Negative? I'd rather say it's part of the stuff that's normalizing totalitarianism by being too polite about it. > Truly, I live in dark times! / An artless wo

Negative? I'd rather say it's part of the stuff that's normalizing totalitarianism by being too polite about it. > Truly, I live in dark times! / An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead / Points to insensitivity. / He who laughs / Has not yet received / The terrible news. > What times are these, in which / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing! / And he who walks quietly across the street, / Passes out of the reach of his friends / Who are in danger? -- Berthold Brecht, ‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake’ > Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. -- George Orwell, "Why I Write" Why would you on the other hand not pay attention? Because you or nobody you love has been put in a camp, for example? Because you're with those who ignore the millions of people who did resist totalitarianism and were murdered, as if those never existed, while giving the time of the day to those who build on their corpses and call it culture or the nature of the people? Imagine an alternate universe where the Nazis hadn't "won the war", but never started one, and had "just" done what they did "internally", while militarizing without attacking. Few would have even raised a brow, nobody would have done anything, and after 20-30 years of that, nobody even capable of forming an opinion would be left alive in Germany. And then people would just say "awww, that's just how they are, that's how they like to treat each other". In that alternative universe, there would also be people for whom that would not be enough, who wouldn't stop with acceptance of totalitarianism, who don't want uglyness to not be called uglyness anymore, they want to see it considered beauty. In short, you're being among the worst in a reality where hardly anyone is good.