“Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth too.”–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow The hypocrisy of the current military strategy of all nations was pointed out by Friedrich Nietzsche as early as 1880, when The Wanderer and His Shadow was published as an addendum to his first aphoristic work, Human, All-Too-Human: Every military erected as a means of self-defense presupposes that those against whom the military has been erected (i.e. the other nations) are on the offensive, since no military would be erected for self-defense if there were nothing to…
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Under the French administration at Vichy during the Second World War, the French Resistance formed in order to combat a regime collaborating with the Germans. Others resisting collaboration with Vichy, unwilling to become bystanders, also contributed to the Resistance, many being Christian rescuers harboring Jewish civilians or otherwise affording safe passage to the persecuted. Francis J. Murphy writes of these Christian rescuers that they “contributed to the fact that 75 percent of French Jews survived the war, a far higher proportion than in Belgium or the Netherlands,” going on to write the lamentable fact that “of the 300,000 Jews in France, 75,000 perished.”[1] Whatever the casualties of warfare and its…
