Featured image by Caroline Jones. Follow the link for more of this artist’s work.
We judge the people of history very critically, often times wondering why the common people would allow for the rise of such terrible things like the Nazis or the Fascists in Italy or the Communists in Russia. We wondered why they would tolerate such evil, oppression, and violence. We pondered as to why they stood by and allowed these totalitarian forces to seize power. How could they not see that the consequences of their inaction would have been the deaths of millions?
I have used the quote before. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Attributed to Mark Twain, it holds that the themes of history aren’t a one for one repetition, but rather that over the course of history, the same circumstances tend to produce similar results. I believe that we are seeing the rise of authoritarianism in the United States. And for many of us, we would much rather be left alone. We have our own lives, jobs, families, issues, and struggles, and many of the things that lie outside our own little patches of earth tend to ride in the background. Many of us are scared: of being cancelled, of being attacked, of being othered, of being killed. We live in the idea that it is better to not stand up for those who are being cancelled, because at least I am safe.
We’ll see someday, that very same judgment passed down upon us by the people of the future. We had the technology to see just how much of the past was being recycled: rampant poverty, crushing debt, politicians making promises to make lives better, the scapegoating of rival ideologies, the marginalization of political rivals as enemies of the state and terrorists, the shifting and consolidation of power combined with active measures to change the political landscape and disarm the population of their ability to fend for themselves. We will be judged as failures for our inability to protect our children, our communities, and our fellow citizens as they become ostracized, marginalized, and radicalized. We’ll be seen not as free-thinking and intelligent people, but as immoral sub-humans who fail to recognize our own privilege and give into our primal desires.
Those who practice this idea that their ideology is superior in every way, and that there is no room for discussion are on the road to tyranny. Every idea has its weaknesses, every movement, every philosophy, every individual. There are no angels among men. And to make martyrs and saints of people is to ignore their frailties and lionize their deaths tells me that the mythmaking tradition of the human race is still alive and well.
A Place 4Politics 