A chilling single phrase, deep in Europe. At an anti immigration rally in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, the governor of a central Slovak region, looked over the crowd and said, "I wish you a nice, white day...We are here to save Slovakia." (The Age, June 22, 2015,p.15) On the same day, the NY Times breaks the connection of the American right to the Council of Conservative Citizens. I remember on one of the early pages of Ravensbruck we are told one of the first buses to pull through its gates carrying "unwanted mouths" was from the region of Slovakia. Detention camps, prison islands, walled in neighborhoods, militarized police forces, in the west, in the east, in the Middle East, in the South. Cleansings are in the air. Capitalisms without a heart embrace nationalisms without a conscience--We who refuse these dead ends must keep speaking out, must hold each other close, thanking the artists for their gifts of beauty, for on the very walls built to deny their humanity, the painter's hand, the writer's voice, the singer's ode calls forth the suns of human caring one for the other. I know hearts broke that afternoon in the the Bratislavian square, the hearts of the dissenters from national hatreds. The church in South Carolina, the streets of Baltimore, the detention camps on Nauru and in the Sinai Desert, the refugee camps along the crossing of the English Channel, the waters off Sicily, a surge away from death of the body and the spirit toward possibilities of life. Behind us are the Fascist armies of the 1940s--what is ahead?
No comments:
Post a Comment