February 1, 2022

“the evil around us”

Namoi Wolf writes (excerpts):

Is It Time for Intellectuals to Talk About God?”:

«I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.» https://naomiwolf.substack.com/.../is-it-time-for...

Thinking Like a Tyrant”:

«[M]eta-national organizations such as the European Union and the United Nations, agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and global corporate and investment communities, founded after the carnage of the Second World War, have served to create a class of global elite policymakers, nonprofit leaders, and bureaucrats, who are able to engage in cruel and oppressive policymaking precisely because they are no longer part of the communities whose lives are affected by what they have done.»

«What happened in the seventy-plus years since the end of the Second World War, is that an elite international class of technocrats, EU bureaucrats, global nonprofit leaders and international investors has developed, in which allegiance to the relationships, programs, profits and outcomes of that global class is more immediate and important to its members, than are any of the relationships, allegiances, rights, property and outrage of their fellow countrymen and women.»

On the Subtlety of Monsters”:

«Casual, escalating cruelty, a culture of degradation of the “othered,” and a two-tier society, were built up in those years certainly at the behest of Nazi social policy. But the construction of a world of evil out of what had been a modern civil society, if a fragile one, was also endorsed and even policed by doctors, by medical associations, by journalists, by famous composers and filmmakers, by universities; by neighbors, by teachers, by shopkeepers — for years before the death camp guards were tasked with their own far more heinous cruelty.»

«Currently, forty-seven US states are operating with emergency measures, which suspend or bypass normal legislative checks and balances …. Under emergency measures, pretty much anything can be done.»

«People are [being] asked to join a cult and offer up their bodies; if they don’t, they are ostracized and denied social life and professional advancement.»