Pax Hominibus Bonae Voluntatis by Aleister Crowley in International, Dec 1917.

“The Germans are under the monstrous delusion that God is with them; that they are fighting for their hearths and altars. It is none of our business to cure that delusion. We must accept it in estimating their minds.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “But the treasures of art, of literature, of music, must this time be preserved for humanity; and we are determined to resist to the death any attack upon those treasures. We are — for the moment — fighting the Germans; but Faust and Siegfried and Zarathustra, the achievement of Kant in philosophy and of Helmholtz in physics, must be put ‘out of bounds.’ We stand above.”
  2. “We have our attention taken away from the business of fighting by the miserable grunts of these self-advertising pigs, who are only guinea-pigs in so far as they can always be counted on to sell their souls for a guinea. It is not only useless and stupid to refuse the benefits of those who at the very lowest estimate were our friends, but the absolute destruction of the whole principle of civilization.”
  3. “LET me draw a picture! In auction, I bid a heart, but only with fear and trembling, because my partner may not have any hearts at all. In the new game of Pirate I can bid two hearts and feel more or less certain that either the man–no matter where he sits–with the hearts or the man with the aces and kings, is going to accept me as a partner and so save me from ignominy and ruin. After a bid has been accepted, and a partnership thus established, the next player can make a higher bid, when anybody can accept that bid and so establish a new partnership, and so on indefinitely.”
  4. “I may dislike this quality in him so much that I am willing to kill him as the only cure; and he is equally right to kill me if he dislikes the color of my necktie. How many people were killed because they wanted to spell ‘Homoousios,’ ‘Homoiousios’ with the iota?”
  5. “The idea of resisting repression is a totally wrong one. Christ submitted willingly to what is generally admitted to be the greatest crime ever perpetrated, although, as he himself explained, he had twelve legions of angels actually mobilized, which would have made as short work of the Romans as the angels of Mons did of the Germans in the early part of the war.”