On this date in 1945 Hitler was no more. The world and Europe could breathe again. The world was freed from a period of unspeakble evil.
Visionaries came together and began the construction of what we today call the EU.
Sixty-seven years later the Greeks are about to elect right-wing candidates with neo-Nazi slant to parliament. The French are talking about reintroducing border controls for EU citizens. It goes on and gets worse.
Extreme right and left wing politicians are finding common cause.
It all sounds similar to what happened with the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
The myth of the need for a 'strong man' is gainng ground.
And that idea is in the ascendant in the Catholic Church too.
Worrying. Scary.
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
ReplyDeleteThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming