Neutrality is dead
Emma Brockes
... What has changed .. is what it means to be apolitical. To say “I don’t care about news” – when so-called American freedoms are, if not under genuine attack then at least threatened symbolically by the highest power in the land – is not to be neutral but way over to the right, in the same way that Trump’s “neutrality” on fascists is nothing of the sort ...
.. In the US, apoliticism feels like a .. decisive aesthetic, a rejection of government in the libertarian style that is, of course, itself deeply political and yet even now – especially now – has a vast and dishonest appeal. It is Trump’s greatest sleight of hand: vote for me, I don’t care about politics.
It was a good week to sit through four-and-a-half hours of The Memory of Justice, the .. Ophüls documentary made in the 1970s ...
There are some extraordinary accounts from ordinary Germans, including the inhabitants of a small town recalling a GP who served them after the war. Yes, they said, they remembered Dr Herta Oberheuser ... Didn’t it bother them, asked Ophüls, that she had performed experiments on prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp and served five years for crimes against humanity. Oh, that, they said: yes. And most looked away with a shrug ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/25/donald-trump-president-apolitical