Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist.
This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.
The damage this causes across generations (even if the regime is short lived!) is so hard to grasp if you haven’t lived with it. It touches every aspect of life. It makes trust impossible, and without some level of trust and a belief in the possibility of justice, *nothing in society works.*
Yup. In the UK, poppy jingoism exploded when the last Great War veterans died, and now we're seeing what happens as we lose the last WWII vets and Holocaust survivors. There's a paradigm shift when an event passes from living memory.
