The music critic Alex Ross in The New Yorker 5/12/16:
"Germany, on the other hand,
increasingly appears to be the strongest remaining bastion of liberal
democracy. With the United Kingdom mired in the aftermath of Brexit,
France facing a possible hard-right swerve, and Italy in disarray, the
country that long stood as a synonym for nationalist insanity has so far
resisted political and cultural regression. Tellingly, it has rejected
the libertarian code of the big Silicon Valley companies, with their
disdain for privacy, copyright, and limitations on hate speech. On the
day after the American election, which happened to be the seventy-eighth
anniversary of Kristallnacht, a neo-Nazi group posted a map of Jewish businesses in
Berlin, titled “Jews Among Us.” Facebook initially refused to take down
the post, but an outcry in the media and among lawmakers prompted its
deletion. Such episodes suggest that Germans are less likely to
acquiesce to the forces that have ravaged the American public sphere."
"The
defeat of the Freedom Party candidate in the Austrian Presidential
election is a hopeful sign: perhaps the German-speaking countries can
remind the rest of the world of the darkness of their former path.
Still, the far right is creeping forward in Germany, as it is all over
Europe. No coming political race will be as tensely watched as Angela
Merkel’s run next year for reëlection as Chancellor. The ultimate fear
isn’t of the second coming of Hitler: history never repeats itself so
obviously, and a sense of shame over the Nazi past remains pervasive in
all corners of German life. No, the fear is that the present
antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only
country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes."
No comments:
Post a Comment