"NEVER AGAIN!?"
There is a thing boys do, when they sit close enough together and talk seriously enough about what actually weighs on them - and it is TO SWEAR.
Not with a hand on a Bible, not with words they have learned from anyone, but with the kind of conviction that only arises at that age where life is still nothing but open possibility, and history is something you have read about, not something you have lived through.
In my childhood in the 70's and 80's in suburban Denmark we talked about Nazi Germany. Not about battles and dates and operational code names, we knew nothing really of that, but about the mystery itself - that a people, a civilized, cultivated, music-loving, philosophizing people, could be shaped into hating with a systematic precision that is still, to this day, hard to look at directly. We turned it in our minds and conversations, this way and that, and the conclusion was always the same. We could not fathom or understand this. And we would never let it happen.
That kind of conversation between us boys always ended at a particular place. Someone says it, and the others nod, and afterward the thing has been said and sworn.
If this Monster ever shows its face again - not as history, but as a living force in our own time - then we would not stand and watch. We would fight it. With words, if words were enough. With gunpowder and bullets from rooftops, if it came to that. With bayonets in snow and mud, if nothing else remained.
It was easy to say. And I think we meant it - in the way you mean something when it costs you nothing.
What we did not know, and what no one really taught us, was that hatred of the Jews did not begin in 1933. It was not a German invention, not a product of the Treaty of Versailles or the chaos of the Weimar Republic or a frustrated, angry painter with a comical mustache who acquired too much power too quickly. It was a phenomenon with roots thousands of years deep in history - not an event, but a regular structure. A story that could be put to sleep, lie dormant for decades, and then return in a new form, with new words, with a new picture of the enemy that looked like something entirely different... but contained exactly the same thing.
No one taught us this. And because no one taught us this, we did not understand the other thing either - that stories do not merely describe reality, they shape it. That Man does not see the world and then form a picture of it. He is given a picture, and then sees the world through it. That whoever controls the story controls what is visible and what is invisible. Who is victim and who is executioner. What is justice and what is violence.
We now stand somewhere - and I am speaking of a movement that has unfolded over thirty-five, perhaps fifty years, quiet, patient, consistent - where the same old hatred has returned. Not with swastikas and marching clearly fascistic columns. Not with the face we recognize and would have run toward, rifle in hand. It has returned wrapped in the very language we ourselves invented to describe freedom and justice. It has returned as "anti-colonialism," as "liberation struggle", as "solidarity with the oppressed", as "resistance to apartheid". It has returned with a face that our age has taught us to respect, and with an enemy that our age has taught us to mistrust.
And this is the point where every man who was once a boy like me, and who swore what we swore, must ask himself the question that is uncomfortable but undeniable to ask of oneself.
Did I mean what I said back then - or did I say it because it was easy to say, because the hatred was already buried, already defeated, already a safe and closed chapter in a closed book?
Is my resistance to evil conditioned on its wearing the right face, the right banner, the right slogan? And how is it that I, who swore I would hold the forward line, now find myself in a position where I am, in real terms, standing shoulder to shoulder with the very view I said as a boy I would fight by every means available?
That question cannot be answered from the outside. It is a question one can only ask oneself, and only answer honestly, if one is willing to look at what has actually happened to one's own understanding across the decades that have passed. Not who is to blame. Not at first at least. But what has taken place.
Because this did not happen through crude manipulation. It happened through fine manipulation - through the patient, decades-long reshaping of the language we think in, the categories we use to sort the world, the stories we tell ourselves about who is fighting and who is oppressing.
We thought we were fighting for the weak. We thought we stood on the side of the oppressed. We followed the uniquely Christian moral intuition, that the small must be defended against the large, that the displaced have a claim on our attention, that the one being hunted cannot be left to stand alone.
And then it happened, slowly, over decades, that the picture inside the frame was switched out, while the frame itself remained in place.
The people who for two thousand years had been the hunted, the displaced, the ones who had nowhere to go, were gradually rewritten into being the opposite. The people who survived the gas chambers and built a state in order to finally have somewhere to go were called colonizers. The people who returned to the land where they had their roots long before Europe even had a name were called occupiers. The people who throughout the modern era have delivered a disproportionate share of science, art, medicine, and philosophy to Western civilization were called oppressors.
The language was inverted.
The categories were exchanged.
The moral intuition was coupled to its opposite purpose.
And the narrative became so dense, so insistent, so pervasive across media, universities, cultural life, and diplomacy, that it became the self-evident way of seeing. It no longer required arguments. It required only that you be "a decent" human being.
This is how the fine inversion works now.
It does not appeal to our hatred.
It appeals to our "decency".
And this is where what we now call "liberation" begins to carry the same DNA as the thing we once swore to fight. Because when you take seriously the language being shouted in the streets, when you read what is actually being said and chanted and pasted onto lampposts in Western capitals, the core is the same.
"From the river to the sea" means something specific.
"Globalize the intifada" means something specific.
The "demand that Jews leave universities, neighborhoods, entire countries", means something specific.
And it is the same "something" that once required yellow stars and shuttered shops and trains heading east.
Read that sentence again.
The difference is not the demand.
The difference is the costume.
And at the same time, and this is the full confusion of the moment, people in our part of the world march for causes that cannot - in any way, shape or form - be held in the same sentence without falling apart.
Students occupy universities in support of islamic movements that would shut down the universities the moment they came to power.
Gays and trans carry rainbow flags in coalition with organizations that would throw them from a rooftop in a heartbeat.
Women shout for liberation in alliance with systems that under sharia do not give them the right to something as basic as deciding what covers their own hair og bodies.
And no one sees the contradiction, because the narrative has placed coherence on pause, and the only question that survives is who carries "the right victim banner".
We live in the FULL INVERSION now.
We thought we were fighting for the weak. We became instruments of the strongest, oldest, and most patient hatred civilization has ever known.
A story does not have to lie about facts in order to invert reality.
It only has to move the light.
Let's move it back!
❤️🔥🪽
