{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

“A German journalist who’d been covering Hitler for more than a decade said his oratorical gifts transcended the audience: “At the highpoints of his speeches, he is seduced by himself.”1 William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for William Randolph Hearst’s Universal News Service, had watched thousands of Nazis clog the street in front of Hitler’s hotel room one night during the 1934 Party Congress, desperate to catch a glimpse of the Führer. He finally popped onto his balcony for a few “Heil Hitler” moments, like the pope giving a blessing in St. Peter’s Square. The crowd “looked up at him as if he were a Messiah,” Shirer observed in his work diary, “their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.”
Taken from author Tom Dunkel


“Uncle Dietrich (Bonhoeffer)  was playing piano for his nieces, Christiane and Marianne, when the doorbell rang. It was Julius Rieger, looking distraught. He’d just learned Paul Schneider, one of the Confessing Church pastors arrested in November 1937, had died at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Pastor Bonhoeffer knew Pastor Schneider well. He was the epitome of costly grace. There was not an ounce of capitulation in him, which was why he had logged so much time in solitary confinement at Buchenwald. Schneider refused to salute the Nazi flag (“I don’t salute that criminal symbol”), so his guards beat him with their fists and with sticks.

He shouted words of encouragement and bits of scripture to camp prisoners from his cell window. His guards would beat him again and sometimes whip him. Finally, they got so tired of administering beatings and whippings, a camp doctor induced a heart attack by giving Schneider five injections of strophanthin, a plant-based toxin used by certain African tribes to poison the tips of their arrows.”

This is a name you must never forget,” Bonhoeffer told his young nieces. “Paul Schneider is our first martyr.
A line had been crossed. Prisoner 2491 became the first German cleric murdered by the Nazis. There was no reason to believe he would be the last.”
Taken from author Tom Dunkel.


“Always remember the goodness of animals,” (Wilhelm) Canaris advised SS officer Walter Schellenberg, an aide to Heinrich Himmler. “You see, my dachshund is discreet and will never betray me. I cannot say that of any human being.”
Taken from author Tom Dunkel.


“Evil is unspectacular and always human / And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
W.H.Auden


“BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES (1821-1867)
A poet and a rebel, celebrated for The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire died insane, paralyzed, and speechless at the age of forty-six. The combined effects of syphilis, alcohol, hashish, and opium killed him.

A decadent, a man who reveled in the atmosphere of “brothels, opium dens, and morgues,” Baudelaire was attracted to “pallor and thinness” in women. Thinness, he believed, was “more obscene” than plumpness.”
Taken from author Mark Mirabello.


“CANNIBALISM
The ultimate transgression, cannibalism is the act of an animal eating its own kind.
Older than modern humans, there is evidence of Neanderthal brain being eaten (apparently by other Neanderthals) in 100,000 B.C.

Anthropologists identify four types of cannibalism: survival cannibalism (famine), ritual cannibalism (religion), gourmet cannibalism (food), and  atrocity cannibalism (war).
Pacific islanders—in the nineteenth century—said that human flesh is sweeter than pork. (The heart, the thighs, and the arms above the elbows are the most desirable portions.) Baby flesh, they claimed, tastes like fish, because the flesh is very soft.

One Frenchman, who shared a cannibal feast with them, claimed that testicles have the taste and texture of marshmallows.”
Taken from author Mark Mirabello.