the news today

The garden is all autumn.

The cabbage season beckons.

The eight xmas cacti came inside and promptly started to produce buds. 

We walked for a couple of hours in the forest 

 

 

 to visit a waterfall

 

and marvel at the horizon

 

I am living in the country where in my parent's lifetime, books were burned, people were persecuted for their political, religious, personal opinions, children with disabilities were selected and institutionally murdered, where the Holocaust was invented and carried out with great precision. I am also living in a country with a long history of great thinkers, creative artists, composers, architects, painters, inventors.

In most towns and cities in my country, there are memorials, statues, museums, stepping stones, monuments, signposts, street names, commemorating resistance fighters, Jewish or Roma or Sinti or gay or otherwise persecuted citizens.

One set of my grandparents were nazis, the other tried to avoid any involvement with them, tried to keep out of it and did nothing. My parents went to school at a time when flags with the swastika were on every building, when almost all activities, from sports to music, chess to scouting were under nazi control. Both my parents remembered friends, neighbours, shop owners, public figures disappearing. My family made it through twelve years of fascist rule, too many wounds and scars to count, but safe and apart from one cousin killed in Russia alive.

Until most recently, we would almost laugh out loud when someone like trump used the word fascist or nazi. You haven't the faintest, we muttered, your idea is based on a cheap Hollywood version where the good guys win.  But now I am not so sure any more. I read this here today by Heather Cox Richardson:

Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”

Read the entire letter, I urge everybody and not just in the US. This could happen anywhere. Trump, coronavirus, the Russian attack on Ukraine and Hamas terrorism have only been the triggers that have made a change visible, which in turn lies more in the reactions to these events. Epidemics, wars and terrorist organisations have happened before. The insecurity they trigger has more to do with the fact that we cannot find an appropriate response to them. We withdraw, stop reading the news, shrug and concentrate on the mundane, dinners, shopping, gardening. There don't seem to be any institutions left to handle crises effectively. Instead, it looks more and more that it's not who is right that wins, but simply who is stronger. Is it just me that finds this scary? 

There are days when I try to reassure myself that all fascist states have failed eventually and utterly, some sooner  (Germany 12 years), a few lasted longer (Portugal, Spain), but they collapsed nevertheless. 

Because: people stopped them. People. Like us. We are people.

Also, climate change could speed it all up dramatically.