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Bloomsbury, 1933, and each week my father & his pals were going to meetings & marches to try to do something, anything, about the rising anti-semitism in Germany. Everyone was fully aware of what was happening. Fully aware. This was six years before the outbreak of war.
The British youth organisations tried to appeal to Germany in "a spirit of friendship." They argued that political & social discrimination on racial grounds went against the long-cherished values of justice & liberty which defined Germany. They thought that decency would prevail.
Many found it very difficult to square the sweeping anti-Semitism & mass support for a blustering fool like Hitler with their own experiences of Germany and their German friends. They felt that normal, reasonable everyday folk would stem it somehow.
Six years later, in 1939, my dad was touring around Europe, before leaving to work for the British Council in Alexandria. One afternoon, he fell asleep on a train, missed his stop, & woke up accidentally in Munich.
In the carriage were a couple of loud, foul-spoken half-cut Nazi officers, drunkenly talking about horrible things - anti-semitic, racist bile. My father just snapped, he roared at them, told them off for their foul language, for their foul views.
He chucked them physically, violently out of his carriage and swiftly took a train back in the opposite direction, and onto Egypt. We still have the faded tickets & the dining carriage menu, in gothic script, from that journey.
Then the war, where he worked in Naval Intelligence, with SOE officers, and the Resistance. Not knowing what had happened to beloved Jewish friends in France, in Budapest, in Germany.
In 1946, he was posted to help Jewish repatriation in Holland. Many of his Jewish friends had died. That awful trajectory: from hopeful student protests in 1933, to desperately trying to help traumatised camp survivors in the late 40s.
We are on that same slippery trajectory today: greased by normalisation, collaboration & a false sense, which everyone always has, that this is as bad as it gets. This isn't as bad as it can get. It has already become so much worse in the past 2 years.
Having just watched @taitoush & @maasalan's footage of Bannon's grisly supporters doing Nazi salutes outside the Union, I'm sharing my father's story again.
30 years after the War, he did his DPhil at Oxford @StEdmundHall, in his 60s, imagining that the fascism he fought in his youth was long buried. I simply cannot imagine how he would feel to see Bannon being normalised in that way in his own city, own university.
Shame on you @OxfordUnion for allowing that man to speak - there is no moral imperative to hear his voice; there is a very strong one, however, for silencing him.
