Ich bin ein Auslander

We've all heard of Godwin's Law - it is a useful tool for the moderation of online conversations and communities. But Mike Godwin never intended his law or rule to be thrown up to shut down conversations that involve issues that require analogies with Hitler or Nazi Germany.

When a right-wing extremist political party rises in Greece using the following flag and emblem,

I am unafraid of making the necessary analogies. The close resemblance to the Nazi flag makes me physically recoil. One does not use a symbolism like that lightly.

The rise of the right in post-GFC Europe is a terrifying prospect to anyone familiar with the rise of the right in 1930s Europe.

In times like these, we need to remember the centrality of our humaness. We, as Sir Lloyd Geering said so eloquently last week, are all standing on the precipice together. Martin Gilbert's seminal account of those known as 'the righteous' - Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust - delineates story after story of those who risked their own lives to save others. Whenever I read this book, as I do every couple of years or so, I am confronted by the words Gilbert ends with: "Each of the nineteen thousand and more known stories - like each of the several hundred stories in these pages - must lead each of us to ask: 'Could I have acted like this, in the circumstances; would I have tried to, would I have wanted to?' One can only hope that the answer would have been - and still would be, if occasion rose - 'yes'"

Hence my musings. A thing that I hold dear is our responsiblity to bear witness. Once I assumed I would merely have to bear witness to a dark past; now I am compelled to bear witness to a dark present. In such circumstances, it is well to be reminded of the spectral presence of history; the ghosts that inhabit our nations, ideas, and identities.

In 1994, Pop Will Eat Itself released Ich bin ein Auslander as genocide was taking place in the former Yugoslavia. I always think of that song when fascism rears its Hydra-like head.

'We are all foreigners', they sing.

Martin Niemoller perhaps said it most famously. We've all heard it before, but it seems timely to revisit old words as other revisit old madnesses.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.