Look to Heaven, Lány

Look to Heaven, Lány

by Marco M. Pardi

Note: In the Hungarian language lány is the affectionate term for daughter.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Teilhard de Chardin

All comments are welcome and will receive a response.

I was a couple of months short of 28 years old when my first and only child, a daughter, was born. By that time I had been some places, and seen some things. As I’ve written previously, around the time she was going on 3 years old I spent a few months taking her through eleven countries, most prominently the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Italy. In those areas she met some relatives for the first time. I have also written about our stop in Vienna where I forgot her doll on the Budapest bound train.

Before and during WWII my paternal uncle was Mussolini’s Cultural Ambassador to Hungary, living with his wife in the Italian Embassy in Budapest. My eldest cousin was born there when Soviet troops overran the Embassy, taking my uncle captive and beating him almost to death. My nine months pregnant aunt escaped out a window, fracturing her pelvis, and delivering on the floor of an Embassy car as they sped away. As the years passed I spent many hours with my uncle and his family in Roma or Positano but never asked him how he personally felt about Fascism, whether he was a believer or simply a covert survivor.

In the late 1940’s, after my little family unit and I escaped the ongoing internal conflict in Italy and got to the U.S. and my grandparents’ home I was left to peruse my grandfather’s large library for anything to help me learn English. As the time passed before going to boarding school (Fall 1948) I found books on the war. Most had pictures, with fairly simple captions beneath. The pictures, though, were not simple.

The armaments were very interesting, and forgettable. The reprinted captured German photographs of people were unforgettable. In their pride, they documented even their war crimes. There was one picture most Americans are familiar with: A German soldier, apparently too young to have a wife and child himself, was a few feet behind a young Jewish woman clutching her child to her breast and trying to escape. His rifle, a 7mm Mauser, was a couple of feet from her back. Having used that rifle myself, I expect the bullet passed through the mother and likely through the child. I wonder now if the Germans had a phrase for “Two-Fer”. Another picture was, to a parent, even more heart breaking. In a large pit outside Budapest a mass of Jewish women and children, all naked, stood surrounded by soldiers atop the edges of the pit. As some soldiers raised and aimed their rifles a woman in the front center of the picture held her young daughter in one arm and with the other pointed to the sky. The caption, though unverifiable, read: Arrow Cross (the predominant Hungarian Fascist party) soldiers jeer as a Jewish mother points the way to heaven.

Madeleine Albright has written a book I feel all Americans should read: Fascism: a warning. In it she describes the socio-economic conditions which gave rise to Mussolini, and eventually to Hitler. I’ve studied Mussolini for years, especially due to the effect he had on my family and my own life. Albright does a masterful job of accurately describing the conditions, Mussolini’s characteristics, and his actions. Though she does not initially hammer the point, she could as easily have been describing Trump, a fact I noticed from the onset of his campaign to win a select portion of American voters. In fact, I find myself wondering if I’ve been wrong about reincarnation all these years. Trump’s mannerisms and behaviors are Mussolini personified – except that Mussolini actually did some good things for Italy (He didn’t make the trains run on time, despite the myth). My acquaintances who are true believers in reincarnation might note: Mussolini was executed on April 28, 1945; Trump was born on June 14, 1946. Time enough to regroup and seize power in the most powerful nation on Earth? I’ll leave that to my true believer friends. But I will not leave other questions unanswered. In particular, Could it happen here? A couple of years ago the question would have been deemed absurd. But since then we have seen the markedly Fascist tactics of demonizing an entire religion (Islam); demonizing an entire ethnic group (Hispanics); rejecting science in all its forms; restructuring taxes to benefit the sycophantic Over Class; destroying public education in favor of thinly disguised Party Line training; and, declaring the Free Press to be the “enemies of the people”. Just yesterday the President forcefully told us to not believe what we see, referring to the mainstream media. Instead, we should get our information from FOX News, which I call the Voice of the Fourth Reich.

Still think it can’t happen here? Lots of other people thought that, too. Of course, they’re dead now.

Whatever label we put to political ideology, I cannot imagine a parent watching the past few months of coverage of the border crossing “Zero Tolerance” policy playing out daily. In all the crossings I did with my daughter I like to think that any border guard would have had to know how to split an atom because if anyone attempted to take my daughter from me I would have fought down to the last atom in my body. But the guards at our southern border used a tactic which should sound familiar: They told the parents their children were being taken “for a bath”. Sound familiar? Need I prompt with the word shower? No, they were not taken and gassed. And instead of cattle cars and trucks they were apparently loaded on airplanes for distribution throughout the United States, with absolutely NO tracking method to connect which child with which detained family member. How many infants and toddlers even know their familial last names? Recently a 1 year old was presented in an immigration hearing and expected to represent himself.

As of this writing 711 children are still separated from their families, many of which have already been deported back to their home countries without their children. There is no method for reuniting these children, now orphaned in a strange and hostile land. Is the confiscation of one’s children not cruel and unusual punishment for crossing a border, or do these concepts no longer apply to a population that has been demonized as “murderers, rapists, and drug dealers.” Of course, the Boogie Man du jour is MS-13, the violent gang. But no mention is made of the fact that MS-13 originated in the United States and, under the Reagan/Bush administrations fed members into the Death Squads of El Salvador where they are now out of work and roaming the streets.

Ah, but we are now being told many parents willingly surrendered their children before being deported, supposedly for a “better life”. As counter to this, I worked for two years on an IRB ensuring that Informed Consent forms were culturally and educationally appropriate to the people signing onto medical trials. I would dearly love to see/hear what these families were told as they were loaded onto transports without their children.

I’m not out, as some, to paint the entire Border Patrol and Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) as Fascist villains. Some years ago these agencies had need of some of my talents and flew me to locations on the border to put them to use. I met many fine individuals. But, don’t we all? How many times have we heard someone say, This isn’t my choice, I’m just doing my job? I wonder if the workers at the American slave ports said or felt the same as they split families and auctioned them as parcels of freight to the highest bidders. Just doing my job, just following orders didn’t exonerate people at Nuremberg. It shouldn’t do so at Laredo.