In my previous entries I have talked about the difference between good intentions and good results and I have pointed out the absolute necessity to take responsibility for alleged good intentions and alleged good deeds. If this does not happen good intentions turn into the paving stones on the road to hell. With this entry, which is bound to lead to a lot of knee-jerk reactions from the want-to-be do-gooders, I will further postulate that in order to actually improve the world, just like in raising children, one needs to lead by example. However, it sets a bad example if you put yourself above other cultures and peoples and aim to turn yourself into the “great saviour” of the world. We, the great Western Nations in Europe and North America will save these poor, underprivileged nations in Africa and the Middle East. Aside from this being a very racist approach toward aid, it is also one that cannot but fail in the end, regardless of how many starving children get saved. Aid must come from the inside out. Like with anything else you must learn to walk before you start running so to speak. To actually change the world you must set your priorities and you must work your way outward from the 1^st priority.
What is the 1^st priority?
The 1^st priority is you! Is this selfish? To some extent it is. But the closest person on earth to you is you. If you want to help others do-good and change the world, your first priority has to be to ensure that you yourself are doing well and want for nothing. Once you accomplished this you can start helping others, and more importantly you will be in a position from whence you can take full responsibility for the aid you provide.
After your own position on earth is secure, you can start thinking of making the lives of others worth living, as much as you enjoy yourself. But do not get ahead of yourself; no, also the 2^nd priority is not helping children from people you don’t even know! After food and shelter to ensure basic survival, what is the one thing every living human craves? It is companionship. No one wants to be alone. In fact it has been proven that people without a loving partner tend to die sooner than those in happy relationships.
So what has to be your 2^nd priority?
Your 2^nd priority is your spouse, the one person in life whom you would gladly give your own life for. Therefore after you yourself do well and want for nothing, the next step is to ensure that your spouse does as well and also wants for nothing.
As you work outward through the priorities, know your limits. You cannot take responsibility of you are operating beyond your own means. So while, children in Africa may suffer from a bad fate, unless you are so successful with the 1^st priority that you are a multi-millionaire, you will not be in any position to change the world for them by getting your own “feel-good-moment” when you pay your monthly € 5.-. This is wasted money! If any of it even gets to where it is supposed to go it will not change anything, let alone make the world a better place. At best it gives parents there a false sense of security that their children will (always-) be taken care of by someone else.
Work through the priorities and go as far as you can without compromising on any of the previous priorities. Perhaps then as a group you can take the next step? Together with your spouse you can take care of your children; Together with your children you can take care of your family. Together with your family you can take care of your extended family etc.

1. You yourself
2. Your spouse
3. Your children
4. Your immediate family (parents, siblings, grandparents)
5. Your spouse’s immediate family
6. Your extended family (aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins etc.)
7. Your spouse’s extended family
8. Your neighbourhood (help your neighbors, help the beggar on the street corner, collect/spend for community projects, and make your neighborhood a worthwhile place to live!)
9. Your township, district or city; if you are doing so well that you can start helping people you don’t even know, help people in your own city before you help people in the neighboring city!
10. Your province or state (more precisely less fortunate people in your province or state)
11. Your country
12. Neighboring countries (to have good relations and secure local peace)
13. Other allied countries
14. Other friendly countries (countries with good relations to yours even if not allied)
15. Other neutral countries (countries who are neither good friends nor hostile toward your country)
16. Hostile countries (try and improve relations while you offer aid)

Goody-two-shoes will now complain that these priorities are selfish and racist and won’t change the world. Is it really selfish to look after your own good first? Is it selfish if you make sure that you do not need to rely on tax money so that you can get welfare for your own survival? Look after yourself 1^st! It is selfish only if you do not factor in the need for someone else to pay for you if you don’t! Is it racist? Did I anywhere say that your spouse had to be of the same ethnicity as you are? Did I say your neighborhood or the population of your country had to be limited to a specific ethnic type? If you think these priorities are racist you are the one with a problem, not I.
These priorities are neither selfish, nor racist! What they are is common sense.
If you ensure your own wellbeing, you free your spouse from taking care of you. If you ensure the wellbeing of your own children you free your family from having to take care of them. If your and your spouse’s extended families are all being taken care of, the welfare office won’t have to! If your own neighborhood is being taken care of and does not have beggars or street kids, the state won’t have to spend money to take care of them. If your whole state or province is doing well the federal government won’t have to spend billions fixing your neighborhood!
If you want to change the world live by example, show that you can take care of yourself, no one else is needed, turn your family into a “model” self-sufficient family; turn your neighborhood into paradise etc.
Only once every one learns to do this, will the world change to the better in the long run. Do not create dependencies, by taking responsibility for the children of complete strangers at the other end of the world, before you haven’t made sure that your own surroundings do not have any people in need! Create paradise around you, before you try and bring it to someone else. And if you do carry it further, make sure you keep remembering your own means and your own limits and take responsibility for the alleged good you want to do! It is not up to you to save the world.

Recently the question of loving thy neighbour is hotly debated with literally millions of refugees flooding into western countries. And I think this ties in nicely with my last blog entry titled “The Road to Hell…” where I had postulated that in order to have good intentions turn into a good result, rather than another paving stone on the road to Hell, the person or persons intending to do good must also be ready to take responsibility for the “good” they do. And more importantly they must be ready to take responsibility and to take decisive action if the “good” they did slowly but remorselessly turns into yet another “evil” instead.

Since Tanya and I currently live in Germany, I would like to take what has become known as the “refugee crisis” to illustrate my thoughts. It all started with “good” intentions. There is a war in Syria. Millions of people are suffering and fearing for their lives. And we, as a nation, wanted to help. It is a noble goal and certainly there is nothing wrong with the intentions. These were “good” intentions. The only problem was in Germany no one was prepared to take responsibility for these good intentions. And while many of the would be do-gooders are now sticking their heads into the sand practicing the fine art of deep denial, the results, as could be expected, were disastrous.

 But what went wrong? From the beginning there was an utter lack of taking responsibility. This meant the borders were opened before a plan was ready on how to take care of the influx of people. There was no plan on where to house these people. There was no plan on how to teach them German. There was no plan on how to integrate them into society. There was no plan on what jobs may be available for all of the new comers. There was no plan on how to handle the influx of children to daycare centres of which we anyway did and do not have enough of or into schools. There was no plan on how to finance healthcare for all of these people. There was no plan on how to combat potentially lethal pathogens brought in by this many newcomers. There was no plan on how to separate criminal elements from refugees. There was no plan on how to quickly and efficiently get rid of said criminal elements. There was no plan on how to budget integrating this many people. On the contrary the actual cost of the “refugee crisis” is a closely guarded secret of the German government and unavailable to the tax payers who pay for it all.

Instead of taking responsibility, politicians threw around phrases like, “We can do it!” and “Germany is a rich country”.

 What effects did this lack of responsibility have for Germans and legal immigrants to Germany? Aside from unfortunate but very real side effects of having conflicting cultures living in the same cities now which leads to “honour killings” and molestation particularly of women and of other minorities as well as the equally very real threat of terrorist attacks, it lead to a substantial shift toward populist radical right wing ideas within the population. This shift too has led to killings of foreigners, or minorities within Germany, and a general much more racist attitude not only against legal residents but also German citizens who are of the “wrong” ethnos or of the “wrong” religion. And this shift led to a radical right wing party jumping from “no seat in the parliament” to becoming the third strongest party in the parliament literally overnight. Personally I find this very troublesome, especially since my own wife is not an ethnic German either. And anyone who knows about the rise of the Nazi party in the early thirties will be able to understand why I am worried. Part of this history is also retold in our new novel “The Art of Being Another” which is to be release soon.

 But at least we are helping. Or are we? Like the crazy cat lady who wants to help every cat in the world, our own chancellor and numerous other politicians seem to have become addicted to “helping”. In fact they have become the refugee equivalent of the crazy cat lady. Tanya and I signify them as “Help Messy” or “Refugee Messy”. Helping has long since become secondary, what seems to be of the outmost importance is that we get more and more refugees to come here. Helping two or three abandoned cats is not enough; the whole living room has to be crawling with seventy or eighty of them!

So, the question is, are we in fact still “helping” the refugees? Or are we now solely helping the wanna-be do-gooders boost their egos because we in Germany are “helping” millions of people? Does anyone even care about that anymore? Is it considered helping to let them come here, but to not be prepared, or even able to actually improve their lives? There are reports of people getting murdered in the refugee dorms here in Germany, because they follow a “wrong” sort of Islam or because they do not adhere to it strictly enough. These murdered, often times young people, have we “helped” them? Was it “helping” that they were killed in Germany by the same elements they had originally fled from in their home country?

There are reports of women getting mistreated, raped, forced into marriages or murdered for falling in love with someone of the “wrong” faith. A woman who has fled her home country to escape such treatment is now mistreated in a dorm in Germany, by the very men she attempted to flee from. Have we “helped” her? Is it any comfort for her that she travelled 2,000 miles just to be mistreated in Germany rather than back home?

Or has Germany failed to take responsibility for their good intentions? Would it not have been better to more strictly control who comes into the country, help those who are allowed in to get integrated quickly and ensure that their lives actually improve after they got here?

Is help measured in quantity, regardless of the outcome? Or is real help measured in quality and ensuring that everyone we help actually receives help?

 The effects of Germany’s reckless actions are not limited only to Germany either. Since Germany had “good” intentions but was utterly unwilling to take responsibility for these intentions, our actions as a nation affected not only us, but all of Europe!

As a direct result of the German “refugee crisis”, radical populist parties are gaining strength not only in Germany, but all across Europe. The fabric of the union is stretched and sometimes… it tears. The so called “Brexit” comes to mind. The vote was very close. And what was one of the main reasons for many pro-Brexit voters to vote as they did? They did not want to risk that thousands of illegal well-fare recipients could come into the UK. And where were thousands of illegal immigrants and well-fare recipients coming into Europe? They came as refugees to Germany! So while other factors certainly played a role in the Brexit vote, the refusal of German politicians to take responsibility for their own actions certainly played a role in splitting up the union, perhaps even a decisive role.

Once again good intentions helped pave the road to Hell.

…is paved in good intentions. Before writing “The Conduit”, before we decided to set it in Canada rather than Germany and before I decided to write it in English rather than in German, this was the title I had considered for the novel.

It seemed fitting at the time as the idea for the story had not yet included the final plot twist. Originally the idea was that the gap (or Armageddon) would be brought about as a result of well-intended but ill-conceived actions taken by characters in the novel. A lot of it can still be seen in the final product of course. Ray Edwards witnesses what he interprets as a rape of a mentally challenged minor and he does the right thing. He reports the incidence to the police. The child protection agency gets involved in the case and they do the right thing. In order to protect the minor from an abusive environment she is removed from her family and her community in her own best interests. Dr. Lee was anyway caught between a rock and a hard place when the girl was brought to him and he wonders if he was responsible for her miscarriage. MP Margarete Bender, who is a victim of abuse, does the right thing. She is making Canadians aware of the plight of abused women and of the often times unjust justice system that allows rapists and other perpetrators of abuse to get away with their crime. She demands that Zack Shuster be held accountable for his crime not due to ill content toward him, but to serve justice to his victim.

None of the characters mean to do ill. On the contrary, they all have the best of intentions. But in the end it looks like their very actions are what bring on the demise of the girl which in turn brings on the onset of Armageddon, or of the gap as the guardians of the Conduit would call it.

In the final version of the novel a final plot twist proves that regardless of the actions taken by the characters the gap was about to happen.

But watching the news of global events around me I was once again reminded of the saying, “The road to Hell is paved in good intentions.” How often does it happen that people claim and often times think that they are doing good only to see these efforts turn into a disaster instead? But do you think that these same people would then step back, admit that they had made a mistake and start analysing to make sure that the same mistake will not be repeated again in the future?

Our other novel “The Art of Being Another” very briefly scratches at another such incidence, although we do not elaborate much in the novel.

At the end of the First World War socialists and communists in Germany started a nationwide strike causing an abrupt and final collapse of the German war effort. The intentions were good. Enough people had died, this war needed to come to an end sooner rather than later. They were doing the right thing, or where they?

By causing a complete collapse of the German front the nation was put into a position where they had nothing to bargain with. The former enemy dictated the terms of surrender and these terms were harsh and ensured that this was not the end. Germany lost large tracts of territory, her military pride was insulted and ludicrous reparation payments caused a complete economic collapse. The population was suffering. And like every time the population suffers, people look for someone to blame and for an easy solution to end their suffering. The time was ripe for populists and radicals to make their moves. And they did. Under severe restrictions in terms of the size and equipment of their army due to the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic could do nothing but watch as the Brownshirts grew to a para-military force of 3.5 million men. The rest of the story we know all too well. Hitler came to power, established himself as a dictator and six years later the war that had ended in 1918 was now continued with a vengeance.

In the end it could be said that in order to save a few lives at the front of the Great War, 44 million lives were sacrificed when the war returned in 1939. And one has to wonder if it would not have been better to let the Great War run its course, presumably still leading to Germany’s defeat but with peace negotiations held while Germany was still in a position to let the war continue for years if need be. This may have led to more favourable peace terms, less suffering in Germany after the war and a much less fertile ground for the likes of Hitler and his ilk. Then perhaps the war to end all wars may have ended all wars, at least in Europe, instead of ensuring that a second war will be fought.

I have a lot more thoughts on this subject as it relates to more modern times. But this blog entry is starting to become rather lengthy. So, allow me to draw some conclusions and to set up another entry in the near future.

Why is it that the road to hell is paved in good intentions? Why is it that so often these words prove all too true in retrospect?

The answer to this is actually quite simple, cruel, but simple. The reason is that there is a difference between intent and responsibility.

Most people want to do good. They see an injustice or an evil and they want to change it. But even though they may very well be committed to their cause and dedicate their entire life to it, what these people refuse to do is take responsibility for their own actions.

Intent alone is not enough. In order for good intentions to turn into a good end result the person or the people intending to do good must also be willing to take responsibility for their own actions. They must be ever critical about the results of their actions and they must be prepared to both admit when they have made a mistake and to then take action to correct the mistake.

If you wish to do good, but you refuse the responsibility that comes with it (by expecting someone else to follow suit, change their behaviour and/or to pay for it for example), then chances are that all you will be doing in the end is setting another stone on the road to Hell.

As I was writing our latest novel - - The Art of Being Another - - (coming soon) I was confronted with historical revisionism, both while writing the novel and while doing the research for it.

The Art of Being Another is set in Germany. It starts in the 1920s and ends after the end of the Second World War. Although it is historical fantasy where the main characters are guardians of the Conduit (see The Conduit - by Sascha & Tatiyana Witt), we hoped to stay historically accurate. A lot of research about the 1920s in Germany, about the rise of the Nazi party and of course about the Second World War was done in order to make the setting of the novel authentic.

The first thing that comes to mind when mentioning the terms - revisionism and - World War Two - in one sentence is of course the efforts of neo-Nazis to deny that the holocaust had ever happened. On the one hand they will never grow tired of arguing about their great Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany, even today. During these arguments they will then recommend that the concentration camps are re-opened. But with the same breath they will give you their drivel why the holocaust is a - holohoax - that never happened. Allegedly it is all just a gigantic ploy by the Jewish state of Israel to press money out of poor little Germany.

Why then, an intelligent man has to wonder, would you want to re-open the concentration camps, if, as you say, nothing had ever happened there? This does not seem to make an awful lot of sense now, does it?

While I was growing up in Germany, I had often wondered why it was illegal in Germany to discuss the holocaust if you questioned the authenticity of historical facts. After having had the displeasure of running into some of those neo-Nazis, or should I call them neo-nutsies, I can now understand how wise the German government was to try and prevent that from happening. Unfortunately with the onset of the digital world and the Internet, such people now have a platform available to them, that often times is beyond the scope of the German justice system.

How does this relate to the novel? Well, since we were writing it from the point of view of the protagonist, one of the guardians who infiltrates the SS, we ourselves often times re-interpreted historic events. This was not done in order to try and falsify history. But it was done in order to show how a German nationalist and an officer in the SS may have thought about historic facts concerning the Great War which had ended just a few years prior to the beginning of the plot. Would such a man, for example, claim that Germany had started the war? Or that Germany was evil? Or would he use the same established historic facts and interpret them in such a way that makes the Entente powers look like the aggressors and the evil that destroyed Germany and then stole large tracts of land and resources from her to establish Poland, a country that had not existed for 120 years prior to the end of the Great War?

I was almost a little appalled to realize just how easy it was to use the same facts available, but to come to different conclusions. Often times the actual facts are few and far between. And what we know as fact today are naught but interpretations of people who had gone before.

I once heard it said that history is just that: it is - his story - these words seem all too true once you attempt to tell a different story, like the neo-Nazis are doing, once I did as part of writing the novel, or once, as I call them, Allied revisionists now try and pretend that their military had not killed anyone during the entire war.

While doing the research for the novel I could not help but feel as appalled by the revisionism practiced by these Allied revisionists as I was by that practiced by the neo-Nazis. I will mention but one example here: the Bombing of Dresden, February 13th - 15th, 1945. The Nazis claimed that 210,000 + people were killed in the attack. It was a number also used in Soviet propaganda for years to come to show how evil the Western powers are.

Now the Nazis of course are not exactly the most trustworthy source. But reading the German translation of Raymond Cartier‘s book - La seconde guerre mondiale - from 1965 I found that historians in the 60s had determined that approximately 135,000 people were killed in Dresden and that within the charred remains of the victims 20,000 wedding rings were found.

Remembering a documentary from the 1990s the number of victims had suddenly shrunken to 45,000.

In 2015 I saw a documentary on German state television commemorating the 70th anniversary of the attack. The number of victims had suddenly shrunken again and it was now stated as 35,000, including some mothers who had just given birth in a maternity hospital.

As I researched the event last year while considering whether to mention Dresden or Hamburg in the novel I found disturbing accounts of this event on the net where: in fact 16,000 buildings were destroyed during the attacks, but most of the city must have been empty, because within the ruins of these buildings less than 22,000 people had died, while the maternity hospital had quickly been turned into a military hospital.

Within the span of just 70 years the number of victims of the fire bombing of Dresden has dropped from 210,000 to 22,000!

Another 10 or 20 years of this and I can throw out my novel, because WW2 will just simply not have happened!

And I have to wonder: The victims of the holocaust deserve to be remembered. Do not the other victims of this same war also deserve this courtesy? Is it OK for people whose grandparents were still in diapers at the time it had all happened to now juggle the numbers and to pretend that no one was killed?