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I'm glad that my parents are dead. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-20

And it is indeed the aforementioned entity that prompts me to put finger to keyboard. Why am I glad my parents are dead? Certainly not due to malice; rather due to love and admiration. They were but teenage refugees when forced to flee Vienna (independent of each other, not knowing of the other's existence at the time). My father arrived in Britain with a grand total of sixpence in assets; my mother (and her mother) even wealthier (/s, though surely unnecessary), formerly having a tie shop around the corner from the opera house, before nice gentlemen requested the establishment's keys.

Their paths continued to be separate. My father ended up in London, doing his bit for the war effort by working with the furnaces in the Royal Mint. Double shifts ("illegal"), which no other workers could manage due to the stultifying conditions. The management desperately protested, to no avail, his eventual arrest and internment on the Isle of Man during the German-speaking roundup. (FDR did similar with America's Japanese, of course.) It was there he met and befriended other dangerous subversives like Norbert Brainin, leader of the Amadeus String Quartet, and Gerard Hoffnung, polymath musician/cartoonist/raconteur.

My mother and grandmother meanwhile were in Kent, becoming servants (cook, maid) to Lord and Lady Muck (name withheld, mainly because I've forgotten it).

There are a multitude of anecdotes I could relate from both branches of my family, but this stream of consciousness is not the place for them. But I will say this: whenever you see a film about the pre-war period, there will be a mood displayed by all the actors that war is coming and is inevitable. This is hogwash. The ignorance of what is happening and what is to come was widespread and was coupled with more than wishful-thinking denial. Which brings me to the present day...

I have rarely tried to be analytical in my infrequent comments on topics political here. (W. S. Gilbert would have loved that sentence.) When I have, I received comments that I didn't know what I was talking about, that historically such things were never done, that I was being a Debbie Downer, etc. (I paraphrase.) Such comments, other than the occasional ad hominem attack, may well have been valid. But I contend that even on DKos, then and now, too many people continue to underestimate the gravity of the current situation. I still read comments referring to the elections in 2028, and even 2026, as the chance to rectify the catastrophe. How touching, there will be elections! Am I overconcerned that these events will be cancelled? Possibly. But the historical parallels suggest otherwise.

I am hardly the first to suggest this. Sinclair Lewis, for one, wrote of this in 1935 (from memory). And there are so many other learned scribes that have written about this that my contribution will probably just waste upon the desert air. But I write this as an apology to my parents, who devoted a large part of their largely ruined lives to ensure I wouldn't have to experience the effects of fascism in my lifetime. I'm glad they are not alive to witness and re-experience the present era.

This is my first - and possibly last - diary here on DKos. Be gentle with me. I will try to respond to comments, but if I overlook some, it will be due to incompetence, not indifference. I am not putting more than one hashtag on, though I won't stop others from so doing, if that is possible; the thought of even tagging The Grim Raper repulses me...

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