 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
End |
Reviews |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
End |
Reviews |
|
|
;void(0)) . . . ERROR see: "ILLUSIONS" see "MISTAKES" for other related links An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains. --Henri Frιdιrick Amiel (18211881) Swiss critic. _Journal Intime_ [1883], entry of 12 November 1852 It is only an error of judgment to make a mistake, but it argues an infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered. Or, as the Chinese better say, 'The glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall.' --Christian Nestell Bovee (18201904) American writer. _Intuitions and Summaries of Thought_, p. 55 [1862] To err is human, but to persevere in error is only the act of a fool. --Marcus Tullius Cicero (10643 BC) Roman orator and statesman. _Philippicoe_, XII, 2 Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834) English poet, critic, and philosopher. If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. --John Kenneth Galbraith (19082006) American economist. Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it: and as he is generally much in the wrong, so he has always much to say; for error is ever talkative. --Oliver Goldsmith (17281774) Anglo-Irish writer, poet, and dramatist. Admitting Error clears the Score And proves you Wiser than before. --Arthur Gutterman (18711943) "Of Apology" Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. --T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley (18251895) English biologist {grandfather of Aldous Huxley}. _The Coming of Age of The Origin of Species_ [1880] Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. --Thomas Jefferson (17431826) American statesman and president [18011809]. _Notes on the State of Virginia_ [1784], Query 6 It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18071882) American poet. Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them. --Andrew V. Mason, MD The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. --Edward John Phelps (18221900) American lawyer and diplomat. Speech at Mansion House, London [24 January 1889]. Also attributed to Bishop W.C. Magee The highest of characters, in my estimation, is his, who is as ready to pardon the moral errors of mankind, as if he were every day guilty of some himself; and at the same time as cautious of committing a fault as if he never forgave one. --Pliny the Younger or Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (62c.115) Roman senator and author of a famous collection of letters. _Epistles_, VIII, 22 To Err is Human; to Forgive, Divine. --Alexander Pope (16881744) English poet. _An Essay on Criticism_ [1711] From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own. --Publilius Syrus (8543 B.C.) Latin writer of mimes who was originally a slave. Errors to be dangerous must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation; from pure extravagance, and genuine, unmingled falsehood, the world never has, and never can sustain any mischief. --Sydney Smith (17711845) English clergyman and essayist, in 1802 cofounded "The Edinburgh Review." If a crooked stick is before you, you need not explain how crooked it is. Lay a straight one down by the side of it, and the work is well done. Preach the truth, and error will stand abashed in its presence. --Charles Haddon Spurgeon (18341892) English nonconformist preacher. - The "Modesto Bee" (CA) made a major blunder last year [in 2003]. The following is a correction which ran the following day: "Gustav Mahler will not play with the Stockton Symphony this season, as reported on Page E-5 on Sunday. He died in 1911."  . . see "CHARACTER" for related links That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong. --Rev. William John Henry Boetcker (18731962) German-born American minister and author. Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. Grub first, then ethics. --Bertolt Brecht (18981956) German dramatist. (Translation by W.H. [Wystan Hugh] Auden (1907-1973).) - Relativity applies to physics, not ethics. --Albert Einstein (18791955) German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. --Albert Einstein (18791955) German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. - We still hold two sets of ethics, pagan and Christian, simultaneously. For instance, we say that we should love our enemies and not resist evil; yet at the same time we believe in justice, and that criminals ought to be punished, and that we should meet force with force, violence with violence. One another instance: we believe in humility; but we also believe in masculine pride and self-assertion. I think that this spiritual conflict creates a strain in our psychology and in the heart of our culture, that has been extremely fruitful both of good and evil, of greatness and intensity, as well as of self-contradiction and hypocrisy and frustration. This theme of spiritual civil war appears often in my verses. --Robinson Jeffers (18971962) American poet. _Themes in My Poems_ Ethics may be defined as the obligations of morality. --Lajos Kossuth (18021894) Hungarian lawyer and journalist. Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life; it is bad to damage and destroy life. --Albert Schweitzer (18751965) Franco-German theologian, philosopher, and mission doctor. "Religion and Modern Civilization" . . see "PLACES" for related links We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked but not comprised. We are interested and associated but not absorbed. --Winston Churchill (18741965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [19401945, 19511955]. Speech in Zurich [19 September 1946]. I love France and Belgium, but we must not allow ourselves to be pulled down to that level. --Winston Churchill (18741965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [19401945, 19511955]. 1953 comment to his doctor; in Alfred Grosser _The Western Alliance: European-American Relations since 1945_ p. 121. - Belgium has only one real claim to fame. Thanks to all the wars that have been fought on its soil, there are more dead people there than anywhere else in the world. So, while there's no quality of life in Belgium, there is a simply wonderful quality of death. --Jeremy Clarkson (1960 ) British journalist and broadcaster. In "Sunday Times" [18 July 1999]. They're Germans. Don't mention the war. --John Cleese (1939- ) British comedian and actor and Connie Booth, _Fawlty Towers_ "The Germans" [1975 BBC TV program] The presence of the Turks in Europe has been a source of unmitigated evil to everybody concerned. I am not aware of a single interest, Turkish or otherwise, that during nearly 500 years has benefited by that presence. Indeed the record is one of misrule, oppression, intrigue and massacre, almost unparalleled in the history of the Eastern world. --George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess Curzon (18591925) also called (18981911) Baron Curzon of Kedleston, or (191121) Earl Curzon of Kedleston. British statesman, viceroy of India (18981905), and foreign secretary [19171924]. (Minutes of a meeting of the British cabinet's Eastern Committee (Curzon was chairman) [23 December 1918].) The peace of Europe is the cornerstone of world peace. Within a single generation Europe has now been the focal center of two world conflicts which were due above all to the existence on this continent of thirty sovereign states. This anarchy must be remedied by the creation of a Federal Union between the European peoples ... The Federal Union must be based on a declaration of civil, political and economic rights which guarantees the free development of the human personality and the normal functioning of democratic institutions; moreover it must rest on a declaration of the rights of minorities to an autonomous existence compatible with the integrity of the nation states of which they form a part. --Draft Declaration of the European Resistance Movements [July 1944], in _Richard Vaughan_ (ed.) _Post-War Integration in Europe_ [1976] p.18. When posterity recounts the achievements of Europe, shall we let men say that three centuries of painstaking cultural effort carried us no further than from the fanaticism of religion to the insanity of nationalism? It would seem that men always seek some idiotic fiction in the name of which they can hate one another. Once it was religion; now it is the State. --Albert Einstein (18791955) German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. In _Einstein: A Centenary Volume_ [1979]. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them. --Frantz Fanon (19251961) French West Indian psychoanalyst. _The Wretched of the Earth_ [1961] America, you have it better than our continent, the old one. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) German poet, novelist, and playwright. _Almanac for the Muses_ [1831 The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. --Sir Edward Grey (18621933) British Liberal politician. Look at the development of the populations in Europe where Moslems are breeding like Mosquitoes. Every western woman produces on average 1.4 children. Every Moslem woman in the same countries produce 3.5 children. In the year 2050, 30 percent of the population of Europe will be Moslems. --Mullah Krekar, Dagbladet [13 February 2006] The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. --Mary McCarthy (19121989) American novelist. _On the Contrary_ [1961] I want the whole of Europe to have one currency; it will make trading much easier. --Napoleon I (17691821) Emperor of France [18041815]. Letter to his brother Louis [6 May 1807]. In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations of the world. --Margaret Thatcher (1925 ) British conservative stateswoman and Prime Minister [19791990]. At the Conservative conference, "The Times" [10 September 1999]. TOPICAL We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbors of the nations in this region. We inform you that the nations are like an ocean that is welling up, and if a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt. It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals (Israel). . . . This is an ultimatum. --Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [20 October 2006] The most important battle in the war for Muslim minds during the next decade will be fought not in Palestine or Iraq, but on the outskirts of London, Paris, and other European cities, where Islam is already a growing part of the West. --Gilles Kepel, French scholar of radical Islam. Quoted by Ross Douthat in _Atlantic Monthly_ [January/February 2005]. Europe will be part of the Arab west, the Maghreb. Migration and demography indicate this. Europeans marry late and have few or no children. But there's strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and Pakistanis in England. They marry early and have many children. Following current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century at the latest. --Bernard Lewis (1916 ) British-born American professor and Middle-Eastern scholar. In an interview with _Die Welt_ (German newspaper) "Europa wird am Ende des Jahrhunderts islamisch sein," [28 July 2004]. - "French police face 'permanent intifada'" by Jamey Keaten, Associated Press Writer October 22, 2006 EPINAY-SUR-SEINE, France - On a routine call, three unwitting police officers fell into a trap. A car darted out to block their path, and dozens of hooded youths surged out of the darkness to attack them with stones, bats and tear gas before fleeing. One officer was hospitalized, and no arrests made. The recent ambush was emblematic of what some officers say has become a near-perpetual and increasingly violent conflict between police and gangs in tough, largely immigrant French neighborhoods that were the scene of a three-week paroxysm of rioting last year. One small police union claims officers are facing a "permanent intifada." Police injuries have risen in the year since the wave of violence. National police reported 2,458 cases of violence against officers in the first six months of the year, on pace to top the 4,246 cases recorded for all of 2005 and the 3,842 in 2004. Firefighters and rescue workers have also been targeted and some now receive police escorts in such areas. On Sunday, a band of about 30 youths, some wearing masks, forced passengers out of a bus in a southern Paris suburb in broad daylight Sunday, set it on fire, then stoned firefighters who came to the rescue, police said. No one was injured. Two people were arrested, one of them a 13-year-old, according to LCI television. More broadly, worsening violence in France testifies to Europe's growing struggle to integrate its ethnic minorities. Some mainstream European politicians adopting positions previously confined largely to far-right fringes are suggesting that the minorities themselves are not doing enough to adapt to European mores. [ . . . ] In France, a high school teacher received death threats, forcing him into hiding, after he wrote a newspaper editorial in September saying Muslim fundamentalists are trying to muzzle Europe's democratic liberties. [ . . . ] Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge. "Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of 'Allah Akbar' (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned," he said in an interview. [ . . . ] "First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they're leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us," said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. "These are acts of war." Associated Press Writer Elaine Ganley contributed to this report from Paris. - I have repeatedly defended the view that Muslim immigrants are not to blame for Europe's predicament. The latter is entirely of our own making. Europeans have foolishly replaced God by the State as the one on whom they rely to take care of all their needs from cradle to grave. The religious vacuum has led to a demographic vacuum, because those who lose faith in God lose faith in the future as well. A civilization that has created a religious and a demographic vacuum is bound to perish. The lights are turning out for Europe. If America follows Europe's example Christendom is lost. --Paul Belien [France] cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, not the unilateralism of a single hyper power. --Hubert Vιdrine French foreign minister [In 1998, referring to the United States.] - EUROPE v. AMERICA Europe vs. America June 18, 2004 The Wall Street Journal The growing split between the U.S. and Europe has been much in the news, mostly on foreign policy. But less well understood is the gap in economic growth and standards of living. Now comes a European report that puts the American advantage in surprisingly stark relief. The study, "The EU vs. USA," was done by a pair of economists Fredrik Bergstrom and Robert Gidehag for the Swedish think tank Timbro. It found that if Europe were part of the U.S., only tiny Luxembourg could rival the richest of the 50 American states in gross domestic product per capita. [. . . ] Higher GDP per capita allows the average American to spend about $9,700 more on consumption every year than the average European. So Yanks have by far more cars, TVs, computers and other modern goods. "Most Americans have a standard of living which the majority of Europeans will never come anywhere near," the Swedish study says. But what about equality? Well, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line has dropped to 12% from 22% since 1959. In 1999, 25% of American households were considered "low income," meaning they had an annual income of less than $25,000. If Sweden the very model of a modern welfare state were judged by the same standard, about 40% of its households would be considered low income. In other words poverty is relative, and in the U.S. a large 45.9% of the "poor" own their homes, 72.8% have a car and almost 77% have air conditioning, which remains a luxury in most of Western Europe. The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet. So what is Europe's problem? "The expansion of the public sector into overripe welfare states in large parts of Europe is and remains the best guess as to why our continent cannot measure up to our neighbor in the west," the authors write. In 1999, average EU tax revenues were more than 40% of GDP, and in some countries above 50%, compared with less than 30% for most of the U.S. We don't report this with any nationalist glee. The world needs a prosperous, growing Europe, and its relative economic decline is one reason for growing EU-American tension. A poorer Europe lacks the wealth to invest in defense, a fact that in turn affects the willingness of Europeans to join America in confronting global security threats. But at least all of this is a warning to U.S. politicians who want this country to go down the same welfare-state road to decline. - When you look out at the world from Vienna or Stockholm or Manchester and search for something to deplore, what do you see? You see Russia spiraling down into dictatorship after a brief interlude of struggling democracy. You see North Korea, arms salesman to the world's criminals, boasting of nuclear capability. You see genocide in Darfur. And of course, you see the ghastly face of terrorism in Madrid, Bali, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv and most especially Baghdad, where terrorists grab and behead innocent Americans and Europeans, and proudly videotape their savagery. But where do many Europeans focus their wrath? On the United States. ... There is something sickly about the European approach to the world. --Mona Charen - "The Widening Atlantic" --Niall Ferguson, _The Atlantic Monthly_ [January/February 2005] Seldom, if ever, has an American president been less popular in Europe than George W. Bush. As cartoonists never tire of illustrating, he embodies those American characteristics that Europeans most dislike: trigger-happiness, environmental unfriendliness, and perhaps most important utter indifference to the delicate sensibilities of America's traditional Western European allies. In the past two years, according to a survey published this past fall by the German Marshall Fund, the proportion of Europeans who disapprove of US. foreign policy has risen by 20 percentage points, to exceed 76 percent. An even higher proportion 80 percent think that Bush's invasion of Iraq was not worth the consequences. And 73 percent think that it has increased rather than reduced the risk of terrorism. According to a poll conducted by Globescan and the University of Maryland, 74 percent of Germans wanted to see John Kerry beat Bush in November, while only 10 percent favored the president. Even in the United Kingdom the public backed Kerry over Bush by 47 percent to 16 percent. During the campaign Kerry sought to capitalize on his popularity abroad, claiming repeatedly that if elected, he could persuade unspecified allies to assist the United States in Iraq. We will never know what a Kerry administration might have accomplished. But it is hard to imagine that it could have healed the transatlantic rift, for the gap between America and Europe has been widening for fifteen years, and it has much more to do with changes in Europe than with the policies of the United States. This is not a fashionable view, least of all in academic circles. A clear majority of those who think, write, and talk about international relations for a living believe that the transatlantic alliance system what used to be known simply as "the West" can and must be restored, by means of adjustments in U.S. policy. The Oxford historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash argues in his new book, Free World, that the United States and the European Union have too many common interests to become permanently estranged. He sees "no inexorable drifting apart of two solid continental plates" but, rather, "over-lapping continental shelves." In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert E. Hunter, a senior adviser to the RAND Corporation and a former US. ambassador to NATO, also called for a shoring up of the Atlantic alliance. The Bush administration's "experiment in unilateralism," he wrote, had merely revealed "the limits of such an approach." Kenneth Pollack, a member of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, urges the Bush administration to work in tandem with the Europeans to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. Nevertheless, there are three strong reasons for doubting that real transatlantic rapprochement is possible. First, we must not forget the primary reason for the formation of the transatlantic alliance, in the 1940s and 1950s: to keep the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain. We should not deceive ourselves that the French and the Germans or, for that matter, the British were passionately pro- American during the Cold War. But as long as a Russian empire was menacing Western Europe with missiles, troops, and spooks, there was an overwhelming practical argument for the unity of the West. With astonishing speed, that ceased to be the case fifteen years ago, when the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev caused the Soviet empire to crumble. Incentives for transatlantic harmony have grown steadily weaker since 1989. President Vladimir Putin is manifestly no democrat, but not even his fiercest critics expect him to launch a Russian invasion across the Central European plains in the near future. The second reason the West is unlikely to come back together is the difference in the ways Europe and the United States assess the risk of Islamic extremism. To Americans, Islamism has effectively replaced Soviet communism as a mortal danger. To Europeans, the threat of Islamic terrorists today is simply not comparable to that posed by the Red Army twenty years ago not great enough, in other words, to require transatlantic solidarity under US. leadership. Indeed, ever since the Spanish elections early last year, many Europeans have behaved as if the optimal response to the growing threat of Islamist terrorism is to distance Europe from the United States. Why? The answer is not far to seek. As a result of rising immigration from the south and the east, there are now at least 15 million Muslims within the European Union, and some say more than 20 million: that is, anything between three and five percent of the population. [ . . . ] So Europe is not only demographically vulnerable to Islamic penetration; it is also politically vulnerable. And perhaps even more important, Europe is religiously vulnerable too. This headlong secularization is as big a story, in its way, as Europe's demographic decline. According to the Gallup International Millennium Survey of religious observance (conducted in 1999), 48 percent of people living in Western Europe almost never go to church; the figure for Eastern Europe is just a little lower, at 44 percent. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark fewer than 15 percent now attend church at least once a month. Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland do more than a third of the people worship monthly or more often. European faith, too, as distinct from churchgoing, has waned quite dramatically in recent years. According to Gallup, 49 percent of Danes, 52 percent of Norwegians, and 55 percent of Swedes regard God as irrelevant to their lives. The proportion of Czechs who take this view is even higher. For whatever reason, Western Europeans living under Christian democracy or social democracy appear to have moved away from Christianity almost as rapidly as Eastern Europeans who used to live under "real existing socialism." In the words of the new Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, even traditionally Catholic Spaniards want "more sports, less religion." What makes the de-Christianization of Europe so intriguing is that it cannot be explained by rising living standards; that theory collapses in the face of the contemporaneous vigor of Christianity in the United States. American religious observance is significantly higher than European; so is American religious faith. More than twice as big a percentage of Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more. Some 62 percent of Americans believe in a personal God; little more than a third of Europeans do. Scarcely any Americans compared with 15 percent of Europeans can be characterized as atheists. Try to imagine George W.Bush calling for "more sports, less religion." It is not so much, then, that militaristic Americans are from Mars and pacifistic Europeans from Venus. It would be more accurate to say that from an evangelical point of view, Americans are bound for heaven and Europeans for hell. At the very least, the rapid decline of European Christianity helps to explain why European conservatism has so little in common with the conservatism of the American right. All this helps to explain, in turn, why in so many recent surveys Europeans have expressed a desire for a foreign policy less dependent on the United States. In the absence of the Soviet Union, in the presence of increasing numbers of Muslims, and in light of their own secularization, European societies feel more detached from the United States than at any other time since the 1930s. In a recent Gallup poll 61 percent of Europeans said they thought the EU plays a positive role with regard to "peace in the world" (while just eight percent said its role was negative). But a remarkable 50 percent took the view that the United States now plays a negative role. Compare that with American attitudes: 59 percent of Americans regard the United States as making a positive contribution to world peace, and just 15 percent think the EU plays a negative role. In the face of this kind of asymmetry it is well nigh impossible to turn back the clock to those halcyon days when there was just one West, indivisible. John Kerry would have tried, but he would have failed. George W. Bush has lower expectations of transatlantic relations. But he should not be blamed for their deterioration. His much exaggerated "unilateralism" is not why the Atlantic seems a little wider every day. It is Europe, not America, that is drifting away. {Mr. Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover lnstitution, at Stanford. His most recent book is Colossus: The Price of America's Empire.} - - Europe and the Mullahs February 20, 2007 _The Wall Street Journal_ On the record, Europe claims to be as concerned as America about a nuclear-armed Iran. The record also shows, however, that Europe's biggest countries do a booming business with the Islamic Republic. And so far for the Continentals, manna trumps security. The European Union led by Germany, France and Italy has long been Iran's largest trading partner. Its share of Iran's total imports is about 35%. Even more notable: Its trade with Tehran has expanded since Iran's secret nuclear program was exposed. Between 2003 and 2005, Europe's exports rose 29% to 12.9 billion; machinery, transport equipment and chemicals make up the bulk of the sales. Imports from Iran, predominantly oil, increased 62% to 11.4 billion in that period. In the absence of an official embargo against Tehran, private EU companies have sought commercial opportunities in Iran. But the real story here is that these businesses are subsidized by European taxpayers. Government-backed export guarantees have fueled the expansion in trade. That, in turn, has boosted Iran's economy and indirectly by filling government coffers with revenues its nuclear program. The German record stands out. In its 2004 annual report on export guarantees, Berlin's Economics Ministry dedicated a special section to Iran that captures its giddy excitement about business with Tehran. "Federal Government export credit guarantees played a crucial role for German exports to Iran; the volume of coverage of Iranian buyers rose by a factor of almost 3.5 to some 2.3 billion compared to the previous year," the report said. "The Federal Government thus insured something like 65% of total German exports to the country. Iran lies second in the league of countries with the highest coverage in 2004, hot on the heels of China." Iran tops Germany's list of countries with the largest outstanding export guarantees, totaling 5.5 billion. France's export guarantees to Iran amount to about 1 billion. Italy's come to 4.5 billion, accounting for 20% of Rome's overall guarantee portfolio. Little Austria had, at the end of 2005, 800 million of its exports to Iran covered by guarantees. The Europeans aren't simply facilitating business between private companies. The vast majority of Iranian industry is state-controlled, while even private companies have been known to act as fronts for the country's nuclear program. EU taxpayers underwrite trade and investment that would otherwise be deterred by the risks of doing business with a rogue regime. It's also hard not to see a connection between Europe's commercial interests and its lenient diplomacy. The U.N.'s December sanctions resolution orders countries to freeze the assets of only 10 specific companies and 12 individuals with ties to Iran's nuclear program. Europe's governments continue to resist U.S. calls for financial sanctions, and the German Chamber of Commerce recently estimated that tougher economic sanctions would cost 10,000 German jobs. As if on cue, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier last week detected in Tehran a "new ambition" to resume talks. The last time the Europeans promoted such diplomatic negotiations, Iran won two more years to get closer to its goal of becoming a nuclear power. In 2004, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily, then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told Iranians to consider Europe a "protective shield" against U.S. pressure. The EU continues to provide a shield for its business interests in Iran, and thus a lifeline to a regime that is unpopular at home and sponsors terror abroad. . . see "DEATH" for related links Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. Modern society should not hesitate to organise itself with reference to the normal individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity. The development of human personality is the ultimate purpose of civilization. --Alexis Carrel (18731944) French surgeon, sociologist, and biologist who received the 1912 Nobel Prize for Psysiology or Medicine. In _Man, the Unknown_ [1935] - Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr Brandt are entrusted with the responsibility of extending the rights of specially designated physicians, such that patients who are judged incurable after the most thorough review of their condition which is possible, can be granted mercy killing. --Adolf Hitler (18891945) German dictator. Late Oct. 1939. (Authorization for the euthanasia of mentally handicapped people.) In M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 831. & see: If it is once accepted that people have the right to kill 'unproductive' fellow humans then as a *matter of principle* murder is permitted for all unproductive people, in other words for the incurably sick, the people who have become invalids through labor and war, for us all when we become old, frail and therefore unproductive ... Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God's holy commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' ... is not only broken, but if this transgression is actually tolerated and permitted to go unpunished. --Bishop of Munster, Cardinal Count August von Galen, sermon, [3 August 1941]. & see: I am quite sure that a man like the Bishop von Galen knows that after the war I shall exact retribution down to the last farthing. And, if he does not succeed in getting himself transferred, in the meanwhile, to the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, he may rest assured that in the balancing of our accounts no 'T' will remain uncrossed, no 'I' undotted! --Adolf Hitler (18891945) German dictator. [4 July 1942], in _Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944_. - - In 1920, a prominent German lawyer, Karl Binding, and a distinguished German forensic psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, wrote a brief but deadly book, The Permission To Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. In his new book, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin), Richard Evans notes that Binding and Hoche emphasized that "the incurably ill and the mentally retarded were costing millions of marks and taking up thousands of much-needed hospital beds. So doctors should be allowed to put them to death." Then came Adolf Hitler, who thought this was a splendid, indeed capital, idea. The October 1, 2003, New York Daily News ran this Associated Press report from Berlin: "A new study reveals Nazi Germany killed at least 200,000 people because of their disabilities people deemed physically inferior, said a report compiled by Germany's Federal Archive. Researchers found evidence that doctors and hospital staff used gas, drugs and starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at medical facilities in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. . . . "The Nazis launched the drive to root out what they called 'worthless lives' [and 'useless eaters'] in the summer of 1939, *pre-dating their full-scale organization of the Holocaust, in which they killed 6 million Jews*." (Emphasis added). The more than 200,000 "worthless lives" terminated by the Nazis before the Holocaust included few Jews. Most of those killed were other Germans considered unfit to be included in "the master race." Among the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and their primary accomplices in the mass murder were German doctors who had gone along with the official policy of euthanasia. An American doctor, Leo Alexander, who spoke German, had interviewed the German physician-defendants before the trials, and then served as an expert on the American staff at Nuremberg. In an article in the July 14, 1949, New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Alexander warned that the Nazis' crimes against humanity had "started from small beginnings . . . merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived." That shift in emphasis among physicians, said Dr. Alexander, could happen here, in America. [...] Dr. Alexander read an article in the April 12, 1984, New England Journal of Medicine by 10 physicians-part of the growing "death with dignity" brigade. They were from such prestigious medical schools as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia. These distinguished healers wrote that when a patient was in a "persistent vegetative state," it was "morally justifiable" to "withhold antibiotics and artificial nutrition (feeding tubes) and hydration, as well as other forms of life-sustaining treatment, allowing the patient to die." They ignored the finding that not all persistent vegetative states are permanent. After reading the article, Dr. Alexander said to a friend: "It is much like Germany in the '20s and '30s. The barriers against killing are coming down." --Nat Hentoff (1925 ) American journalist and author. "It's Not Only About Terri Schiavo Barriers to Killing Come Down" - - The mass killing of mental patients [in Nazi Germany] was a large project. It was organized as well as any modern community psychiatric project, and better than most. . . . The organization comprised a whole chain of mental hospitals and institutions, university professors of psychiatry and directors and staff members of mental hospitals. --Fredric Wertham (18951981) German-born American psychiatrist. {on the murder of 'at least 275,000' individuals identified as 'useless eaters,' 'persons devoid of value,' 'worthless people,' 'superfluous people,' 'misfits,' undesirables,' 'cripples,' 'schizophrenics,' 'idiots,' et al. in more than 30 German psychiatric facilities with 'special departments' set up for that purpose, in _A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence_ [1966] - Q} In 1941 the psychiatric institution, Hadamar, celebrated the cremation of the ten thousandth mental patient in a special ceremony. Psychiatrists, nurses, attendants, and secretaries all participated. Everybody received a bottle of beer for the occasion. --Fredric Wertham (18951981) German-born American psychiatrist. _A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence_ [1966] - Q} - - In October of 1939 amid the turmoil of the outbreak of war Hitler ordered widespread "mercy killing" of the sick and disabled. Code named "Aktion T 4," the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate "life unworthy of life" at first focused on newborns and very young children. Midwives and doctors were required to register children up to age three who showed symptoms of mental retardation, physical deformity, or other symptoms included on a questionnaire from the Reich Health Ministry. [...] The Nazi euthanasia program quickly expanded to include older disabled children and adults. Hitler's decree of October, 1939, typed on his personal stationery, enlarged "the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death." Questionnaires were then distributed to mental institutions, hospitals and other institutions caring for the chronically ill. Patients had to be reported if they suffered from schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile disorders, therapy resistant paralysis and syphilitic diseases, retardation, encephalitis, Huntington's chorea and other neurological conditions, also those who had been continuously in institutions for at least 5 years, or were criminally insane, or did not posses German citizenship or were not of German or related blood, including Jews, Negroes, and Gypsies. --Nazi Euthanasia . . see "DECEPTION" for related links Know the meaning of evasion. It is the prudent man's way of keeping out of trouble; with the gallantry of a witty remark he is able to extricate himself from the most intricate of labyrinths. He emerges gracefully from the bitterest encounter and with a smile. --Baltasar Graciαn (16011658) Spanish Jesuit philosopher. ----- prevaricate [prih-VAIR-uh-kayt], intransitive verb: To depart from or evade the truth; to speak with equivocation. . . see: "STARS" see "TIME" for other related links Night hath a thousand eyes. --John Lyly (1554?1606) English prose stylist and playwright. _Maides Metamorphosis_ ----- gloaming [GLOH-ming], noun: Twilight; dusk. vespertine (adj.) 1: of, pertaining to, or occurring in the evening; twilight. 2: opening in the evening, as certain flowers. 3: active in the evening, as certain birds and animals; crepuscular. . . see: "FACTS" see: "PROOF" see "CRIME & PUNISHMENT" for other related links If you walk on snow you cannot hide your footprints. --Chinese proverb. Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule. --Charles Dickens (18121870) English novelist. _Great Expectations_ [1860-1861], Chapter 40 Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence. --Tryon Edwards (18091894) American theologian. To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt. --Samuel Johnson (17091784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. --Carl Sagan (19341996) American astronomer and author. Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk. --Henry David Thoreau (18171862) American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher. _Journal_ [1906] "11 November 1854" end page | EARS - ECONOMY (THE) | EDUCATION | EFFORT - ELEPHANTS | ELOQUENCE - EMOTION | EMOTIONS & FEELINGS | EMPIRE - ENERGY | ENGLAND - ENGLISH (THE) | ENGLISH (LANGUAGE) | ENLIGHTENMENT - ENVY | ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES | EPITAPHS - EQUAL RIGHTS | ERROR - EVIDENCE | EVIL - EXECUTIONS | EXERCISE - EYES | | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
||