this is profoundly true, unfortunately.

watching the news about the arbeit macht frei sign theft, they showed the camp, and mentioned the decision to leave it intact rather than destroy it.

the sight moved me deeply, there were a few trees, and this death factory. the horror of what humans reduced themselves to hit me so hard, it was nauseating, dizzying.

that wasn't so long ago, yet fascism polishes its boots here in europe under our noses, (never mind the USA), seeing brutality and unpunished collusion between industry, government and criminality, right now, and then it hit me that i kept waiting for israel to quit punishing the palestinians for what the germans had done, instead of paying more attention to the everyday racism that is semi-hidden in many outwardly 'normal' people.

indeed i suspect the sign was stolen for its collector value, some sick, evil person will celebrate his unholy treasure.

seeing the mussolini memorabilia on sale in the antique shops, his sayings lovingly repainted freshly on village buildings, then his newly minted portraits in shops, i wonder why the holocaust was horrible enough for some people, so afraid of modernity, change, freedom, creativity, just soullessly addicted to brute power.

we can't judge israel without first facing down and denouncing fascism right here.

my local gas station attendant, a nice guy, (to me), had a fucking swastika up in his office, next to a pic of berlusconi!

what do you do? collar him and try to 'educate' him?

i chose to go to other gas stations, as if that helps!

i get the feeling that liberality could flourish only in boom years, and i fear the return of 'la miseria'  as government cheats so much its people return to the poverty and want they lived with before the sixties, the beginning of the vespa and fiat 600 years, when even the poorer had some hope of bettering their lives with some consumer novelty.

now we contemplate the peopling of europe with immigrants to pay our pensions, which would be less necessary if we treated these poorer countries right and hadn't caused so much need for immigration in the first place.

and this incites more racism and wastes more nergy that could be used for really dealing with our problems at home, spending the country's wealth more fairly.

this is the antidote to fascism, imo.

when a country's wealth is drained off to foreign corporations and international criminals, how can it pick itself up out of the mud, no matter how rich or influential it was in the past?

italy has not really _processed _ its deal with the devil it made, and its role in the causative chain that ended up with auschwitz, (the closest it got was benigni's 'la vita e bella').

that's why the EU is so important, it's our local UN, and by grouping together these old battle-scarred nations we can set a global example of how we believe the whole world could be.

with all its flaws, obvious and otherwise, its aspirations are more enlightened than anywhere, though i am also in admiration of many aspects of latin american socialism.

my dream is that in 20 years they'll 'meet in the middle', but we'll have to see.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty