Tonight marks the start of #YomHaShoah, a day dedicated to memorializing the 6 million Jews
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I said to my husband just the other day that there is so much urgent work to do in this world to save the planet; and yet there are people who truly love the violence of war, fantasize about war, plan for it, crave it.
The US Capitol insurrectionists tried to set one off, and it is too soon to tell if they will get their wish in what’s left of my lifetime. But Putin the Poisoner, in his lightless and shriveled soul, has the power to actually make it happen, and to try to wipe out a people in a 21st century genocide.
We Americans are duty-bound to get involved, to try and stop these monstrous events.
Yet all the while our Mother cries out…
I have a beautiful calligraphy made by my friend LKL some decades ago, in which the Hebrew letters of Hannah Senesh’s well-known poem form a candle. Crossing the flame is the blessing the True Judge. The translation as LK gave it to me is:
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame
Blessed art Thou HaShem our God, King of the Universe, the True Judge.
now and then in Europe before WWII. By the time my husband, who was born in 1940, was old enough to meet them, they were all dead. Apparently they were all among those who believed people were too civilized for the stories to be true. They had means, but none got out in time.
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that some people, shockingly, haven't advanced since then at all. We had stability since then in this very blessed nation because majorities had united to keep them and populist leaders who weaponize them in check.
Never forget.
I believe civilization has been advancing but not individual human nature, so that when bad leaders rise... that people capable of "it" are everywhere, but even in the 1990s I still believed it wouldn't, that our culture and traditions were too embedded.
Civilization may be advancing, but some people will always be capable of the worst, eagerly, if lead to it. At least we're learning a lot more about them that wasn't known before. WWII lead to the identification of authoritarian personalities, identified almost entirely as RW, looking at the countries where naziism surged.
But fairly recently LW authoritarians, far more like RW than not, have also been identified. That helps explain some of the destructive ugliness targeted at Democrats from LW authoritarians in 2016, and since, that was masquerading as about "progressivism." Same scary, anti-democratic behaviors, different claimed ideologies.
