An Excerpt from the Diary of Captain Wilm Hosenfeld ...

About August 21, 1942, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, of the German army, stationed in Poland, wrote this in his diary.

After 21 August 1942, Lying is the worst of all evils. Everything else that is diabolical comes from it. And we have been lied to; public opinion is constantly deceived. Not a page of a newspaper is free of lies, whether it deals with political, economic, historical, social, or cultural affairs. Truth is under pressure everywhere; the facts are distorted, twisted and made into their opposite. Can this turn out well? No, things can't go on like this, for the sake of human nature and the free human spirit. The liars and those who distort the truth must perish and be deprived of their power to rule by force, and then there may be room for a freer, nobler kind of humanity again. Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.

Captain Hosenfeld saved multiple lives, and was an articulate, intelligent, religious and compassionate witness to two of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century, indeed world history, himself falling victim to one of them. The first was the holocaust, perpetrated by people of his own country, and the second, the Soviet gulags. The more than half century separating the present day from the Great Depression and World War II have indicated to many people that nothing bad can really come of our choices, that, at worst, tragedies will be short term, easily contained, and without serious, long term consequences, either military or economic. No choices we make can have dire consequences in the long term. They can. We are not voting to give either Barack Obama or John McCain an honor like the Nobel Prize, simply acknowledging their accomplishments and then living our lives as we have been living them for the last few decades. November 4th is not the finish line, it is not even the starting line. For the next four to eight years, and beyond, you will have to live with the consequences of your actions, of your decisions. With a heavily Democratic Congress, and, soon, a Democratic Supreme Court Justice, Barack Obama will have more power than anyone has had in the history of this country. Do you really know enough, with enough certainty, to risk a Barack Obama presidency? People who have lived in the most terrible dictatorships the world has ever known did not know that people who are now the world's most infamous leaders would do what they did. In 1917, Russians did not expect the Bolsheviks to sieze such utter power and rule so brutally for so long. They thought the situation could not get worse than it already was. I even believe that Lenin had good intentions. In 1933, no one suspected that Hitler would attempt the largest scale genocide the world has ever known, or that his government would be one of the most brutally authoritarian in humanity's history. In 1951, millions and millions of people genuinely mourned the death of their beloved leader, Joseph Stalin. With the story changing, the mystery, the secrecy, the complete lack of public support, or even public appearances, from people from his past, including friends or family, the questionable ties, the questionable statements, the absence of a voting record, the inexperience, the promise by Joe Biden of an international crisis, the lack of understanding of foreign affairs, the treatment of Joe the Plumber, and every question which has been raised by people of the McCain and Hillary campaigns and ordinary citizens, which have not been answered but merely diverted by personal attacks, talking points and topic - changing, I do not ask you to conclude with absolute certainty that Barack Obama is a horrible person and will make a terrible president. I merely ask that, as you enter the voting booth on November 4th, before you pull the lever, you answer to yourself whether or not you are willing to deal with the risks of an Obama presidency.