Reposted by Tony Pickering
Tony Pickering
@tonypickering.bsky.social
367 followers 436 following 40 posts
Comics creator, illustrator, graphic visualiser, artist, & occasional academic. I do graphic medicine & somehow specialise in illustrating research. Type 1 Diabetic. Will draw for money. www.pick-art.co.uk
![[T]he constellation of precarities that define our time makes us especially vulnerable to a politics promising immediate empowerment through the designation of a maligned object. The permission to spite, abuse, blame & hate the foreigner, the migrant or the culturally different has been a significant unifying tactic for millennia. We only really departed from this script eighty years ago when the full horror of such politics became apparent, & the heart of modern, enlightened Europe became the home of the most appalling genocide. However, what makes our current situation more acute [...] is that the familiarity of the world we built after the catastrophe of the 1930s & 1940s makes us prone to amnesia. [T]his happens at an individual level where a person with every social advantage is given no reason to reflect upon their privilege, but it can also happen at a social level where people are born into a range of progressive benefits unavailable to previous generations (civil rights, peace, healthcare, welfare, labour protections) that they assume are somehow natural & inevitable. Unfortunately, we lose sight of how precious, how historically fragile these things are & how hard we had to fight for them. It also comes at a time when the long path to democracy has ended in a shift towards plutocracy a& corporate oligarchy that threatens to eliminate every check, every balance and every element of accountability & transparency we had painstakingly attached to the exercise of power.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qzzr73476v4g46avt5qdgbih/bafkreihmkm2k4bz3gln2yib4hbctlj4zo3p2pmbrj3vzj4cj6ba6brpgea)
