Politics & Power Quote by Emily Greene Balch

“Flood time” is doing the heavy lifting here: Balch frames fascism and Nazism not as freak ideologies but as a natural disaster of human making, a force that rises, breaches, and drowns institutions that people assumed were solid ground. It’s a quietly devastating choice of metaphor for an educator and peace advocate, because floods don’t just destroy; they leave behind contamination, ruin you can’t unsee, and a landscape that demands rebuilding.

Then she snaps the metaphor into a different register: “meteoric course.” Meteor implies speed, spectacle, and a public that watches, half-awed, as something burns bright and plummets. The subtext is an accusation aimed at complacent bystanders and late-waking elites: you saw the streak in the sky; you mistook velocity for inevitability, charisma for destiny. Calling it “meteoric” also refuses fascism the dignity of longevity. It was intense, brief, and catastrophic, not a civilizational alternative.

Balch’s most biting move is her accountant’s phrase, “beyond all computation.” It’s not poetic excess; it’s a rebuttal to the tidy postwar impulse to tally losses and declare the bill paid. Coming from someone who lived through two world wars and spent her career insisting that peace is a system, not a sentiment, the line warns against moral bookkeeping. Some damage can’t be balanced, only remembered, taught, and structurally prevented from returning with the next high-water season.