Our Power.

A few years ago, it might have been five, it might have been fifteen, a handful of books written in Nazi Germany and in German were finally translated into English and made available to Americans. They were written by an alcoholic Jew, Hans Fallada, who somehow survived the war and the Third Reich, though he no longer had all his faculties intact. Who does?

I leapt at the book like a seal at a bucket of fish during feeding time at the zoo. And while I didn't love them, one of them "Every Man Dies Alone," tells a story that I believe might become increasing relevant as the darkness of autocracy and FLG (fucking the little guy) spreads over more and more of what we, without sarcasm, used to call the free world.

It's been maybe a decade since I read "Every Man," but, as I've said, the book made an impact and I remember these details. 

Otto and Elise Quangel are a working class couple in Berlin. They were not interested in politics, but after Elise Quangel
learned that her brother had fallen in France, she and her husband began committing acts of civili disobedience.

To authoritarians, the greatest act of civil disobedience is telling the truth. So Otto and Elise began writing leaflets on simple postcards that made people aware of realities they worked to avoid.

They wrote hundreds of them, leaving them in apartment stairwells and dropping them into mailboxes. They knew the law made this a capital crime but they didn't care. Eventually, Berlin's Chief of Police enlisted virtually his entire force to find the Quangels. They continued their work for well over a year until they were betrayed and arrested. 

They were tried by Nazi judge Roland Freisler and were executed in Plötzensee Prison. 

There's not a lot normal people like the people who read Ad Aged can do to combat the billionaire class and the forces of stark and mean totalitarianism. And this post could be an over-reaction to things that haven't happened and might never. Maybe, somehow, amerika will regain its moral bearing. Or at least the morals of bears.

But it pays to remember the power of what we can do. Us FLGs.

I'd wager that many of the 80,000 or so people who read Ad Aged every week type for a living. We can type what we see and help other people see it. As Orwell is said to have said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

The notes the Quangel's wrote and distributed were not eloquent. They were not sophisticated. They weren't erstwhile Thomas Paine's. They told the truth bluntly. They didn't adorn. 

Often, unadorned bluntness is effective.

...

This is a deep dark rabbit hell-hole I've wandered down today. And I might be wrong and melodramatically wrong. 

I hope so.

But let's remember, always, that we have power. We have the power of our brains, the power of our craft, the power of our hearts. Etiam si omnes, ego non. Even if all others, not I. We have the power of those words and that way of being.

Again. Maybe I'm over-reacting to things that might never happen. 

But Hans Fallada.

Oh, and Claude McKay, too.