“I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties. It forgets the great way home that lies before it. And I could weep at how mean people are and how they betray their fellow creatures, perhaps for the sake of personal advantage. It is enough to make a person lose heart sometimes…I will cling to the rope God has thrown me in Christ Jesus, even when my numb hands can no longer feel it.”
Sophie Scholl
“Where does the truth lie? Should one go off and build a little house with flowers outside the windows and a garden outside the door and extol and thank God and turn one’s back on the world and its filth? Isn’t seclusion a form of treachery, of desertion? I am weak and small, but I want to do what is right.”
Hans Scholl
“The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
Tacitus, Agricola
Pretty much says it all….
An interesting story, the Scholls. A young man who does well in the Hitler youth, Hans and his young sister, herself an achiever in the Hitler youth for young ladies, executed for distributing anti-Hitler propaganda at college.
Both devout believers in both religion and in their own sense of moral outrage at what they saw happening in the world which others had managed to overlook.
Do you remember the photo of the child riding past the pile of skeletons on a bicycle? A comment by a German who had been a child then, but not that one on the bicycle, explained how their parents told them there was a plague amongst the people living in the ghettos and that they should not even look at the dead bodies being gathered up. So that an entire society can be trained to ignore evidence of mass murder right in front of their eyes is something we all should think about in this age of virtual information that parades into our lives as truth.
Hans and Sophie were distant relatives of mine (my branch of their family came here about 5 generations back). The really profound thing about them, imo, was how resolute they were in their religious convictions & revelations, and just how wise/mature they were beyond their years…. very, very few college kids (or older adults) have that kind of ability to stand up for the truth the way they did, knowing full well what it was going to cost them. I pray that I have that kind of fortitude when my time comes.
The great irony of their story, concerns how the German people regard them. If you ask folks over there about them, a great many know their names and the story, but they have completely failed to learn anything from it. The Germans are still a programmed flock of sheeple, willing to go along — and defend- – any nutty idea their overmind masters demand of the group collective consciousnesses.
People place fresh flowers on their graves every day year round.
Steve C.
Nope, backwards. Disintegration, the deindividuated melt-pot, is treachery, self-desertion. The rest is just symptoms.
Assuming, of course, there was ever a self to begin with. Selfless is more…well, there are more of those.