From a Guardian piece on Ian Buruma, current editor of The New York Review of Books:
What does Brexit look like to him? “It is the most shocking political event in my life. It was like a knife going through me. It’s very painful, and we haven’t even seen the worst consequences of it yet.” Did he see it coming? “No. I was much more worried Trump would get elected.” Our preoccupation with the last war, as revealed in films such as Dunkirk, is to him striking: “It seems to express a mood, and yet a lot of things that have happened recently have done so because the generation that is running the world has no memories of it. The world we grew up in was created by people who were terrified the war could happen again, and they tried to make sure it wouldn’t. Less nationalism, more cooperation. Now real fascist rhetoric is creeping back into the mainstream. The old taboos are fading because of lost memory.”
