I saw a very disturing photo on the Sydney Morning Herald site this Sunday - and I am not referring to Mr Borisson's Pentecostal appearance with yelling mouth and raised right arm...
The photo that worrried me was one of three sturdy policemen in what appeared to be battle gear, each with a hand on the pistol in his holster, patrolling some deserted northern Sydney street.
See more than two people together? That's an impending insurrection against state order, so we're only doing our duty LOL.
(The photo appears to have been withdrawn since, and I couldn't locate it again today.)
But it is no laughing matter! I was born in 1936 when Hitler's SA (Sturm Abteilung = assault unit) patrolled the streets of Germany to dispose of any sign of opposition to the Nazi rise to power. Anyone rounded up - if s/he was not clubbed to death immediately - was taken to a concentration camp 'for their own protection'...
I was nine when the war ended, and the Americans liberated my home town of Jena. That province was yielded to Stalin and became part of the horrible German Democratic Republic.
I was but 11 when I left home one night across a shooting border, with a student who lost his way and forced us to cross that very border TWICE due to some geographical quirk...
I went to live with my grandmother in the Eifel mountains near her bombed out Cologne, and a practical saint was she, still remembered with great affection.
From there I went to live in Brazil, in France, in Sweden, Portugal and Spain, among other places before I came to Australia in 1971. Since then I've lived more than half my life in Australia. Would I go back to Germany? Never!
But is fascism coming to haunt me here at home? The times they are a'changing...
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