Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Seyss-Inquart

The line reads like a policy memo disguised as a threat: blunt, action-oriented, and engineered to make violence sound like consequence. “Smite” is doing strategic work here. It’s archaic and biblical, a word that borrows moral thunder to launder what is, in plain terms, an announcement of assault and murder. Seyss-Inquart isn’t just describing hatred; he’s claiming a righteous mandate for it, implying that the act will be punitive rather than predatory.

The second clause is even more revealing: “whoever goes along with them must take the consequences.” That’s the scaffolding of social isolation and complicity-building. It expands the target from Jews to anyone who associates with them, turning everyday solidarity into a punishable offense. The subtext is: don’t help, don’t speak, don’t even be seen nearby. It’s terror as community management, meant to pre-empt dissent by making neutrality dangerous and decency costly.

Context sharpens the intent. Seyss-Inquart was a key Nazi functionary, instrumental in the Anschluss and later the Reichskommissar of the occupied Netherlands, where deportations and repression accelerated under his administration. This sentence sits comfortably inside the Nazi playbook: normalize violence by framing it as inevitable “consequences,” and create a social environment where persecution becomes self-reinforcing. It’s not mere rhetoric; it’s a public permission slip for brutality, and a warning to bystanders that the regime will treat empathy as collaboration.