I just read that Stalin is regaining popularity in Russia.

My first thought was surprise at how stupid humans are. My second was at how clever some of those in power are. My third was how short our collective memories are. My fourth was how fragile the truth has become. My fifth was maybe there’s worse news out there to distract me. My sixth was maybe those idiots deserve it for fuck’s sake Stalin was horrific how on earth could you celebrate such a grotesque bastard. My seventh was it’s not their fault they only get the news they get. My eighth was I only get the news I get and that the State Anthem of the Russian Federation is fantastic. My ninth was to remember that taxi driver I had in London who thought that Nicolae Ceaușescu was the greatest Romanian leader of all time and that he had been grossly misunderstood by history (and presumably by all those orphans he kept in caves). My tenth was at least the Germans aren’t saying this about Hitler.

Yet.

For how long? I didn’t think the US would become what it’s become today. I couldn’t fathom a day where we’d have a president who openly antagonized half his own citizens, the Danes, or the Canadians. Who pisses off Canadians? At least Danes have noisy shoes. What did Canadians ever do? Wantonly reduce bacon fat?

I also didn’t see Brexit coming but being away from England for so long I thought I’d just forgotten how much they hated foreigners with all their bi-lingual nonsense and fervent sexual exploration. I certainly didn’t imagine I would live to see a day where Russians would rethink where Stalin sat on the Evil Despotic Leader scale. He did kill an awful lot of Soviets, 20 million or so (though a lot of them were Ukranian so perhaps a pattern is emerging).

Maybe Germany is next? I believe they’re a safe bet, but the world is bonkers at the moment. It would be terrifying if Germany started to change their collective minds about Hitler. Mostly because they do seem to be awfully good at working with a collective mind. They are just so darned good at getting things done. Whenever the Orange Shame Machine comes out for his daily troll, there is a part of me that hopes the Germans decide to do something about it, because I feel like they could just about fix anything. Maybe that’s just me thinking I want the apocalypse because I crave simplicity. I want a simple life. Build Shelter. Hunt Food. Avoid Cannibals.

I kind of miss the worrying about nukes. At least we were all screwed with nukes. Nukes were out to get us all. Sting wrote songs about it. We were all on the same team. Now I’m worried that we’re descending into anarchy and hate. It’s a purge. We’ve declared war on compassion. We want strong, angry men and aloof, cold-hearted women. We want to be the bad guys, just to see how it feels. This is a bad path. Our memory is short; once it’s too late to fix, we won’t remember how we got here.

Perhaps the best way to combat this tendency humans have to forget the atrocities of our past is to force ourselves to relive it. Right now, we make do with museums, books, and movies. We should up the ante.

All children should at some point between the ages of 12-16 visit a concentration camp. Not a replica. They should be flown to German, Poland, or Austria and experience the life changing experience of being there.
All politicians of any country that has engaged in any conflict in the last 100 years must also visit the concentration camp before taking office and must sit in silence for 5 minutes to hear their inside voice.
We must keep a replica Gulag, a replica hard labor prison, and a solitary confinement prison operable at all times so lawmakers can revisit them to see how inhumanely we used to treat prisoners in the past.
1. Note: the US currently practices this my keeping thousands of convicts in 23 hour a day solitary confinement in Super-Max prisons.
We must have a national, not for profit, paid for by tax dollars, press.

We can start, today, by sending every US politician to Auschwitz. In my heart, I want to believe that no human could walk into one of those gas chambers and walk out unmoved. Even Joseph Stalin.

Stalin's back?