John

“Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.”
― Socrates

“But nothing surprises me now. I’ve grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the building straight.”
― Philip Kerr, March Violets

“There is that old joke. Why is there never a coup in the United States? Because there is no US embassy there.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

“Even so, the advance of the far right in Europe and the United States reveals the need to rethink memory work, to adapt it to new generations for whom the Second World War feels like a long-ago crisis. It's important to tell a story people can identify with, a story of ordinary people, the Mitlaufer, and not only of heroes, victims, or monsters. To raise awareness that, if history as such does not repeat itself, sociological and psychological mechanisms do, which push individuals and societies to make irrational choices by supporting regimes and leaders who are opposed to their interests, by becoming complicit in criminal ideas and actions. The most dangerous monster is not a megalomaniacal and violent leader, but us, the people who make him possible, who give him the power to lead. By our opportunism, by our conformity to all-powerful capitalism, which places money and consumption over education, intelligence, and culture, we are in danger of losing the democracy, peace, and freedom that so many of our predecessors have fought to preserve.”
― Géraldine Schwarz, Those Who Forget: My Family's Story in Nazi Europe – A Memoir, A History, A Warning