Where Now?

Be careful what you wish for. An adage most people would associate with their grandmothers, but one which they would well heed. Been watching the follow-up series to "Secret Army"; "Kessler", about the subsequent 'career' of one of the Nazi protagonists from the original series, made in the early 1980s. I was not exactly shocked, but certainly interested to note the parallels between then and now. Although the original protagonists of European Fascism are now largely dead and buried, their spectre lives on. Age doesn't automatically confer wisdom on anyone, but experience is its natural concomitant, and learning by experience one would think is the natural order of things. Unless that experience is divorced completely from historical context, which for a large swathe of the population seems to be the case these days, mediated as it is by the possible falsities of media consumption, we choose to side with the loudest and most charismatic voices, at the expense of rationality and good sense, just as was the case in 1930s Weimar Germany.

The world at the moment is tilting geopolitically towards war once again: not the phoney war of the Cold War era, where the two major powers knew only too well that there was no good outcome for either side to act; the only possible result being the annihilation of the human race within weeks of the initiation of conflict; but a war along more traditional lines of conflict, powered by the same motivations of trade and territorialism that fuelled the two previous global conflicts. Capitalism by itself does not create conflict. Socialism by itself does not create conflict. Avarice, prejudice and ego create conflict. We are seeing the latter yet again prevail in world politics, pushing morality and community into the margins at the expense of the common good, and for the gain of the minority. We live in unstable times: judge others as you would judge yourselves...