Pimpernel Smith

 

"Pimpernel Smith" is a 1941 movie, featuring National Socialists appropriately as the bad guys, and Leslie Howard as an english professor who continually outwits them.  I cannot speak to the merits of the movie, but this quote is good, and hopefully prescient.  It is from a scene at the end of the movie, when Professor Smith has been captured by the gestapo:

General von Graum: Mm. We can afford to make a loss, our profits will be tremendous. Tonight we march against Poland, and tomorrow we'll see the dawn of a new order. We shall make a German empire of the world... Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man 

Professor Horatio Smith: May a dead man say a few words to you, general, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world... because you are doomed. All of you who demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still, you will have to go on... because you will find no horizon... see no dawn... until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers. And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words...  

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats wrote this in 1919, after WWI and in the midst of the Spanish Flu epidemic.  His pregnant wife was recovering from the flu when he wrote this.  Mortality rates for pregnant women were as high as 70% (not .7%, nor yet .03%) with that version of the flu.  "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, ...The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." Sounds pretty familiar today in early 2021.  It is faintly comforting to realize that the world has been here before, and that better men have felt the same churn in their gut over the situation, but it doesn't make the situation any better.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?