Gregory's ServerI keep seeing "How can they all give into fascism so willingly, didn't they pay attention in school?" and that strikes me as so unbelievably naive. The fact of the matter is that the last people who actually still witnessed the Third Reich are dead or in the process of dying. The last people whose *parents* still witnessed it are in their 50s give or take a few years. And did school really keep you from smoking? Drinking? Riding your bike too fast? No? See what I mean? Nobody actually remembers!
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If all you know is bombings on TV, suitably sanitized, you presumably have a very different relationship to the idea of another war having to flatten that shit country you live in and its newly empowered Nazi scum. Maybe it won't be that bad? Maybe "we'll win this time?" This is the shit that causes existential dread for me, imagining that some people around Germany, maybe 30% of us, *really* think that the fascists will "get it right." But it'll be nothing but pain and misery. Nothing at all. |
I am not "blaming the kids" here. It's simply a fact that once you're disconnected from an event or era, that event or era is no longer "real" to you. It's like a movie, closer to fiction than fact. Maybe not intellectually, but in your gut. And so it's easy to think "well, this time we know how to keep this under control" or "this time we won't let it get that bad" or whatnot. My mom remembered cowering in a basement during allied bombing raids. She told me about it. Described it viscerally.