A million people killed. Damn. How do you live with it?

[struggle4progress]

37. Maybe you should read up on the 1912 Basel Congress: the members of the Second International

swore up and down they'd go back home and organize the working classes against the war that was coming -- and instead, as their countries moved towards war, they almost all decided patriotism trumped their anti-war sentiments, so the Second International collapsed and war engulfed Europe

Nobody much remembers it -- but Germany erupted spontaneously in revolution at the end of WWI. The centrist SPD then sided with rightwingers to restore ordinary government rule, and the SPD split. The KPD then emerged as a political party, and the KPD made a point of never forgiving the SPD for siding against the German revolutionaries: this was understandable, I suppose, but it ultimately meant that there was no possibility later for a united front against the NSDAP, when it clawed its way to power

About thirty years later, in Nazi-ruled Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a very informative essay ("After Ten Years&quot detailing the inadequacies of various psychological approaches his contemporaries adopted in order to deal with life under Nazi rule

We cannot solve our problems by shooting magic silver bullets: no such magic bullets exist

Politics is all about organization; and successful politics involves forming expedient alliances that may necessarily shift with shifting conditions

Abstract principles can provide useful stars by which we set our general course; but the sea is subject to gales and waves that cannot be ignored