I’m thinking of him a lot lately. He’s my German grandfather and he lived through WWII. He was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. We spoke a lot about what it was like to live during those times.
I’d like to tell you about him and why I hope you won’t end up like him.

I’ve told this story before but it becomes more and more relevant as the US enters its final dead-sprint towards a full-on fascist regime...

My grandfather was not a fascist. He grew up indoctrinated from an early age on, just as many people living in Germany at the time.

He was part of the Hitler Youth, because everybody was. Hitler ran on the platform of patriotism, fear and false promises of a better future for the everyday worker. And people believed it, because that’s how indoctrination works.

When I was old enough, my grandfather and I used to sit on the stairs in my childhood home to tell stories and I asked him about what it was like living through it because we learned about it in school early.
I asked him why he didn’t do things to stop it.

I remember the moment vividly because it was the first time I’d seen him cry. His granddaughter just asked him a devastating question:

Why did you not do more to prevent the atrocities that our country committed and that would be a festering wound forever to all of us?

There are many answers as to why he didn’t do more. Propaganda. Indoctrination from an early age. Being surrounded by misinformation. Fear. Prosecution under a dictatorship.

No matter the reasons, legitimate or not, I will never forget the deep regret in his soul.

It’s hard to tell in retrospect how much choice he really had during the time he lived through Hitler’s regime and being indoctrinated early. I knew him. He would never hurt a fly. He was the voice of reason for progressive political discussion in our family.

But no matter his progressive values, it was too late for him to do something about the atrocities our country would commit during his lifetime.

Nothing can take that back. He was complicit. Even though he was not a Nazi.

This involuntary complicity is what could happen to us.

When my grandfather was born, it was too late for him to have a choice in where the country was headed. Other people with ignorant perspectives had made that choice for him and for generations of people who would feel the pain of it for decades to come.

This is where we are on the timeline. On the brink of something that could shatter all resemblance of democracy and plunge thousands upon thousands of people into life-threatening circumstances, inflicted by a fascist and authoritarian regime.

The vast majority of Germans who lived under Hitler did not know of the atrocities that were committed by their country until after the war. The guilt stays regardless, stuck to them and to generations to come.

Here, we still have a chance to choose differently.

You can not ignore the signs. You can not ignore the similarities. All authoritarian, fascist regimes share similar timelines and this one is no different.

My grandfather did not have many tools to choose differently or be informed - but we do. We can learn from history.

I think about my grandfather every day these days. I think about the regret in his soul and about how I thought often about what I would have done.

Now I am here. And you are. And we need to choose what we would sacrifice to save the people around us for generations to come.

I love all of you. And if I have one wish for us, it is that we fight as hard as we wished people before my grandfather should’ve fought to save millions of lives, to save the world from a devastating war and the pain it would inflict for generations to come.

Fascism will rip your country apart beyond recognition. It will creep deep into its bones and make its ideologies inescapable forever. The blood on your hands won’t ever wash off. The pain it causes will echo through generations. And it will lie to you every step of the way.

I deeply wish for you, dear Americans, and everyone around you, that you can choose differently. That you won’t ignore the signs. That you understand how alarming the situation is we are in right now.

I’ll do everything I can now.
For my grandfather, for RGB and for all of us.