My mother was brought up in #communist #yugoslavia. The #uk saw this always as an acceptable #thirdway (#tonyblair’s own hadn’t been invented at the time).
The #us, meantime, had no such delusions.
At least, when I was a kid and being taken on summer holidays to what was always #croatia not #yugoslavia for my mum, that’s how I saw it — even when I was very young. You don’t know how bad it gets unless as a young man or woman you grow up checking your words even when lying on your own bed. You don’t know the evils of #communism until, like water, it seeps into everything you live.
It was, after all, the #british #foreignsecretary #douglashurd who argued non-#serbs should not be armed by the #allies because this would increase the total body-count. ‘Hardly seemed to matter that more non-#serbs would die than the aggressors in the matter, if such a policy had been followed. The important thing was to keep the total numbers down: liberty and freedom weren’t then ever fundamentals of #british #politics, now were they? Perhaps not now, either.
Ultimately, it took the influence of the #us to righten the sinking ship. Maybe #margaretthatcher, too. In this sense, she was always a bit of an outlier.
But not that bit of the #uk establishment the likes of #hurd represented. A direct lineage can be drawn, tbh, from that assertion by #hurd and #mi5’s future moral and technological capitulation to #china and #russia both, in collaboration with the #british #conservativeparty as it became under #borisjohnson’s influence, alongside his not-so-secretive #russian funders and #oligarch friends.
I remember four things of the #us from that time, etched into my youthful #english brain like a sizzling brand on the rump of a breed of the best pedigree animal.
1. The magazines #time and #newsweek, bought at the newspaper shop in the harbour of #velilošinj: a little late in the week; but full of good journalism that in their analytical power were sufficient beacons of hope in themselves.
2. The then #internationalheraldtribune which I would buy with my own pocket money. It was a magnificent compendium of different newspapers. I remember reading one of the many I read over the years in a sun-infused piazza in #venice one morning, with #barrymanilow’s #copacabana floating out through a first-floor window. My magdalene, for sure …
3. Then there was #life magazine: what fabulous photographic reportage of the most deepening for a young mind like mine. I would read it once a holiday on the yearly visit to my mother’s friend #nada. She lived in #krapina — a small town not too far from #zagreb — and had been an #english #teacher all her life. She had them piling up in the corner of a room in her house. I’d riffle through them so joyfully whenever we visited. I’d spend hours with their colourful images.
I also loved #nada so much because she smoked so heavily, and my mother hated smokers. But for some reasons she couldn’t hate #nada. And she’s still alive, after all that tobacco: this wondrous big-hearted, small-town intelligence she manifests even now in her 90s. I will never forget how she loved, equally fulsomely, #american #waysofseeing when they weren’t what #trump et al turned them into.
4. Finally, #apollo. I was there when it happened. I was there when 13, too. I was so impressionable; yes I was, it’s true. I was impressed as well, because what I learnt from #nasa and its people all those years — and first and foremost 1 and its profound human sacrifice — set me up for a life where everything, even today, just has to still be all to play for.
And that’s what all these thoughts have led me to: just that.
Never give up.
Never.
Never when they assert that this or that #communism is ok. Never.
Never when they claim numbers outweigh principles, to save our humanity. Never.
And never, even when your homeland says you’re a paranoid schizophrenic instead of a gifted thinker, in order that no one will ever see you as a gifted thinker, and your gifts will never find a space to surface. Anywhere.
Never. Ever. Give. In.
Because I’m NOT #galileo. Never have been. And sincerely, frankly, firmly don’t intend to become.
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