The New Old World - Born Into This: Born Out Of That

Europe's reality, beyond it's stab at cultural post-modernism, is mighty scary to contemplate - they still keep hand grenades at home:

Europeans grew tired of watching overgrown boys marching around pretending to be soldiers, the silly uniforms, the incessant demands by dictatorial leaders that they reshape their lives and devote themselves – at all costs, at the cost ultimately of their childrens’ lives – to the nation. Today those memories are still so deeply etched into the continent’s culture that it is hard to make them disappear. Fascism remains close to us. Yet austerity does pose a threat to democracy today and so does the ethical blindness of too many politicians. New demagogues are emerging, promising endless false dawns and new orders, playing on undercurrents of racial prejudice that have never really disappeared. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, it has been said. That does not seem quite right to me. The greater likelihood is not mere repetition. It is that by lacking any historical perspective on our own times, we no longer remember what it is we should value and what we should fight to protect.

In other words, as we become more like them,...