I Don't Know Where the Bulldozer Has Buldozed their Bones

"I am one of the few Holocost surrivers still left......  I am really moved that I have this opportunity to be here (pause), for my family. 

Because i don't know where the wind has blown their ashes. And I don't know where the bulldozer has buldozed their bones."

- Dr. Eva Olsson. 91 year old Holocaust Survivor speaking in Edmonton at the Rememberance Day Ceremonies.

Make It Up - Real Good!

".... if one is going to concoct, 

one must really concoct, 

.... if one is going to expose expose someone, 

one should really expose him." 

-Nikolai Krylenko

Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician

You CAN'T Supress Truth If You Don't Know It

"One can only suppress something of which one has knowledge." 

--Douglas Moo, Commentary on Romans, NIVAC, 2000.

Romans 1:18 (ESV): For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

Breaking The Back Of The Church

"..... all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches for the starving!....

From the distance of a half a century, it is easy to reproach the patriarch. Of course, the leaders of the Christian Church ought not to have been distracted by wondering whether other resources might not be available to the Soviet government, and who it was who had driven the Volga into famine....

Bishop Antoine Granovsky, a member of the Central Committee of Pamgol: "The Believers fear that the church valuables may be used for other purposes, more limited and alien to their hearts." .....

The petrograd Metropolitan, Veniamin, was similarly impelled by a mood of trust: "This belongs to God and we will give all of it by ourselves." But forced requisitions were wrong. Let the sacrifice be of our own free will. He, too, wanted verification by the clergy and the believers to watch over the church valuables up to the very moment when they were transformed into bread for the starving..... 

Veniamin announced: "The Orthodox Church he is prepared to give everything to help the starving." It's a sacrilege only in forced requisition. But in that case requisition was unnecessary.....

The Metropolitan said: "The heaviest burden is division and enmity. But the time will come when the Russian people will unite. I myself, at the head of the worshippers, will remove the cover [of precious metals and precious stones] from the icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan. I will shed sweet tears on it and give it away."  .....

The newspapers began to howl about the "evil pastors" and "princes of the church," and the representatives of the church were told: "We don't need your donations! And there won't be any negotiations with you! Everything belongs to the government - and the government will take whatever it considered necessary."  ....

 All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Only Church Left Was The Heart.

"We have already had an opportunity to observe that the separation of church and state was so construed by the state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart."

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

Growing The Law?

"Who was that young woman flashing past?That was Tolstoi's daughter, Alexandria, Krylenko asked her: "What did you do during these conversations?" And she answered: "I attended the samovar." Three years of concentration camp!
And that's how the son of our freedom rose.
It was as just such a well-nourished little imp that our Octobrist child - Law - began to grow. Today we don't remember this at all."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol 1. 

"Accident in history is Rife; unintended consequences and perverse outcomes are the rule."

- Stephen Kotkin. Stalin. Paradoxes Of Power.

Innocent Today But Kill Him To Protect The Future?

"That was the way it was in those years: people lived and breathed and then suddenly found out that their existence was in expedient. 

And it must also be kept in mind that it was not what he had done that constituted the defendant's burden, but what he might do if he were not shot now. "We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future.""

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Phone Law

"All of this, Krylenko explains, "shows the superiority of our system over the false theory of the separation of powers," that is, the theory of the independence of the judiciary. (True, Sverdlov also said: "It is very good that the legislative and executive power are not divided by a thick wall as they are in the West. All problems can be decided quickly. Especially on the phone.")"

(Concerning sentencing  and convicting people)

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Resisting War As Christians

"If everyone was like you, brother, how good it would be! There would be no war, and no whites and no Reds!"

Arresting police officers after the trial of a "non-resistance" Christian who refused to take up arms and kill other men.

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

No Cold Guns In War

"In those dramatic years, the sabers of War were not rusting in their scabbards, nor did the executioner's revolvers have time to grow cold in their holsters."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

When I Am Fooled

"The ego as such is not evil, but it can lead us to do evil without realizing it. To succeed, evil somehow has to look like virtue. It leaves you blind to your own Illusions and convinced that you see perfectly."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now

Satan Was There When I Went To Pray

A Negro Spiritual (What is the proper term now?)

------------------

I went down de hillside to make a one prayer,

An’ when I get dere ole satan wus dere,

O what you think he said to me?

Said, “Off frum here you better be.”

Old satan tole me to my face,

“I’ll git you when a you leave this place;”

O brother dat scere me to my heart,

I was ’feared to walk a when it wus dark.

I started home but I did pray,

An’ I met ole satan on de way;

Ole satan made a one grab at me,

But he missed my soul an’ I went free.

I tell you brother you better not laugh,

Ole satan’ll run you down his path,

If he runs you lak he run me,

You’ll be glad to fall upon yo’ knee.

Saving Money To Be Scoundrels

"As I get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up more and more, simply for myself, my dear son Alexey Fyodorovitch. You may as well know. For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly."

- Fyodor Dostoevshy. The Brothers Karamazov 

To Self-absorbed To See Evil

"We were too self-absorbed even to grasp Stalin's simple economic calculations let alone his malice."

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol 1

Human Evil Versud Cancer and Earthquakes

Evil enters the world with self-consciousness....

 Their mere factual reality is sometimes sufficient to turn even a courageous person against life. It has been my experience, however, that human beings are strong enough to tolerate the implicit tragedies of Being without faltering - without breaking or, worse, breaking bad. I have seen evidence of this repeatedly in my private life, in my work as a professor, and in my role as a clinical practitioner. Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer - we're tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world..... 

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules For. 

War Brings Out Evil Justice

"Benjamin B. Ferencz, one of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials who, in May 1945, investigated occurrences at the Ebensee concentration camp, and narrated them to Tom Hofmann, a family member and biographer. He was completely outraged at what the Nazis had done there. When people discovered a SS guard who attempted to flee, they tied him to one of the metal trays used to transport bodies into the crematorium. They then proceeded to light the oven, and slowly roast the SS guard to death, taking him in and out of the oven several times. Ferencz said to Hofmann that at the time, he was in no position to stop the proceedings of the mob, and frankly admitted that he had not been inclined to try. Hofmann adds, "There seemed to be no limit to human brutality in wartime."

- Wikipedia.  Death By Burning.

Vice Needs No Ministers

"Vice has universally an ill effect on everybody, being in itself a sufficient producer of infelicity, needing no instruments nor ministers. For tyrants, anxious to make those whom they punish wretched, keep executioners and torturers, and contrive branding-irons and other instruments of torture to inspire fear  in the brute soul, whereas vice attacks the soul without any such apparatus, and crushes and dejects it, and fills a man with sorrow, and lamentation, and melancholy, and remorse. "

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals 

Your Government Deifies Jesus

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed:

Rule Of Law Means I Die?

"If I should object to force I will be arrested. If I object to arrest I will be clubbed. If I defend myself against clubbing I will be shot. These procedures are known as The Rule of Law."

Edward Abbey, The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel