Relevant Quote of the Day

What remnants there were of such a moral order were suppressed by the contemporary sloganeering. And those struggles produced their own strange and terrible conflicts. Much like the era of Church schism introduced by Luther four centuries earlier, the entire world was gripped by an immense unrest. Everywhere lines of battle formed; everywhere bitter enmity sprang up between old and young, between Fatherland and humanity, between Red and White. We in our day can no longer reconstruct, let alone comprehend and sympathize with the impetus and power of such labels as Red and White, let alone the real meanings of all the battle cries. Much as in Luther’s time, we find all over Europe, and indeed over half the world, believers and heretics, youths and old men, advocates of the past and advocates of the future, desperately flailing at each other…. Fighting, killing, and destroying went on everywhere, and everywhere both sides believed they were fighting for God against the devil. —Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game