Berlin : 1935
It’s in the eyes of the people that you see it. They stare, they flicker and they look away. They are always on alert; they go from face to face without ever looking into the eyes looking back. I do it; they do it, always looking for a threat always feeling the danger. Whenever you move in public people are looking over there shoulders, you can feel it, the questions. Where is he from? Why is he dark? Is he a threat? What do his parents do? Why is he here?
The insecurity and the stigmatisation has been growing these last couple of years. In the beginning with sporadically violence, then more and more, until it became legitimate. Using fear as a horse pulling their cart, The Party began to rise.
In the beginning no one paid attention to them, The Party. They were seen as a joke, as a minority, people that couldn’t be taken seriously. Their members where the kind that would hang out in places where smoke hung from the ceiling, where beer was served and traditional out of date music played. They would be the kind that when you met them, you would ignore them, smile and say that they were crazy.
But slowly people started listening to them. “The country is in danger”, “the national culture is being destroyed”, “this foreign religion is taking over the world”, ”one day the country as we know it will cease to exist”. People started listening to them, the newspapers started bringing stories on how crime was rising and The Party responded. They had the answer. The problem was the people that were different. It was the this group that caused the corruption of society, the degeneration of the nations values and that was the threat to Christian faith.
The leaders of the country started to get scared of their power and started to agree with them, started stating that we should be put in special camps away from everything. The Party only grew stronger, became only more popular.
The Party claimed that it represented the common people, that they were the voice against the elite, that their movement was democratic, that they were the only true defenders of the nation and of our country’s culture. One day the Party was elected to parliament and after the following election The Party controlled that government and now had the final say.
I could have cared less, but one day the Party put me on a list saying I was different, that I was not like the others. I have lived here almost all my life, suddenly I was different, I was a threat?
The party has written that we on the list are a cancer, that we are too many, that the insecurity is our fault, that we are the biggest threat to their way of life, that we will take everything.
They won’t let some of us build buildings of worship and some of the most extreme members of “their” society, destroy cemeteries. Although the action is condemned, the feeling of hate continues to rise. They redicule how some of us dress, our culture and our beliefs.
They say that our women are oppressed and that our men are incompetent and don’t do anything else then gather money and leach off the government.
So the government with the support of The Party targets our businesses, create special laws to keep us from bringing more of our kind to the country and the government decide were we should live.
The newspapers have started to bring caricatures of us and of the god that some of us worship. They do this under the protection of freedom of speech. It’s true they have that right and they should have it, but I’m not sure they understand the message that its sends throughout the community. Those who agree with the drawings hate us even more and those who are ridiculed feel even more marginalised, even more hated.
They claim that we don’t want to be a part of their society and that we seek to undermine it and take control of the democratic institutions and enrich ourselves.
The result is increased focus on us. Every time one of us commits a crime you hear about it in the media. When one of our leaders is caught in a scandal The Party uses it to spread more fear and more hate. So the insecurity grows. We fear them and they fear us.
The growing hate, the quivering insecurity, the focus on differences instead of what makes us the human race, is the blanket that covers the inability of the general population and its leaders to see history repeating itself.
It’s only ironic that in order to leave this reality behind me for a while, I travel to the city where what we are ignoring and forgetting met its end for the first time. Hopefully people will wake up before the atrocities of yesterday, become the reality of today.
I better catch that flight to Berlin at 19.35.
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