…or  “בשוק סמייא צווחין לעווירא סגי נהור.”

in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king or, in older Hebrew, “in the street of the blind, the one-eyed man is called the Guiding Light.”

I’d hope that in some future extremis, we (that is, my family), would choose the side of humanity, of the guiding light…

I’m not saying, by the way, that this man did not have his faults (who doesn’t?).  Rather, he made the very courageous and right decision in a time of terror and extremis.  I don’t believe in his religion, or his aristocratic values, much in the same way that I don’t believe in Bonhoeffer’s religion, but I would fight for their rights to those beliefs and their rights to practise freedom of religion and tolerance, in a way that, for example, some other monotheistic religions would not allow.

At the moment of realisation, and of no going back, he like, Hermann Henning, Karl Robert von Tresckow, Hans Paul Oster et al stood up for others and became guiding lights for humanity versus radical evil.

There is a passage in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, where the central character Dr. Max Aue and his friend Dr. Voss have an argument about the scientific veracity of Nazi racial theory and anthropology and that in Voss’ view “trying to define a people by anything other than by their language, their religion, their customs, their habitat, their economic usages, or their own sense of identity would make no sense. ”

I like to look for signs in literature and other media, that rationality and humanity can exist amongst the chaos of barbarism and ignorance, amidst the destruction of a period of radical evil.

I turn to the fictional Voss again.

“,…when you hear so many stupid and inept things around you, it becomes difficult at a certain point to keep quiet.”*

* Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, (Vintage, London, 2010) pp 300-303