterilized. She was quite insistent, and I agreed with her, but I don't think that the government can be trusted to make that decision. It should be up to the person, but I definitely believe that we should pay people to be sterilized. It should be up to the individual, but they should be rewarded with that which makes Americans tick-money.

Flimsy Sanity said...

I think there are too many people on the earth too. I think that if people were educated, they would see that irresponsible breeding will eventually starve us off the planet after we have used up all that is good in nature.

I wish medicine was a little more gentle with people. Haldol and Thorazine are pretty violent.