Israel's invasion of Lebanon will be its Bridge Too Far moment.

For the 21st-century, I am not considered that old by North American or European standards. But I turn 61 next month, and am aware, more than most, that our footfalls on the stage of existence are short. Being skint and past middle age also sharpens the mind to how everything can turn pear-shaped between breakfast and lunch. It’s a here today gone tomorrow reality for the poor.

All it takes is another co-morbidity to be added to the list of diseases intent on killing you or an unexpected expense that must be paid. And snap like a game of Ring around the Rosie, "We all fall down."

Maybe that's why when I am not spending my time surviving, I am preoccupied with historical events near and far away. I want to better understand how they shaped me as a human being.

Lately, I have been drawn to how my mother's experiences as a girl and teenager growing up in Nazi Germany shaped her personality. Those events also cast a long shadow onto her children that were born long after the cataclysmic events of World War Two.

I can't speak for my siblings, but when I was very young and also a teenager my mother often spoke about her experiences in Hitler's Germany. I am not sure why she did it. Perhaps, my mother wanted an uncritical ear to unburden painful memories. Maybe, she was trying to make sense about how a bastard child of a Berlin socialist from Weimar Germany, ended up a middle class woman in a suburb of Toronto.

I don’t know. But I do know there was a constant thread that connected all of the stories my mother told me about life in Germany. It was her pushback against Nazism's need to control people through the dehumanisation of others. Mum wouldn't have any of it. She wasn't a Sophie Scholl, but she did dissent against the brutality of Hitler as best she could.

During this past week, the 80th anniversary of The Allies Operation Market Garden was commemorated.

It was a battle fought in German-occupied Holland from September 14th to 25th, 1944. The battle plans were conceived by Britain's Field Marshall Montgomery famed for defeating Nazi Germany's Panzer Corp in the North African Desert during a series of battles in 1942. Market Garden was supposed to shorten the war and ensure a clear and speedy road to Berlin. Instead, it was a disaster for the Allies.

My mum in Sept 1944 was a 17-year-old German teenager. At a cinema in Hamburg, she watched the newsreels of German troops massacring Polish General Sosabowksi's paratroopers as they parachuted into occupied Holland during Market Garden. Revolted, she left the cinema-no one else did. She was questioned by the Gestapo. She blamed it on her period and was released.

When my mother revealed this memory to me, she said, “the Nazis stole Germany's moral core and replaced it with hate.” My mum added. “It’s not unique to Germany. It will happen to any country that manipulates its citizens into believing they are morally superior to their neighbours and more worthy of life.”

Now more than ever, my mother’s words resonate with me. For the past year we have lived through a sustained campaign of Israel and the West dehumanising Palestinians and now the Lebanese to further a war that could lead to a global conflict.

It will not end well for us because our governments, political, business and news media classes had no moral centre and used their entitlements in the pursuit of genocide against Palestinians.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So if you can please subscribe and if you can’t it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide. So many of us lose so much time on the important work that must be done because of the mad scramble to pay the rent and feed oneself during an economic crisis not seen since the 1930.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these times. October rent is approaching and I need 6 yearly subscribers to make it. Take care, John