David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank’s history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how in the 1990s, via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches, often at the expense of ethics and the law.
At the age of 10, Eva Mozes Kor became a victim of Josef Mengele, the doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp notorious for his barbaric experiments on twins. Eva and her twin sister Miriam lost both of their parents and two older sisters in the Holocaust; only Eva and Miriam survived. Eva later married an American and moved to the United States to begin a new life. In 1984, she founded the organization CANDLES together with the help of her sister Miriam. The name is an acronym for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. Working with the organization, Eva was able to locate 122 other survivors of Dr. Mengele’s horrific experiments around the world. In 1995, Eva also founded CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center to educate the public about eugenics, the Holocaust, and the power of forgiveness. That same year she publicly forgave the Nazis for what had been done to her - a decision that brought her international attention.
Eva circled the globe delivering her message of peace, kindness, healing and self-empowerment for future generations. Her lessons went far beyond her own experience, addressing current global atrocities and two of the biggest problems facing today's youth: bullying and discrimination. Eva Mozes Kor died on 4 July 2019 in Krakow.
Cizik School of Nursing has created a REMI Platinum Award-winning documentary film that tells the grim cautionary tale of nurses who participated in the Holocaust and abandoned their professional ethics during the Nazi era. The 56-minute film, Caring Corrupted: the Killing Nurses of the Third Reich, casts a harsh light on nurses who used their professional skills to murder the handicapped, mentally ill and infirm at the behest of the Third Reich and directly participated in genocide.
Four days ago the Conversation – an “independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community” – published an article headlined:
‘Morality pills’ may be the US’s best shot at ending the coronavirus pandemic, according to one ethicist
The article’s author is Parker Crutchfield, an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics, Humanities and Law at Western Michigan University, and his argument can be broken down into four key points:
Wearing masks and social distancing are good for public health
People who refuse to follow these rules are “defectors” who need to be “morally enhanced”
This moral enhancement can be achieved with medication to make people more “empathetic” and “co-operative”
This medication should be compulsory and/or administered secretly via the water supply. (more...)
White supremacists of the 1930s maintained there was one sure way to identify a fellow member of the “master race” — blushing. It was thought that only a true pureblood Aryan could display a noticeable change of color in their skin upon an episode of shyness, shame, or modesty. That Charley Poole was a non-Aryan was not the real issue with the Black Legion, which saw to it that his cheeks were eternally blanched for a different, more powerful reason: the sanctity of Protestant womanhood. On the night of May 12, 1936, the young unemployed autoworker was taken into the countryside west of Detroit and shot five times at point-blank range, an honor killing that was the latest in a long string of atrocities committed by the black-robed vigilantes.
“Nobody could hate Charley,” cried Becky Poole, after being told by detectives that her husband’s body had been found near Gulley Road in what is now Dearborn Heights. “He never hurt anyone in his whole life.”
That wasn’t what the local chapter of the Legion — which included Becky’s brother-in-law, Lowell Rushing — believed. Rushing had gotten wind of Charley’s occasional arguments with Becky and reported back to his friends at the Wolverine Republican Club, one of various fronts the Legion used to mask its activities. He exaggerated the Pooles’ discord, which typically centered on Charley’s inability to find a steady job. At a secret meeting inside a rented hall, “Colonel” Harvey Davis helped stir Legionnaires into a frenzy by describing Charley as an abusive husband who had beaten his pregnant wife so badly she had miscarried. “What shall we do about such a man?” he asked. “Whip him!” members yelled. “Kill him!”
The following evening, as Becky lay in her bed at Detroit’s Herman Kiefer Hospital, Rushing lured Charley into a car filled with Legion members. Charley, a talented sandlot ball player, thought he had been invited to the organizational meeting of a factory baseball team, which would have assured him a job at the sponsoring plant. But, in the hard-boiled vernacular of the day, this was a one-way ride. “You’ve beaten your wife for the last time,” he was told before being shot and dumped into a ditch.
As unremarkable as Poole’s life had been up to that point, in death he wound up extracting an extraordinary price from his killers. His murder caused the previously unknown Black Legion to explode into the headlines, resulting in most of its leaders being sent to prison and exposing the clandestine brotherhood of bullies to ridicule. “Hooey may look like romance and adventure in the moonlight,” The Detroit News editorialized toward the end of the Legion’s brief but spectacular appearance on the public stage, “but it always looks like hooey when you bring it out in the daylight.” (more...)
A marathon trial in Germany has come to an end. On 11 July 2018, more than five years after the trial had begun, the higher regional court in Munich handed down the sentences against five members and supporters of the German radical right terror group “National Socialist Underground” (NSU). Beate Zschäpe, the main defendant, received a life sentence; she was found guilty of ten murders, in complicity with Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, who had died in an apparent murder-suicide pact in 2011.
The judges made a finding of “particular severity of guilt,” which means that her chances of parole after 15 years are very limited. Ralf Wohlleben, a main supporter of the group, received ten years for complicity in murder. Holger Gerlach was sentenced to three years in prison, André Eminger to two and a half years. Both were convicted for supporting a terrorist organization. They provided the group with identities and logistical support. Carsten S. got three years (youth custody); together with Wohlleben, he supplied the terrorist group with the murder weapon. S. made a substantial confession at the beginning of the trial.
The public reactions to this verdict were characterized by harsh critique of the lenient sentence against André Eminger, a crucial supporter of the NSU who never renounced the radical right scene. Furthermore, thousands of protesters nationwide demanded to continue the investigation of the NSU case. Relatives of the victims said that the verdicts brought them little closure with so many unresolved questions remaining, such as the support network of the NSU or state failures during the investigations. (more...)
While voter support for Germany’s most powerful party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU),[1] had been crumbling in the course of the current legislation period (2017-2021), with the onset of the coronavirus crisis, the tables have turned importantly in favor of the party: Polls had dropped to under 30% at the end of January this year, but have risen in the wake of Covid-19 to almost 40%. It is too early to tell whether this trend will hold up until the 2021 general election but, assuming that it does, Germany will most likely have a CDU-led government in the forthcoming years—a good occasion to have a closer look at the origins, development and current structure of the party.
In hindsight after one million people have lost their jobs, over 10 million people having switched to part-time work, and a predicted slump of the economy of 6.8 percent in 2020, it seems odd that people would back a party known for being the henchman of capital’s interests.
This is particularly so after it became clear that the massive “rescue” package the German government took on (over 300 billion Euros so far) resembled more of a dinosaur feeding: Fossil-fuel industries, such as Germany’s over-boarding car industry, or flagship airlines, such as Lufthansa, benefitted from state aid to continue their business as usual. Companies are granted a major share of the aid funds, 200 billion euros, while in comparison, municipalities will receive a mere 57 billion. (more...)
