World War II (1939-45)

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      The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Rage and Grief

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      Käthe Kollwitz’s fierce belief in social justice and her indelible images made her one of Germany’s best printmakers. A dazzling MoMA show reminds us why.An artist friend texted me recently, asking how to contend with the anger and sadness she was feeling about the state of the world. I can think of no better balm than the Museum of Modern Art’s Käthe Kollwitz retrospective, the first ever at a New York museum that encompasses this German artist’s groundbreaking prints and drawings and her sculpture, posters and magazine illustrations.Once you’re there, go straight over to her series “Peasants’ War,” which she started in 1902, to find her own outlet for her burning desire for radical change. She was about 10 years into her already successful career when she made it, a remarkable feat given that she was a woman in a country that still didn’t allow women into art schools. In 1898, she had been nominated for a gold medal at the Greater Berlin Art Exhibition for her first major print cycle, “A Weavers’ Revolt” (1893-97), but did not receive it: The Prussian minister of culture thought her subject matter — a fictional uprising based on a contemporary play about an 1844 revolt, a watershed moment for many German socialists — too politically subversive, while Kaiser Wilhelm II himself objected to the idea of a woman garnering top prize.Born in 1867, Kollwitz was an avowed socialist whose career stretched from the 1890s to the 1940s, a period of tremendous social upheaval and two world wars. Though she was a member of the progressive Berlin Secession art movement, she kept a distance from the elite art world, living in a working-class Berlin neighborhood with her husband, a doctor who tended to the poor.Display of posters by Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA, left to right: “Vienna is dying! Save its Children,” 1920; “The Survivors,” 1923; “Help Russia,” 1921; “Never Again War!” from 1924; poster to legalize abortion, from 1923; “Release our Prisoners,” 1919. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWith “Peasants’ War,” Kollwitz again turned to the past to share her outrage at the injustices around her “which are never ending and as large as a mountain.” The seven-part series deals with the historical revolt that swept German-speaking countries of Central Europe in the 16th century, not as a transcription of historical events but as an imagined narrative showing the exploitation of farm workers (men treated no better than animals yoked to a plow, a woman in the aftermath of a rape by a landowner), their explosive response, and the chilling repression that followed. It is a story worthy of Charles Dickens or Émile Zola, told from a woman’s point of view.The largest print, “Charge,” focuses on the figure of “Black Anna,” reputed to be a catalyst of the violence, urging a mob of peasants to action. She is no “Liberty Leading the People.” Unlike Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 image of a beautiful and bare-breasted personification of French freedom, Kollwitz’s crone is shown from the back, her sinewy arms raised and hands clenched urgently, practically launching herself into the crowd.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alderney Is a Small Island With a Dark History

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      Look closely at this tiny, idyllic island: Victorian-era fortifications dot the windswept coastline. A concrete anti-tank wall disrupts a quiet beach. Overgrown greenery covers bunkers and tunnels.This is Alderney, where the 2,100 people who call the island home do not lock their cars. Where the streets are quiet and the pubs (nine of them) are lively, and the roads don’t have traffic lights. And where reminders of World War II hide behind most corners.This fiercely independent island in the English Channel, roughly 10 miles from France, is at the center of a debate about how to remember Nazi atrocities and live mindfully among sites where misdeeds occurred — and how to reckon with the fact that Britain never held anyone responsible for running an SS concentration camp on its soil.Alderney residents today enjoy a deep love for the place, a yearning for a peaceful and quiet lifestyle and the added benefit of low taxes.Cristina Baussan for The New York TimesAlderney, a British Crown Dependency and part of the Channel Islands, has an independent president and a 10-member parliament. (King Charles III is its monarch, but Rishi Sunak not its prime minister.) The Channel Islands were the only British territory occupied by the Germans during World War II, and Alderney was the only one evacuated by the British government. Shortly after, as Germany occupied parts of Northwest Europe in June 1940, German troops moved to the island.The Nazis built four camps on Alderney. Helgoland and Borkum were labor camps run by the Nazis’ civil and military engineering arm. The SS, the organization that was largely in charge of the Nazis’ barbaric extermination campaign, took control of two others, Norderney and Sylt, in 1943.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Investigators Say Chicago’s Art Institute Is Holding onto ‘Looted Art’

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      The museum asserts it is the rightful owner of an Egon Schiele drawing that New York investigators say in a new court filing was stolen by the Nazis.New York investigators trying to seize a drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago filed an exacting 160-page motion on Friday accusing the museum of blatantly ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been looted by the Nazis on the eve of World War II.While the court papers, filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, did not accuse the museum of being party to the fraud, they said it had applied “willful blindness” to what the investigators said were clear indications that it was acquiring stolen property.The drawing, “Russian War Prisoner,” by Egon Schiele was purchased by the Art Institute in 1966. It is one of a number of works by Schiele that ended up in the hands of museums and collectors and have been sought by the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret entertainer from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. The institute paid about $5,500 for the drawing, which has been valued by investigators today at $1.25 million.In a statement, the Art Institute said it had good title to the work by Schiele, an Austrian Expressionist, and would fight the district attorney’s attempt to seize it.“We have done extensive research on the provenance history of this work and are confident in our lawful ownership of the piece,” the museum said, adding: “If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”But the investigators said in their court filing that the institute’s “failure” to vet the work properly “undercuts any arguments that AIC were truly good-faith purchasers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Italian Holocaust Survivor Asks if She Has ‘Lived in Vain’

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      Liliana Segre, who has become Italy’s conscience on the Holocaust, says she is pessimistic in the face of rising anti-Semitism.For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to recount her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan’s train station to the death camps of Auschwitz. Her plain-spoken testimony about gas chambers, tattooed arms, casual atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers not to remember.Now she is wondering if it was all wasted breath.“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation? For whom? Why?” Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a steel-cage memory and an official status as a Senator for Life said last week in her handsome Milan apartment, where she sat next to a police escort. She wondered, not for the first time these days, if “I’ve lived in vain.”Even as Ms. Segre accepted another honorary degree on Saturday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, rising anti-Semitism and what she considers a general climate of hate have put her in a pessimistic mood.The Hamas-led massacre of Jews in Israel on Oct. 7 revolted her, she said, and Israel’s reaction in Gaza left her with a “desperate” feeling, as did what she considered the exploitation of the conflict to spread anti-Semitism under the guise of a pro-Palestinian cause. In Europe, Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine led her to ask about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “What is this, another Hitler?” while the rise of the far right in France and Germany make her queasy.In Italy, Ms. Segre is dismayed by a recent mass gathering of right-wing extremists giving the Fascist salute, by nasty language against migrants whose plight reminds her of her own and by a right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni, who has condemned Italy’s racial laws and the horrors of the Holocaust, but who herself was reared in parties born from the ashes of Fascism.Musing on a cyclical view of history, Ms. Segre wondered if she had lived so long as to see history repeat itself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Poland’s Ruling Party Uses Germany as Boogeyman as Tough Election Looms

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      Poland’s Law and Justice party is using Germany as a punching bag to rally its base for the election on Oct. 15, a tactic driven by the country’s de facto leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.Amid rising alarm this summer in Poland and the Baltic States over a possible military attack from the east, the Polish Embassy in Lithuania requested an urgent meeting with the head of Germany’s diplomatic mission. Polish embassies in other European countries made similar requests.What the Polish diplomats wanted to talk about, however, was not the risk of an assault from Belarus or the war in Ukraine, but a less pressing matter: a demand that Germany cough up more than a trillion dollars to cover damage done by the Nazis during World War II.The issue of reparations, which was settled decades ago, is a personal fixation of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of the Polish governing party, Law and Justice. Last weekend, rallying supporters ahead of a critical general election next Sunday, he told a party convention that it was not only about the money, but also a “matter of dignity.”Demands that Germany pay Poland $1.3 trillion — the exact figure keeps changing — first surfaced several years ago, but they have flared with new intensity as Mr. Kaczynski looks for ways to secure his party a third consecutive term. Attacking Germany and its supposed hold on the leader of the opposition has become his main tool for mobilizing voters.Recent opinion polls put Law and Justice slightly ahead of its main rival, Civic Coalition, which groups center-right forces and progressives upset by the current government’s hard lines against abortion and minority rights. But neither of the front-runners is likely to win enough seats in Parliament to form a government on its own. Which side can do that will depend on the performances of smaller parties, including a far-right outfit opposed to helping Ukraine and a leftist coalition.Posters demanding that Germany pay reparations to Poland for crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II are seen in 2021 in Warsaw.Czarek Sokolowski/Associated PressLaw and Justice’s use of Germany to rile up its nationalist base in a tight race reflects the extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence of Mr. Kaczynski, 74. He dictates Polish policy on most matters of state even though he holds only one government post, deputy prime minister, a position that he assumed in June and that carries little formal power.“He always had an obsession about Germany,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, who served as defense minister in an earlier government headed by Mr. Kaczynski. “There is no chance of getting any money, but this is a good way to excite voters,” he added.Mr. Kaczynski “is a virtuoso at playing on fear, on what is worst in us as a nation,” Mr. Sikorski said.The influence of Mr. Kaczynski is so great that “he is No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 in this country,” said Bartlomiej Rajchert, a political strategist who worked closely with Law and Justice on its successful 2005 presidential election campaign for Mr. Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash in 2010.The office of Mr. Rajchert’s consulting company, GDS, is next to Mr. Kaczynski’s on the second floor of a dingy, Communist-era building in the center of Warsaw that also houses Law and Justice headquarters. When Mr. Kaczynski is in town, Mr. Rajchert said, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, regularly visits him, as do other key government officials, apparently to receive instructions.“This is where important decisions get taken,” Mr. Rajchert said, pointing to Mr. Kaczynski’s office next door.Stanislaw Kostrzewski, Law and Justice’s longtime former treasurer, described Mr. Kaczynski as “a highly intelligent person” who “obviously doesn’t believe” the elaborate conspiracy theories featuring Germany that are being pumped out ahead of Election Day by a state broadcasting system controlled by the governing party.“It is all such nonsense, but it works,” Mr. Kostrzewski said. “I feel bad as a Pole because of the stupidity of my nation.”Donald Tusk, the leader of the opposition Civic Coalition party, last Sunday at an anti-government march in Warsaw. Mr. Tusk, according to Mr. Kaczynski, is not only a political rival, but a national traitor intent on selling his country out to German — and Russian — interests.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBashing Germans not only stokes grievances left by World War II, when Poland lost around six million people, but also helps turn boring political arguments over taxation rates and the age of retirement, currently 65, into an exciting moral drama.In that telling, Law and Justice’s main opponent, the Civic Coalition’s leader, Donald Tusk, a former prime minister, figures as a German lap dog who, in Mr. Kaczynski’s description, is the “personification of pure evil” who must be “morally exterminated.”Mr. Tusk, according to Mr. Kaczynski, is a national traitor intent on selling his country out to German — and also Russian — interests.Mr. Kaczynski recently starred in an anti-German election ad on television that features him taking a phone call from a Polish-speaking man with a comically thick German accent playing Berlin’s ambassador in Warsaw.The ambassador, with Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” blaring in the background, informs Mr. Kaczynski imperiously that the German chancellor wants him to raise Poland’s retirement age back to what it was — 67 — when Mr. Tusk was Poland’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014. Mr. Kaczynski sternly tells the ambassador that Warsaw no longer takes orders from Berlin. “Mr. Tusk is no longer here and these customs are gone,” he says.Casting Germany as a malevolent force in cahoots with Mr. Tusk helps justify the governing party’s long-running feuds over the rule of law and other issues with the European Union, which Mr. Kaczynski has described as a German-led “Fourth Reich.” Before returning to Polish politics in 2019, Mr. Tusk served as president of the European Council, the European bloc’s principal power center.Mr. Kostrzewski, the former party treasurer, said that Mr. Kaczynski had never cared about money or luxury — his car is a humble Skoda — and that his only real passion had always been politics, which took on a cold, deeply cynical edge after his brother’s death.Left alone in command of Law and Justice and free of his brother’s moderating influence, Mr. Kaczynski, Mr. Kostrzewski said, stacked the party and the government it formed after winning a 2015 election with “people who only tell him what he wants to hear” and who serve his “Machiavellian vision of executing power.”Mr. Kaczynski with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, left, and Mariusz Blaszczak, the country’s defense minister, in August at the Law and Justice party’s headquarters in Warsaw.Radek Pietruszka/EPA, via ShutterstockFor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski — an opposition member of Parliament and deputy chairman of the legislature’s foreign affairs committee, whose father was an Auschwitz survivor and Poland’s foreign minister after the end of Communist rule — Law and Justice’s crude pre-election antics mean that “we have no foreign policy anymore, only foreign affairs for domestic use.”Mr. Kaczynski, he said, “thinks that whatever damage he does by being fanatically anti-German does not matter so long as it helps mobilize core voters.”For weeks now, state television has peppered news broadcasts with a recording of two single words — “für Deutschland” or “for Germany” — uttered by Mr. Tusk during a 2021 speech in German that thanked Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party for its role in healing Europe’s divisions at the end of the Cold War.The two words — a tiny and misleading fragment of what Mr. Tusk said — have become Exhibit A in Law and Justice’s case against the opposition leader as a German stooge.Aimed at rallying a party base that is mostly older, rural and often resentful of foreigners, the barrage of anti-German messaging has stunned and appalled Germans invested in postwar reconciliation and Poles who want to see their country as a serious player.At a security conference this past week in Warsaw — an event that was meant to spotlight Poland as Europe’s “new center of gravity” because of the war in Ukraine — politicians and experts from Poland and Germany bewailed the damage done to Poland’s image and European solidarity by Law and Justice’s pre-election stunts.A monument in Warsaw honoring the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. In the view of many Poles, Polish suffering in World War II has often been ignored by outsiders.Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn an interview, Knut Abraham, a member of the German Parliament and a former diplomat in Warsaw, described Law and Justice’s demonization of Germany and Mr. Tusk as “not only nonsense, but insane,” accusing the Polish governing party of shredding hard-won postwar reconciliation for electoral gain. Last year, Mr. Abraham accompanied the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union to Mr. Kaczynski’s office in Warsaw. The Polish party leader, he recalled, was civil, even charming, but peppered the conversation with historical references to slights against Poland. He is a “hard-core Polish nationalist” with a keen eye for political advantage, Mr. Abraham said.And no issue is easier to exploit at election time than the wounds of World War II, in which Polish suffering, in the view of many Poles, has been often ignored by outsiders focused on the Holocaust, a big part of which took place in Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland.Pawel Poncyliusz, who served as Mr. Kaczynski’s press officer before jumping to the opposition, said his former boss had a genuine interest in history but had harnessed the horrors endured by Poland in the past to serve his political ambitions.A lifelong bachelor who lives alone in the same modest Warsaw house he shared with his mother until her death a decade ago, Mr. Kaczynski, he said, “does not need women, money or holidays in Asia” but desperately needs to win and hold power.“In his head, he has unified himself with Poland,” Mr. Poncyliusz added. “Everything that is good for him is good for Poland. Everything that is against him is against Poland.”Anatol Magdziarz More

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      Looking Back at Her World War II Secret

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      Ruth Mirsky, who turns 100 today, was a code breaker in the U.S. Navy. “It was very hush-hush,” she remembered.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet a World War II code breaker who turns 100 today. We’ll also look at a filing by Representative George Santos that suggests he is already considering running for another term in Congress.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesSomewhere in Rockaway Park, N.Y., is a World War II code breaker who is finally talking.Ruth Mirsky, who turns 100 today, did not say much about breaking codes. She gave almost nothing away, saying things like “it was top-secret work” and “I had a very small part in it.” And “we worked in shifts. We worked around the clock — daytime, nighttime.” Not a word about encryption machines or eureka moments deciphering enemy messages long ago.Mirsky’s birthday comes 80 years after she enlisted in the Navy and became a WAVE, the acronym for Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services. She was promptly sent to Washington, where she became one of several thousand women scrambling to unscramble messages intercepted from the Japanese and German military.She worked in the library unit at what became known as the Naval Annex, typing incoming messages on file cards, categorizing them and noting repetitions — recurring letters or phrases that might have been potential clues to encryption. Others have said it was mind-numbing duty, an excruciating search for patterns and ciphers among monotonous columns of numbers and letters, but Mirsky still sounded fascinated.“It was a whole new thing,” she said. “For me it was, anyway.”Their diligence paid off. “Together, this group of Navy women broke and rebroke the fleet code” and “helped keep track of the movements of the Imperial Japanese Navy,” the author Liza Mundy wrote in her book “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.The women were instructed not to talk about their secret wartime lives — “it was very hush-hush,” Mirsky told me. When she visited her former boss in New York, she recalled, “he asked me, ‘What are you doing there? The F.B.I. was asking all kinds of questions to find out what kind of a person you were.’”She added: “I couldn’t even tell my fiancé.”We’ll get to him in a moment. Mirsky worked in an installation in Washington that was just off Ward Circle, “which taxi drivers started calling WAVES Circle,” Mundy wrote.Around the time Mirsky arrived in 1943, that installation was a base of operations for 1,500 women, along with just over 900 male officers and enlisted men, according to Mundy, who wrote that by early the next year, there were almost twice as many women and far fewer men. But, in what the writer Meryl Gordon called a “pre-Betty Friedan moment in American life when institutional discrimination was the norm,” the Navy’s pay scale favored the men.Mirsky did not mention that last week. She talked about two brothers, David, whom she had been dating, and Harry, who had been stationed in South Dakota as a radar specialist. “Harry came to see his brother before David’s unit went overseas,” she said. Harry had been injured when he was thrown from a jeep; at one point he had been in a body cast. With David off to the front lines, “Harry asked me if he could write to me from South Dakota, so that’s how it started,” she said.About six months later, Harry’s unit was transferred to Fort Dix, in New Jersey. He remained stateside when the unit went overseas because of the accident. He managed to go to Washington regularly — once without a pass, for which he was punished when he returned to Fort Dix, she said.You can guess what happened. Harry became the fiancé, then the husband. They were married for 39 years, until his death in 1984.She is a regular at a JASA Older Adult Center not far from her apartment center. It organized a birthday party last week, a few days early. “You can’t put 100 candles on a cake,” Mirsky told me, but she blew out 10 or so on the strawberry shortcake that was served. Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato, who represents the area, brought a proclamation and tweeted photos.“I’ve had a happy life,” Mirsky told me. “I feel I’ve done what I wanted, actually.” She mentioned her two children, Stuart Mirsky and Debra Aluisio, who had joined her at the JASA center. She mentioned her five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. She double-checked those numbers with her son, counting as they named the names.She talked about playing Scrabble — on an iPad.“It’s a good thing for my mind, I guess,” she said.“Very similar to the codes,” said Aluisio.WeatherIt’s a cloudy, windy day near the mid-40s. The evening is breezy and mostly clear, with temps around the mid-30s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until April 6 (Passover).The latest Metro newsJefferson Siegel for The New York TimesJail supervisor convicted: A jail supervisor who walked away from an inmate after he had hanged himself was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, capping a trial that pointed to the brutal conditions inside New York City’s jails and the persistence of inmate suicides.A city councilman’s apartment hunt: Chi Ossé became the youngest member of the New York City Council when he was sworn in 14 months ago. Now, he faces a challenge: finding an apartment in his district. He called the search “tiring, treacherous, and competitive.”A police department’s troubled history: Najee Seabrooks was shot and killed by police officers in Paterson, N.J., after calling 911 to report that he was experiencing a mental health crisis. A coalition of groups requested a Justice Department inquiry into what it called “widespread unlawful and unconstitutional conduct” by the Paterson police.Santos signals he might run againJonathan Ernst/ReutersLittle more than two months after he assumed office, George Santos signaled that he might want a second term.Santos, the embattled Republican from Long Island who is under scrutiny for lies about his background and questions about his finances, submitted paperwork to the Federal Election Commission suggesting that he may run for re-election in 2024.My colleague Michael Gold writes that the filing does not necessarily mean that Santos will run, but it does allow him to continue to raise money and spend it on campaign-related expenses, including paying back roughly $700,000 that he lent to his campaign last year.He can also use money he raises for any potential legal fees involving some of the investigations he is facing. Federal prosecutors have been examining his campaign finances and personal business dealings, and last month the House Ethics Committee opened its own inquiry.After The New York Times reported that Santos had lied about graduating from college, working for prestigious Wall Street firms and managing an extensive real estate portfolio, Santos acknowledged that he fabricated parts of his résumé and his biography.But he has denied criminal wrongdoing and has resisted calls to resign, even as some Republicans questioned whether he could serve constituents. Republican officials in Nassau County have said they would avoid taking constituent problems to his office whenever they could. Ten House Republicans have called on Santos to resign, and a poll in January by Siena College found that 78 percent of the voters in his district wanted him to give up his seat, including 71 percent of the Republicans who were questioned.METROPOLITAN diaryClocking inDear Diary:When I was in my early 20s, I worked at a cafe in Park Slope. I used to walk to work in the darkness at 4:30 a.m., lacing up my black sneakers in my Clinton Hill apartment and schlepping past halal trucks on my way as they set up for the day.I always bought a grapefruit from the bodega across the street before starting my shift. The man at the counter would greet me with a wide smile, its warmth washing away the tired feelings left over from the morning trek.Clocking out? I’d ask.Yes, he would say. Clocking in?Yes, I’d say.And then each day, like a mantra, he would singsong to me: “You are beginning your day … and I am ending mine!”— Annabelle LewisIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      Broad, Sunlit Uplands

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      On June 18, 1940, Churchill delivered his celebrated “Finest Hour” speech. The British Army had been evacuated from Dunkirk. France, under Pétain, had decided to surrender. “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war,” Churchill told the House of Commons.“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”Two of those phrases — “broad, sunlit uplands” and “the abyss of a new Dark Age” — should ring in our ears as we approach the end of this hinge year in history.Broad, sunlit uplands are the women of Iran tearing off their hijabs the way the people of Berlin once tore down their wall. And Ukrainian soldiers raising their flag over Irpin, Lyman, Kherson and other cities liberated from Russian barbarism. And Chinese protesters demanding — and gaining — an end to their regime’s cruel and crazy Covid lockdowns by holding up blank sheets of paper, where nothing needed to be written because everyone already knew what they meant.Broad, sunlit uplands were Emmanuel Macron’s victories over the fascistic Marine Le Pen in France. They were the defeat of nearly every election denier in the United States who ran to oversee voting at the state level. They were the drubbing of most of Donald Trump’s handpicked candidates in battleground midterm elections, including in states such as Georgia where non-QAnon Republicans won handily.Broad, sunlit uplands are a Covid fatality rate that, in America, no longer spikes a few weeks after case counts do. They are the demonstration that a lab-made fusion reaction can create more energy than it consumes. They are the lofting of a telescope that lets us peer far into the reaches of space and back to the beginning of time.This isn’t just a laundry list of the year’s good news. It is a demonstration of the capacity of people across cultures and circumstances to demand, defend and define freedom; to defy those who would deny it; and to use freedom to broaden the boundaries of what we can know and do and imagine.But it isn’t the only thing 2022 demonstrated. We continue to stare into the abyss of a new Dark Age, brought about not just by the malice of the enemies of freedom but also by the complacency and wishful thinking of its advocates.The complacent include those who imagined we could leave Afghanistan to the Taliban and suffer no wider consequences. But the perception of American weakness travels fast and far. Vladimir Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine, on Feb. 24, happened about six months after that American fiasco. Recall that his first invasion of Ukraine, in February 2014, happened a few months after Barack Obama’s Syria debacle over his chemical weapons “red line.”The complacent include those who thought that we could trade our way to a form of perpetual peace — whether by bringing China into the World Trade Organization or outsourcing Europe’s energy needs to Putin or imagining we could strengthen Iranian “moderates” with sanctions relief. Dictatorships are rarely weakened by being enriched. Lenin may not have said that “capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them,” but it’s remarkable how the point never seems to be learned by successive generations of capitalists.The complacent include those supposedly sophisticated Republicans who never took a real stand against Trump — first on the grounds that he couldn’t win; then on the view that he could be a vehicle for conservative policy victories; then in the conviction that he would concede gracefully; then in the belief that impeachment after Jan. 6 was too extreme a remedy — only to see him infest the party with conspiracy theorists and lead it to its well-earned defeat.The complacent are those who think that no vital American interest is at stake in a Ukrainian victory or in the outcome of the Iranian demonstrations. Or that China’s recent travails, along with Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine, might dissuade Xi Jinping from trying to seize Taiwan. Or that a corner has been turned on inflation. Or that the surging wave of migration across the southern border, sparked by a collapse in governance throughout much of Latin America, is some peculiar right-wing obsession rather than a genuine crisis that will incite a furious populist backlash if it isn’t competently managed.As Britain was fighting for its life in 1940, much of America was still uncertain as to what, if anything, the moment demanded of it. Churchill laid out the choice: sunlit uplands, or the abyss. It remains our choice today.Happy holidays.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Italy’s Hard Right Feels Vindicated by Giorgia Meloni’s Ascent

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      Long marginalized politically and ostracized socially, the new prime minister’s supporters sense a chance to give a final blow to the stigma and shame of their association with Fascism.ROCCA DI PAPA, Italy — As a young card-carrying member of a party formed from the ashes of Italy’s Fascist party after World War II, Gino Del Nero, 73, recalls being insulted, sidelined and silenced by leftists, as well as by some neighbors and co-workers.But now that Giorgia Meloni, a hard-right political leader, has been sworn in as prime minister of Italy, Mr. Del Nero feels vindicated.“That is over,” he said of the decades where he had to keep his head down. “We are freer now.”The ascent of Ms. Meloni, who leads the most hard-right government since Mussolini, was the final blow to a political taboo for Italy. That has worried critics on the left, who fear that she will initiate an atmosphere of intolerance on social issues and that her nationalist impulses will threaten Italy’s influence in Europe.But to her supporters, it has meant a chance to assert their domination over the mainstream of Italian politics and to shed the shame and stigma of their association with a Fascist movement that took power 100 years ago this week, with Mussolini’s march on Rome, which ushered in two decades of dictatorship that used political violence, introduced racial laws against Jews, allied with Hitler, and disastrously lost a world war.Rocca di Papa, a hilltop village outside Rome where the hard-right Brothers of Italy won 38 percent of the vote in September.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesGino del Nero, 73, who was a member of the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, recalls being insulted and admonished by leftists in his youth.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesFor her part, Ms. Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the remnants of that failed experiment, has sought to walk a fine line, repeatedly condemning Fascism, while also nodding to the long years of political exclusion and social ostracism of her supporters and offering them solidarity.In her maiden speech to Parliament as prime minister this week, Ms. Meloni again rejected Fascism and said that the racial laws of 1938 were the lowest point in Italian history. But she also denounced Italy’s postwar years of “criminalization and political violence,” in which she said “innocent boys” had been killed “in the name of antifascism.”The remarks were very much in line with the balancing act that Ms. Meloni executed throughout her campaign before the election in September. On the eve of that vote, she said her victory would not only be “payback for so many people who in this nation had to lower their head for decades,” but also “for all the people who saw it differently from the mainstream and the dominant power system.”They were, she said, “treated as the children of a lesser God.”“Giorgia’s victory closes a circle,” said Italo Bocchino, a former member of Parliament and now the editor in chief of Il Secolo d’Italia, a right-wing newspaper that used to be the party’s in-house organ, and whose readership, he said, has grown by 85 percent in the past year. “Let’s say it’s been like a desert crossing that lasted for 75 years.”A polling station in Garbatella, a traditionally leftist district in Rome where Ms. Meloni grew up and started her political career.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesMs. Meloni, right, taking a selfie with a supporter last month in Rome. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesBut if her supporters now hope for a long-awaited cultural shift, others are looking on with “critical and concerned awareness,” said Nadia Urbinati, a professor of political theory at Columbia University. Ms. Meloni’s use of the word “nation” instead of “country” or “people” during her maiden speech struck Ms. Urbinati as a possible red flag.Italy’s New Right-Wing GovernmentA Hard-Right Breakthrough: Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, is once again a testing ground for the far right’s advance in Europe after Giorgia Meloni’s election victory in September.New Government Forms: As she takes office, Ms. Meloni faces surging inflation, an energy crisis and increasing pressure to soften Italy’s support for Ukraine.The Coalition’s Linchpin: Ms. Meloni’s turn as prime minister will depend on support from the billionaire media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. So may the health of Italian democracy.Renewed Anxiety: Mr. Berlusconi was caught on tape blaming Ukraine’s president for pushing Russia to invade, raising concerns that Italy could undercut Europe’s unity against Moscow.When the Italian Social Movement was first formed in 1948, its close association with its Fascist forebears repelled many Italians still stinging from the fallout of World War II. Effectively, for nearly a half-century, Italy remained politically split between the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, leaving little room for the hard right to maneuver in part because of a tacit agreement to keep the right out of government.Political polarization surged among young people during the 1970s and early ’80s, and schools and streets became violent battlefields where the right was vastly outnumbered. Clothing was a political statement then: Members of the left wore parkas, known as an “Eskimo,” and lace-up shoes, and they wore their hair long; members of the right opted for Ray-Ban glasses, leather bomber jackets and camperos, made-in-Italy cowboy-style boots.Members of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Brothers of Italy, at a rally in September in Rome.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesSimone D’Alpa, 32, one of the leaders of the Rome branch of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Brothers of Italy, at its headquarters in Rome.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesIn those days, said Simone D’Alpa, one of leaders of the Rome branch of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Brothers of Italy, you could be targeted, even killed, for wearing camperos boots, or for writing essays seen to be too rightward thinking. Ms. Meloni’s victory vindicated those deaths. “We owe it to them,” he said.The tide first turned in the early ’90s, when the party was reborn as National Alliance and softened its tone. Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister at the time, brought it into the center-right coalition, lifting a longstanding taboo. Critics said that Ms. Meloni’s messaging of “vindication, comeback and victimization” was unjustified because members of her party have already been in office.But to supporters, leading the government is another story.Six of Ms. Meloni’s cabinet ministers started their political careers in the Italian Social Movement, the post-Fascist party. Her close ally Ignazio La Russa was elected president of the Senate, the second top institutional office after the president. The right-wing newspaper Libero called his nomination “the definite legitimization not only of a party, but of an entire world,” that for 30 years had been in a “political ghetto.”Ms. Meloni’s supporters also hoped that this legitimization would trickle down to their everyday lives.Maurizio Manzetti, 61, at his restaurant, The Legend, in Ostia, a seaside neighborhood of Rome. The restaurant was vandalized because its décor included Italian flags and photographs of Ms. Meloni.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesA plaque outside an office of the former Italian Social Movement, now a branch of Brothers of Italy, in Rome. When the Italian Social Movement was first formed, its close ties with its Fascist forebears repulsed many Italians.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesTwo years ago, vandals targeted Maurizio Manzetti, a cook in the seaside Roman neighborhood of Ostia, whose restaurant décor includes Italian flags and photographs of Ms. Meloni. They spray-painted “Friend of Giorgia, Fascist” on a wall in front of the eatery and left a bottle that looked like firebomb in front of his door.“As soon as you talked about patriotism, sovreignism and borders they called you a Fascist,” Mr. Manzetti said. “Now the word patriot is not going to be canceled anymore.”Some nationalists said that having a prime minister might also give them a better foothold in public sectors of cultural life that they complain has systematically excluded them.“There’s now a great opportunity on a cultural level,” said Federico Gennaccari, the editor of a Rome-based conservative publishing house. His wish list, for example, would include a new take on the massacre of Italian soldiers and civilians by Yugoslav Communist partisans from 1943 to 1947 in northeastern Italy. For decades, members of the hard right, in a clear example of “whataboutism,” cited that massacre when asked about Fascist complicity in the Holocaust.One series about that massacre that Mr. Gennaccari saw aired by the state broadcaster RAI “didn’t say the word Communist once,” he said.Federico Gennaccari, the editor of a conservative publishing house in Rome.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesA rally commemorating the mass killings of Fascists by Yugoslav Communist partisans during World War II.Matteo Corner/EPA, via ShutterstockOthers, like Gennaro Malgieri, a conservative author and former lawmaker, spoke of a “hegemony of the left” in postwar Italy that had “occupied centers of learning and culture,” keeping the right from making inroads in “publishing, means of mass communication, universities, festivals and positions in cultural institutions.”While Italy is far less sensitive to political correctness than other Western democracies are, Mr. Malgieri said the victory would afford the right more — and vaster — channels from which to critique those positions and affirm a nationalist “way of being Italian” that derived from the country’s Roman, Greek and Judeo-Christian roots.Some Italian historians question the extent to which the right had been truly banished, and whether it was instead simply engaging in politically useful victimization.“The names of people who were discriminated against or exiled because they were right wing don’t come to mind,” said Alberto Mario Banti, a modern history professor at the University of Pisa.The Square Colosseum, an example of Fascist architecture, in Rome’s EUR district.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesOutside a cafe in Rocca di Papa.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesStill, supporters said, Ms. Meloni’s victory was a turning point for them.Mr. Del Nero, from Rocca di Papa, said he hoped that now he could read a right-wing newspaper or book on the subway without eliciting scornful looks.His loyalty to the right had come at a cost, he said, years of being excluded from workers’ union meetings at the hospital where he worked. Colleagues silenced him in discussions. People often dismissed him as a “Fascist.”“It’s a mark we carry inside,” he said. “Now I feel vindicated.”A bus stop and magazine stand in Rocca di Papa. Mr. Del Nero said he hoped that he could now read a right-wing newspaper without eliciting scornful looks.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times More