EDELWEISS MOMENT

Is it possible for good people to end up on the wrong side of history? I suppose it must be.

I happened to watch ‘The Sound of Music’ today - not the original Julie Andrews version but a stage remake. It was pacier but it still hit all the right notes. I was emotional. But in between the beats of the love story, the Captain’s emotional journey, and the regimented children who learn to sing in the mountains, there was an important question that I felt a bit rattled by. And it’s how I started: is it possible for good people to end up on the wrong side of history?

Of course it is. Rolfe is a sweet Austrian boy who becomes a Nazi. The Captain’s friends fly the Swastika, and then shuffle uncomfortably at the sound of Edelweiss at the Salzburg festival. Plenty of good Austrians in 1938 would have landed very comfortably on the wrong side of history and would not have known.

You see the issue. If it was easy for them, it must be easy for us too. We’re people just the same, swayed by propaganda and political thought, by personality and public opinion. The powers of nationalism and fascism are still here, and perhaps look subtler these days. How do any of us know we’re sitting comfortably on the right side?

“Everyone’s cross these days,” says the housekeeper at one point.

“Half my friends just aren’t talking to the other half, it seems,” says the Captain.

It would be easy to start painting the conservative right as the neo-fascists. A lot of people salivate at the chance. However it would also be easy to think of the woke liberals forcing their values on everyone, snarling at even a hint of balance. Well who are the allies and who are the axis? Which are the liberators, and which are the guards? And which side is God really on? I’m not altogether sure that history is quite as clear when you’re living it in the present.

Well. The Sound of Music is still brilliant. I suspect its message of music changing the world is timeless, and there is something so powerful about the Edelweiss moment - when art and poetry and song can be a revolutionary act of defiance against tyranny and darkness. I like that.