I picked up a novel to begin reading and, only a few pages in. was struck by the horrifying appropriateness of the following to the current situation in our country. The administration isn't rounding up the Jews, but in plain sight they are purging from the government any who value truth above loyalty to the Orange Embarrassment. They are demonizing the "Other" and there are little children, separated from their families and kept in cages. We are at a tipping point.
from The Guest Book by Sarah Blake
"It started so slowly... coming toward us like a river shifting from its banks, one centimeter at a time. One lie, then the next. Lies so big there had to be a reason to tell them. there had to be a purpose, maybe even some truth..."
". . . (He) is toying with the world...With one hand he negotiates peace; with the other he sets us on the path to war. We all see it. Right before us... And we do not look away."
"The excitement of resistance two years ago when it had seemed certain that the Fuhrer's inordinate excesses, his purges, his insanities would yield a revolt among his own ranks and knock him out of power, had been flattened into quietude by the steady, unsleeping machinery of the Reich operating in plain sight."
And here we are...
6 comments:
Hard to comment...
The school-yard bully certainly makes it hard to find a force to whittle him down to size. Life isn't entertaining to consider these days, and I hope fiction still offers respite. The forces of nature are worthy of consideration at least.
I've been thinking a lot about how a population lets this happen. Not so much the people who are welcoming it, but those like you and me who are not. What did the resistance do in Germany? How can we be that resistance? It's hard to figure out the ways in which we can stop this and it gives me some reluctant sympathy for those in Germany, and other places, that saw the juggernaut roll right over them and were unable or unwilling to sacrifice themselves to stop it.
My thoughts were exactly like yours as I read THE GUEST BOOK. I loved it but it did ring a bit too true in certain parts, reminding me that so many did not learn the lessons of the past.
It is getting gloomier and gloomier.
I hate how much truth is in this post - and how powerless we feel.
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