Reply #24: I'm reading the book "JFK and the Unspeakable" by James Douglass...

[drokhole]

...and he cites a great quote from a Trappist monk, and noted peace advocate, named Thomas Merton in a poem called "Chant to Be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces"

"Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles, without ever seeing what you have done."

The poem itself is described as "droning...spoken by the commander of a Nazi death camp in Europe. The matter-of-fact tone, the quotations, the obsession with cleanliness amidst the extermination of people, the mechanical recitation of events all make a powerful impact. For Merton, this is the result of a world without the sacred to reveal the value of the profane. All becomes mechanistic and death-bound. Merton uses irony and a kind of black humor to speak of a horror beyond words. The murderers are not from a different species than humanity and that is the startling thing for Merton. They seem so sane in many ways, they can appreciate music, love their families and dogs and then go to work where they antiseptically commit genocide all in a day's labor. Merton saw such 'sanity' without love as a threat to human survival and that truth demanded less, not more, of such sanity."