January 20, 2017 — Evil Thrives When Good People Do Nothing
There are times I reckon a disharmony,
A noise, not very loud,
A clashing so familiar at times,
Rarely recognizable.
You wake up, rub your eyes, and you see
In a painting between Breughel and Bosch,
Nobody listening to the sirens,
Reckoning “all clear” will come soon.
It smells like Kristallnacht.
In the calm before the storm, what is this?
Secretly, somebody’s leaving town.
Dignitaries keep rushing by, incognito.
Officially, they’re not part
Of those who, ready to strike,
Drift toward the boiling point,
And, shivering with jealousy,
Yell for revenge
During Kristallnacht.
But those scared of everything different,
Who, as is expected, go with the stream,
Those who see gays as leprosy,
Foreigners as criminals,
They need somebody to deceive them.
And there will be no cavalry to save you,
No Zorro to take care of it.
At best, he may piss a “Z” into the snow
And then, nonchalantly, pass out.
“So what? Kristallnacht!”
Kristallnaach is a song by the German rock group BAP whose lyrics are written in Kölsch, the dialect of Cologne, thus Kristallnaach instead of Kristallnacht. With eleven albums reaching the number one in the German record charts, BAP is one of the most successful rock acts in their home country.
The title refers, of course, to a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and German civilians. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The title Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.
The intention behind the song is to raise the question of whether Kristallnacht ever ended, or if it’s an ongoing process. Evil processes develop slowly and almost undetectable. We cannot change the past, but we can change the future, and we should do everything to prevent history from repeating one of its darkest chapters.
