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Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American author and historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.[2] He has written several books, including the best-sellers Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.[3]

Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ~ Wikipedia

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   1 Timothy Snyder

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1:The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country's history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. ~ Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,

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1:Do not obey in advance. ~ Timothy Snyder,
2:making an eternity of the ~ Timothy Snyder,
3:Be wary of paramilitaries. ~ Timothy Snyder,
4:Contribute to good causes. ~ Timothy Snyder,
5:Post-truth is pre-fascism. ~ Timothy Snyder,
6:Beware the one-party state. ~ Timothy Snyder,
7:Listen for dangerous words. ~ Timothy Snyder,
8:The good people died first. ~ Timothy Snyder,
9:Practice corporeal politics. ~ Timothy Snyder,
10:Make eye contact and small talk. ~ Timothy Snyder,
11:Remember that email is skywriting. ~ Timothy Snyder,
12:The final mode is misplaced faith. ~ Timothy Snyder,
13:Be reflective if you must be armed. ~ Timothy Snyder,
14:Learn from peers in other countries. ~ Timothy Snyder,
15:Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. ~ Timothy Snyder,
16:Make new friends and march with them. ~ Timothy Snyder,
17:To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. ~ Timothy Snyder,
18:eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. ~ Timothy Snyder,
19:History does not repeat, but it does instruct ~ Timothy Snyder,
20:Make sure you and your family have passports. ~ Timothy Snyder,
21:patriotism involves serving your own country. ~ Timothy Snyder,
22:Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. ~ Timothy Snyder,
23:History does not repeat, but it does instruct. ~ Timothy Snyder,
24:Take responsibility for the face of the world. ~ Timothy Snyder,
25:History does not repeat, but it does instruct. As ~ Timothy Snyder,
26:nothing is real that does not end on the streets. ~ Timothy Snyder,
27:Having old friends is the politics of last resort. ~ Timothy Snyder,
28:It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It ~ Timothy Snyder,
29:Most the power of authoritarianism is freely given. ~ Timothy Snyder,
30:statehood was crucial to future national existence. ~ Timothy Snyder,
31:The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. ~ Timothy Snyder,
32:Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery. ~ Timothy Snyder,
33:Take responsibility for what you communicate with others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
34:Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary. ~ Timothy Snyder,
35:salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. ~ Timothy Snyder,
36:In politics, being deceived is no excuse. —LESZEK KOŁAKOWSKI ~ Timothy Snyder,
37:And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. ~ Timothy Snyder,
38:The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant. ~ Timothy Snyder,
39:Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. ~ Timothy Snyder,
40:It is the government’s job to increase both freedom and security. ~ Timothy Snyder,
41:Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books. ~ Timothy Snyder,
42:Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. ~ Timothy Snyder,
43:The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. ~ Timothy Snyder,
44:Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks. ~ Timothy Snyder,
45:You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
46:Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
47:Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization. ~ Timothy Snyder,
48:Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song. ~ Timothy Snyder,
49:It was easier to triumph in violence that it was to make a new order. ~ Timothy Snyder,
50:The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So ~ Timothy Snyder,
51:What might seem like a gesture of pride can be a source of exclusion. ~ Timothy Snyder,
52:the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. ~ Timothy Snyder,
53:The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. ~ Timothy Snyder,
54:Take responsibility for what you communicate with others. “What is truth? ~ Timothy Snyder,
55:The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. ~ Timothy Snyder,
56:The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. ~ Timothy Snyder,
57:Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy. ~ Timothy Snyder,
58:The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in. ~ Timothy Snyder,
59:History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. ~ Timothy Snyder,
60:Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. ~ Timothy Snyder,
61:The politics of the greater evil was a common creation at a time of chaos. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
62:But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
63:States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated. ~ Timothy Snyder,
64:It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. ~ Timothy Snyder,
65:The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp. ~ Timothy Snyder,
66:Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
67:The seduction by a mythicized pas prevents us from thinking about possible futures ~ Timothy Snyder,
68:History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have. ~ Timothy Snyder,
69:If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny ~ Timothy Snyder,
70:The seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures ~ Timothy Snyder,
71:A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. ~ Timothy Snyder,
72:If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. ~ Timothy Snyder,
73:It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral. ~ Timothy Snyder,
74:A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority. ~ Timothy Snyder,
75:how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
76:James Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency. ~ Timothy Snyder,
77:To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the co-creator of another. ~ Timothy Snyder,
78:But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant. ~ Timothy Snyder,
79:Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
80:We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. ~ Timothy Snyder,
81:The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones. ~ Timothy Snyder,
82:If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If ~ Timothy Snyder,
83:In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much. ~ Timothy Snyder,
84:When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning. ~ Timothy Snyder,
85:Every Pennsylvania county that Obama won in 2012 but Trump won in 2016 was in opioid crisis. ~ Timothy Snyder,
86:If young people do not begin to make history, politicians and inevitability will destroy it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
87:In the politics of the every day, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much. ~ Timothy Snyder,
88:Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. No ~ Timothy Snyder,
89:As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical. ~ Timothy Snyder,
90:The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had. A ~ Timothy Snyder,
91:This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
92:What matters is that this spectacular act of terror initiated the politics of emergency. Gazing ~ Timothy Snyder,
93:The psychological and political reasons to overcompensate by insisting on victimhood were strong. ~ Timothy Snyder,
94:the view of many reasonable people in 1933, just as it is the view of many reasonable people now. ~ Timothy Snyder,
95:We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. ~ Timothy Snyder,
96:When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning. ~ Timothy Snyder,
97:Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. ~ Timothy Snyder,
98:What the glorious retellings of the history of Irgun and Lehi often omit is the Polish connection. ~ Timothy Snyder,
99:It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. ~ Timothy Snyder,
100:When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary. ~ Timothy Snyder,
101:Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
102:Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
103:The move to separate from the EU is not a step backward onto firm ground, but a leap into the unknown. ~ Timothy Snyder,
104:We do not see the minds that we hurt when we publish falsehoods, but that does not mean we do no harm. ~ Timothy Snyder,
105:Having old friends is the politics of last resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change. ~ Timothy Snyder,
106:Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If ~ Timothy Snyder,
107:Why then should we form our political judgment on the basis of zero investment? We get what we pay for. ~ Timothy Snyder,
108:The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
109:For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions ~ Timothy Snyder,
110:Law had no purpose beyond the codification of a Führer’s momentary intuitions about the good of his race. ~ Timothy Snyder,
111:Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow. ~ Timothy Snyder,
112:that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books. ~ Timothy Snyder,
113:The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. It ~ Timothy Snyder,
114:For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. ~ Timothy Snyder,
115:If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And ~ Timothy Snyder,
116:People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both. ~ Timothy Snyder,
117:We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen. ~ Timothy Snyder,
118:After Hitler’s rise in 1933, he pursued domestic policy for more than six years before he began his first war. ~ Timothy Snyder,
119:Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies. As ~ Timothy Snyder,
120:The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned. ~ Timothy Snyder,
121:To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history. ~ Timothy Snyder,
122:To Ukrainians, Americans seemed comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and fake news. When ~ Timothy Snyder,
123:Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.” It ~ Timothy Snyder,
124:Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. ~ Timothy Snyder,
125:For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For ~ Timothy Snyder,
126:People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both. You ~ Timothy Snyder,
127:When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. ~ Timothy Snyder,
128:Accepting the markings as a natural part of the urban landscape was already a compromise with a murderous future. ~ Timothy Snyder,
129:Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. ~ Timothy Snyder,
130:defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future. ~ Timothy Snyder,
131:Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. ~ Timothy Snyder,
132:As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. ~ Timothy Snyder,
133:A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938.57 ~ Timothy Snyder,
134:You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. ~ Timothy Snyder,
135:Is truth nothing more than a convention of power, or can truthful historical accounts resist the gravity of politics? ~ Timothy Snyder,
136:to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two. ~ Timothy Snyder,
137:When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. ~ Timothy Snyder,
138:An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power. ~ Timothy Snyder,
139:Beijing’s preferred method of control, in Russia as in Africa, has been legal contracts on terms advantageous to itself. ~ Timothy Snyder,
140:They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
141:Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
142:If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever ~ Timothy Snyder,
143:some supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics. ~ Timothy Snyder,
144:These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena. ~ Timothy Snyder,
145:but that the production of lawlessness was an appropriate way to find murderers who could be recruited for organized actions. ~ Timothy Snyder,
146:support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. ~ Timothy Snyder,
147:all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised. ~ Timothy Snyder,
148:fringe groups representing national minorities who could imagine that somehow the destruction of states provided opportunities. ~ Timothy Snyder,
149:people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. Protest ~ Timothy Snyder,
150:We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
151:Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. ~ Timothy Snyder,
152:The key to this translation of ideology to politics in both cases was an effective appeal to human experience at the crucial time. ~ Timothy Snyder,
153:When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable. ~ Timothy Snyder,
154:In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like. ~ Timothy Snyder,
155:A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. ~ Timothy Snyder,
156:All in all, the purification of the armed forces, state institutions, and the communist party led to about fifty thousand executions. ~ Timothy Snyder,
157:Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth. ~ Timothy Snyder,
158:Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
159:We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. During ~ Timothy Snyder,
160:The predominant view was that budgets should be balanced and money supplies tightened. This, as we know today, only made matters worse. ~ Timothy Snyder,
161:The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. ~ Timothy Snyder,
162:Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. ~ Timothy Snyder,
163:Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. ~ Timothy Snyder,
164:salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched. ~ Timothy Snyder,
165:The capacity for trust and learning can make life seem less chaotic and mysterious, and democratic politics more plausible and attractive. ~ Timothy Snyder,
166:The fourteen million were murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power. ~ Timothy Snyder,
167:The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection. ~ Timothy Snyder,
168:To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
169:No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past. ~ Timothy Snyder,
170:Most of the states of Europe had no prospect of social transformation, and thus little ability to rival or counter the Nazis and the Soviets. ~ Timothy Snyder,
171:When exactly was the “again” in the president’s slogan “Make America great again”? Hint: It is the same “again” that we find in “Never again. ~ Timothy Snyder,
172:Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires. ~ Timothy Snyder,
173:The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection. We ~ Timothy Snyder,
174:The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
175:The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” Thus Hamlet. Yet he concludes: “Nay, come, let’s go together. ~ Timothy Snyder,
176:We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy—ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth. ~ Timothy Snyder,
177:A nationalist...is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. ~ Timothy Snyder,
178:The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate. ~ Timothy Snyder,
179:If the main pillar of the system is living a lie,” wrote Havel, “then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth. ~ Timothy Snyder,
180:Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
181:Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. ~ Timothy Snyder,
182:No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. ~ Timothy Snyder,
183:The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics. ~ Timothy Snyder,
184:Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. ~ Timothy Snyder,
185:the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded. Certainly ~ Timothy Snyder,
186:In the end, the number of people killed in the kulak operation was about the same as the number sent to the Gulag (378,326 and 389,070, respectively). ~ Timothy Snyder,
187:you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles. ~ Timothy Snyder,
188:If the main pillar of the system is living a lie,” wrote Havel, “then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.” Since ~ Timothy Snyder,
189:One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. ~ Timothy Snyder,
190:The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labor of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity, and survival. We ~ Timothy Snyder,
191:The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere. ~ Timothy Snyder,
192:What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. ~ Timothy Snyder,
193:Like Hitler, the President used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking and presented journalism as a campaign against himself. ~ Timothy Snyder,
194:Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything. ~ Timothy Snyder,
195:When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, Great Britain was alone. The British had won no meaningful battles and had no important allies. ~ Timothy Snyder,
196:changes. It was the deliberate policy of Nazi Germany to artificially create conditions of state destruction and then steer the consequences towards Jews. ~ Timothy Snyder,
197:If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. ~ Timothy Snyder,
198:Some believed that Satan had come to earth in human form as a party activist, his collective farm register a book of hell, promising torment and damnation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
199:What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As ~ Timothy Snyder,
200:By July 1933 it was illegal in Germany to belong to any other political party than the Nazis. In November the Nazis staged a parliamentary election in which ~ Timothy Snyder,
201:Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything. As ~ Timothy Snyder,
202:Soviet state destruction made the political perspective of people who had been marginal right-wing national terrorists seem like the mainstream. Lithuanians ~ Timothy Snyder,
203:Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
204:The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law. Because ~ Timothy Snyder,
205:You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. ~ Timothy Snyder,
206:Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. ~ Timothy Snyder,
207:A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
208:As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. ~ Timothy Snyder,
209:Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. ~ Timothy Snyder,
210:Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. ~ Timothy Snyder,
211:More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, ~ Timothy Snyder,
212:History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have. ~ Timothy Snyder,
213:Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world. ~ Timothy Snyder,
214:During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world. ~ Timothy Snyder,
215:Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle. ~ Timothy Snyder,
216:There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream—as the tyrants themselves are defining ~ Timothy Snyder,
217:You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even ~ Timothy Snyder,
218:Will we in retrospect see the elections of 2016 much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932? This, ~ Timothy Snyder,
219:generations have laid before them. One thing is certain: If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And ~ Timothy Snyder,
220:It is easy to imagine situations where we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we enter an abusive relationship or vote for a fascist. Similarly, ~ Timothy Snyder,
221:there is nothing, in fact, which man cannot be forced to do by hunger and pain.” Herling became convinced “that a man can only be human under human conditions.” From ~ Timothy Snyder,
222:Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
223:Putin’s aim was not to fool Ukrainians but to create a bond of willing ignorance with Russians, who were meant to understand that Putin was lying but to believe him a ~ Timothy Snyder,
224:The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence. ~ Timothy Snyder,
225:In April 2015, Russian hackers took over the transmission of a French television station, pretended to be ISIS, and then broadcast material designed to terrorize France. ~ Timothy Snyder,
226:It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. ~ Timothy Snyder,
227:We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil. ~ Timothy Snyder,
228:Hitler and Stalin both accepted a late-nineteenth-century Darwinistic modification: progress was possible, but only as a result of violent struggle between races or classes. ~ Timothy Snyder,
229:In the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, NKVD officers recorded 682,691 executions of supposed enemies of the state, most of them peasants or members of national minorities. ~ Timothy Snyder,
230:Rather than reporting the violation of basic rights, our media generally preferred to mindlessly indulge the inherently salacious interest we have in other people’s affairs. ~ Timothy Snyder,
231:the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of an election and a coup d’état. A ~ Timothy Snyder,
232:It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. ~ Timothy Snyder,
233:Sharing in an undertaking teaches us that we can trust people beyond a narrow circle of friends and families, and helps us to recognize authorities from whom we can learn. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
234:In the 1990s, Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York City to allow anonymous purchases of apartment units, an opportunity that the Russian mob quickly exploited. ~ Timothy Snyder,
235:Before you deride the “mainstream media,” note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult. ~ Timothy Snyder,
236:The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin p ~ Timothy Snyder,
237:Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the East. ~ Timothy Snyder,
238:a man can be human only under human conditions.” The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal. ~ Timothy Snyder,
239:As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: “Any of the comrades who can’t see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we’ll have to feed.”4 ~ Timothy Snyder,
240:No matter what Germany or Germans did, it was because they were defending themselves from international Jewry. The Jews were always the aggressor, the Germans always the victims. ~ Timothy Snyder,
241:Beyond manipulation itself there was no object or subject of politics. There was only the darkness that is consummate when gifted minds such as Schmitt’s cloak evil with unreason. ~ Timothy Snyder,
242:In his 2016 campaign, the American president used the slogan “America First,” which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany. ~ Timothy Snyder,
243:It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today. ~ Timothy Snyder,
244:Not 79,950 but five times as many people would be shot in the kulak action. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed some 386,798 Soviet citizens in fulfillment of Order 00447.51 ~ Timothy Snyder,
245:Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. ~ Timothy Snyder,
246:Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States—fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942. ~ Timothy Snyder,
247:The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. ~ Timothy Snyder,
248:To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. ~ Timothy Snyder,
249:If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
250:The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.

But there are no adults. We own this mess. ~ Timothy Snyder,
251:The nation faces forward. It is made and remade every day. If we believe that the nation resides in the orderly recitations of history given to us by our leaders, then our story is over ~ Timothy Snyder,
252:The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. ~ Timothy Snyder,
253:The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. ~ Timothy Snyder,
254:In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicised past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. ~ Timothy Snyder,
255:In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. ~ Timothy Snyder,
256:Like all immorality, eternity politics begins by making an exception for itself. All else in creation might be evil, but I and my group are good, because I am myself and my group is mine. ~ Timothy Snyder,
257:Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In ~ Timothy Snyder,
258:He walked upon 'earth that is as unsteady as the sea,' and found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery a sack of hair, blonde and black. ~ Timothy Snyder,
259:The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We ~ Timothy Snyder,
260:The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will ~ Timothy Snyder,
261:The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more free speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. ~ Timothy Snyder,
262:A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. ~ Timothy Snyder,
263:When states are absent, rights—by any definition—are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited, or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort. ~ Timothy Snyder,
264:Czechoslovakia spoke of “normalization,” which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal. To say otherwise in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was to be condemned to an insane asylum. ~ Timothy Snyder,
265:The choice to be public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen. ~ Timothy Snyder,
266:The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. ~ Timothy Snyder,
267:Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more. ~ Timothy Snyder,
268:The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. ~ Timothy Snyder,
269:Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
270:Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. ~ Timothy Snyder,
271:people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. ~ Timothy Snyder,
272:The choice to be in public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen. ~ Timothy Snyder,
273:Hitler was not a German nationalist, sure of German victory, aiming for an enlarged German state. He was a zoological anarchist who believed that there was a true state of nature to be restored. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
274:One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice. ~ Timothy Snyder,
275:Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. ~ Timothy Snyder,
276:no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to kill Jews in large numbers was developed and some one million Jews were murdered. ~ Timothy Snyder,
277:Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them. ~ Timothy Snyder,
278:The Russian anti-gay campaign, which associates European and American power with the hidden hand of the gay international, was targeted to the Muslim world as well as to domestic constituencies. These ~ Timothy Snyder,
279:If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one great, bloody accident. ~ Timothy Snyder,
280:If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one, great bloody accident. ~ Timothy Snyder,
281:When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency. What ~ Timothy Snyder,
282:Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future. That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow. ~ Timothy Snyder,
283:Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. ~ Timothy Snyder,
284:If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning. ~ Timothy Snyder,
285:Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer. ~ Timothy Snyder,
286:Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change. ~ Timothy Snyder,
287:What does it mean that six of the president’s companies have gone bankrupt, and that the president’s enterprises have been financed by mysterious infusions of cash from entities in Russia and Kazakhstan? ~ Timothy Snyder,
288:If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable. ~ Timothy Snyder,
289:More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. ~ Timothy Snyder,
290:philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler’s language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), ~ Timothy Snyder,
291:The myth of their total responsibility arose during postwar trials in the Federal Republic of Germany as a way to protect the majority of German killers and isolate the killing from German society as such. ~ Timothy Snyder,
292:By 1940 most Europeans had made their peace with the seemingly irresistible power of Nazi Germany. Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First. ~ Timothy Snyder,
293:Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
294:If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. ~ Timothy Snyder,
295:If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth. ~ Timothy Snyder,
296:In the most dangerous of times, those who escape and survive generally know people whom they can trust. Having old friends is the politics of lost resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change. ~ Timothy Snyder,
297:One class of elementary school students, for example, sent a letter to party authorities asking “for your help, since we are falling down from hunger. We should be learning, but we are too hungry to walk.”75 ~ Timothy Snyder,
298:If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. ~ Timothy Snyder,
299:Lawyers were vastly overrepresented among the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces who carried out the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, Polish elites, communists, the handicapped, and others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
300:The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
301:We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call “post-truth,” and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. ~ Timothy Snyder,
302:When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. ~ Timothy Snyder,
303:Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant. ~ Timothy Snyder,
304:You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent. ~ Timothy Snyder,
305:Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar ~ Timothy Snyder,
306:Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Even ~ Timothy Snyder,
307:The German communist party, for years the strongest outside the Soviet Union itself, was broken in a matter of a few months. Its defeat was a serious blow to the prestige of the international communist movement.11 ~ Timothy Snyder,
308:A planetary vision of bloody racial struggle, something not inherently attractive to most people most of the time, was translated at moments of stress into concepts and images that could generate political support. ~ Timothy Snyder,
309:the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection ~ Timothy Snyder,
310:Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books. ~ Timothy Snyder,
311:For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. ~ Timothy Snyder,
312:Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. ~ Timothy Snyder,
313:Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. other forces were at work besides conformism. But without conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
314:Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. ~ Timothy Snyder,
315:Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
316:If past and future contained nothing but struggle and scarcity, all attention fell upon the present. A psychic resolve for relief from a sense of crisis overwhelmed the practical resolve to think about the future. Rather ~ Timothy Snyder,
317:Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
318:The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler’s time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned. ~ Timothy Snyder,
319:Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I ~ Timothy Snyder,
320:Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
321:Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles). ~ Timothy Snyder,
322:The state is for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected. The state endures to create a sense of durability. A ~ Timothy Snyder,
323:Brezhnev. It was Brezhnev who proved to be Stalin’s most important successor, because he redefined the Soviet attitude to time: he buried the Marxist politics of inevitability, and replaced it with a Soviet politics of eternity. ~ Timothy Snyder,
324:Our time is certainly out of joint. We have forgotten history for one reason and, if we are not careful, we will neglect it for another. We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty. ~ Timothy Snyder,
325:Stalin raised a toast: “We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”29 ~ Timothy Snyder,
326:WE TEND TO assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government. ~ Timothy Snyder,
327:Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them. ~ Timothy Snyder,
328:This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value. ~ Timothy Snyder,
329:If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
330:The German settlers would defend Europe itself at the Ural Mountains, against the Asiatic barbarism that would be forced back to the east. Strife at civilization’s edge would test the manhood of coming generations of German settlers. ~ Timothy Snyder,
331:the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. ~ Timothy Snyder,
332:To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. ~ Timothy Snyder,
333:AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES USUALLY include a special riot police force whose task is to disperse citizens who seek to protest, and a secret state police force whose assignments include the murder of dissenters or others designated as enemies. ~ Timothy Snyder,
334:Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books. ~ Timothy Snyder,
335:Be kind to our language: avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books. ~ Timothy Snyder,
336:He places the sign in his window so that he can withdraw into daily life without trouble from the authorities. When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable. ~ Timothy Snyder,
337:Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
338:Who,” asked Hitler, “remembers the Red Indians?” For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade. ~ Timothy Snyder,
339:Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. ~ Timothy Snyder,
340:Be reflective if you must be armed: if you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. ~ Timothy Snyder,
341:In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like. Communists required all such groups to be officially registered and transformed them into institutions of control. ~ Timothy Snyder,
342:Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30 ~ Timothy Snyder,
343:The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
344:The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. ~ Timothy Snyder,
345:Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. In ~ Timothy Snyder,
346:Believe in truth: to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. ~ Timothy Snyder,
347:Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. ~ Timothy Snyder,
348:Father Stalin, look at this Collective farming is just bliss The hut’s in ruins, the barn’s all sagged All the horses broken nags And on the hut a hammer and sickle And in the hut death and famine No cows left, no pigs at all Just your picture on the wall ~ Timothy Snyder,
349:Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. ~ Timothy Snyder,
350:To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. ~ Timothy Snyder,
351:certain kinds of polities, communist party-states such as the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, are capable, in times of peace, of killing large numbers of their own citizens as a matter of deliberate policy. ~ Timothy Snyder,
352:Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion. ~ Timothy Snyder,
353:10 Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. ~ Timothy Snyder,
354:History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda. In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders' accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions. ~ Timothy Snyder,
355:Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. ~ Timothy Snyder,
356:Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
357:When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters. ~ Timothy Snyder,
358:Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We ~ Timothy Snyder,
359:The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. ~ Timothy Snyder,
360:In 1942, propaganda against Slavs would ease, as more of them came to work in the Reich. Hitler’s decision to kill Jews (rather than exploit their labor) was presumably facilitated by his simultaneous decision to exploit the labor of Slavs (rather than kill them). ~ Timothy Snyder,
361:It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant. ~ Timothy Snyder,
362:The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both ~ Timothy Snyder,
363:When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. ~ Timothy Snyder,
364:Ionesco’s aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening. ~ Timothy Snyder,
365:As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. ~ Timothy Snyder,
366:The poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that 'only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate. ~ Timothy Snyder,
367:Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz The poor child cries as alone he goes There’s no bread and there’s no fat The party’s ended all of that Seek not the gentle nor the mild A father’s eaten his own child The party man he beats and stamps And sends us to Siberian camps38 ~ Timothy Snyder,
368:Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow. ~ Timothy Snyder,
369:Stand out: someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow. ~ Timothy Snyder,
370:When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
371:The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1 ~ Timothy Snyder,
372:It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant. During ~ Timothy Snyder,
373:Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow. ~ Timothy Snyder,
374:In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires. ~ Timothy Snyder,
375:same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism ~ Timothy Snyder,
376:They handled hundreds of cases at a time, at a pace of sixty per hour or more; the life or death of an individual human was decided in a minute or less. In a single night the Leningrad troika, for example, sentenced to death 658 prisoners of the concentration camp at Solovki.55 ~ Timothy Snyder,
377:If the main pillar of the system is living a lie,” wrote Havel, “then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.” Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth. ~ Timothy Snyder,
378:The Soviet census of 1937 found eight million fewer people than projected: most of these were famine victims in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia, and the children that they did not then have. Stalin suppressed its findings and had the responsible demographers ~ Timothy Snyder,
379:Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection. ~ Timothy Snyder,
380:Adolf Hitler claimed that all that mattered was the struggle of the race, and that the elimination of Jews would restore nature's eternal balance. His Thousand-Year Reich lasted twelve years, and he committed suicide. A state does not endure because a leader mystifies a generation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
381:Every large-scale shooting action of the Holocaust (more than thirty-three thousand Jews murdered outside Kyiv, more than twenty-eight thousand outside Riga, and on and on) involved the regular German police. All in all, regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen. ~ Timothy Snyder,
382:Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
383:In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. ~ Timothy Snyder,
384:If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles. ~ Timothy Snyder,
385:It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. ~ Timothy Snyder,
386:a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans. ~ Timothy Snyder,
387:Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. ~ Timothy Snyder,
388:Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. ~ Timothy Snyder,
389:Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.” It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today. ~ Timothy Snyder,
390:It was in Poland that the Einsatzgruppen were to fulfill their mission as “ideological soldiers” by eliminating the educated classes of a defeated enemy. (They were in some sense killing their peers: fifteen of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando commanders had doctorates.) ~ Timothy Snyder,
391:When fascists or Nazis or communists did well in elections in the 1930s or ’40s, what followed was some combination of spectacle, repression, and salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
392:Like Hitler, the president used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking, and presented journalism as a campaign against himself. The president was on friendlier terms with the internet, his source for erroneous information that he passed on to millions of people. ~ Timothy Snyder,
393:When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. ~ Timothy Snyder,
394:Frank claimed that law was meant to serve the race, and so what seemed good for the race was therefore the law. With arguments like this, German lawyers could convince themselves that laws and rules were there to serve their projects of conquest and destruction, rather than to hinder them. ~ Timothy Snyder,
395:The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
396:We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgment on the basis of zero investment? We get what we pay for. ~ Timothy Snyder,
397:Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. ~ Timothy Snyder,
398:We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgement on the basis of zero investment? We get what we pay for. ~ Timothy Snyder,
399:We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgement on the basis of zero invetsment? We get what we pay for. ~ Timothy Snyder,
400:The word "Auschwitz" has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time that Auschwitz became a major killing facility. Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten. ~ Timothy Snyder,
401:The Germans murdered about as many non-Jews as Jews during the war, chiefly by starving Soviet prisoners of war (more than three million) and residents of besieged cities (more than a million) or by shooting civilians in “reprisals” (the better part of a million, chiefly Belarusians and Poles). ~ Timothy Snyder,
402:Collectivization, when completed, brought starvation to much of the Soviet peasantry. Millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia died horrible and humiliating deaths between 1930 and 1933. Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat. ~ Timothy Snyder,
403:What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
404:Achamos natural que paguemos por um encanador ou um mecânico, mas procuramos por nossas notícias de graça. Se não pagarmos por encanadores ou mecânicos não esperaremos beber água ou dirigir um carro. Por que, então, deveríamos formar nosso julgamento político com base em zero investimento?"(p. 77) ~ Timothy Snyder,
405:Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission. ~ Timothy Snyder,
406:The lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognising and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
407:You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. ~ Timothy Snyder,
408:You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual- and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. ~ Timothy Snyder,
409:emphasizing cultural differences, making politics about being rather than doing. In the United States, this meant playing to the grievances of whites even though they were a majority whose members held almost all the wealth; in Ukraine it meant exaggerating the difficulties of people who spoke Russian, ~ Timothy Snyder,
410:To find his successor, Yeltsin’s entourage organized a public opinion poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted into a number of films, most famously the television serial Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973. ~ Timothy Snyder,
411:As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton,
412:For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
413:Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark ~ Timothy Snyder,
414:For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so. James ~ Timothy Snyder,
415:The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning), and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel). Politicians in ~ Timothy Snyder,
416:For violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards. These first challenge the police and military, then penetrate the police and military, and finally transform the police and military. ~ Timothy Snyder,
417:Churchill said that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it himself. Yet in his vast histories and memoirs, he presented his own decisions as self-evident, and credited the British people and Britain’s allies. Today what Churchill did seems normal, and right. But at the time he had to stand out. ~ Timothy Snyder,
418:If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
419:We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call “post-truth,” and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. Yet there is little here that George Orwell did not capture seven decades ago in his notion of “doublethink. ~ Timothy Snyder,
420:the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
421:The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
422:Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation. National ~ Timothy Snyder,
423:Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some responsibility for the public's sense of truth. If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
424:It is gratifying to know that, whatever the course of events, you are helping others to do good. Many of us can afford to support some part of the vast network of charities that one of our former presidents called “a thousand points of light.” Those points of light are best seen, like stars at dusk, against a darkening sky. ~ Timothy Snyder,
425:Those who accept eternity politics do not expect to live longer, happier, or more fruitful lives. They accept suffering as a mark of righteousness if they think that guilty others are suffering more. Life is nasty, brutish, and short; the pleasure of life is that it can be made nastier, more brutish, and shorter for others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
426:Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much the same thing. Such reductionism, although temptingly elegant, is fatal. If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
427:We are in the presence,” said Winston Churchill, “of a crime without a name.” Its perpetrators were human beings, operating with initiative and creativity in political circumstances of their own making. State destruction did not alter politics, but rather created a new form of politics, which enabled a new kind of crime. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
428:Make new friends and march with them. For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything. Second, people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. ~ Timothy Snyder,
429:the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation. Do only Germans do such things? The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, contemplating Nazi atrocities, wanted to show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germans behaved as they had. ~ Timothy Snyder,
430:When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. ~ Timothy Snyder,
431:Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I found so much obedience,” Milgram remembered, “that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany. ~ Timothy Snyder,
432:That November, German authorities held parliamentary elections (without opposition) and a referendum (on an issue where the “correct” answer was known) to confirm the new order. Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope. ~ Timothy Snyder,
433:The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When ~ Timothy Snyder,
434:Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much. ~ Timothy Snyder,
435:The likelihood that Jews would be sent to their deaths depended upon the durability of institutions of state sovereignty and the continuity of prewar citizenship. These structures created the matrix within which individual choices were made, the constraints upon those who did evil, and the possibilities for those who wished to do good. ~ Timothy Snyder,
436:Christians might return to the foundational book, which as ever is very timely. Jesus preached that it “is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” We should be modest, for “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. ~ Timothy Snyder,
437:To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual, and thus the collapse of any political system that depends on individualism ~ Timothy Snyder,
438:Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. ~ Timothy Snyder,
439:Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny. ~ Timothy Snyder,
440:Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. T ~ Timothy Snyder,
441:Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much. ~ Timothy Snyder,
442:You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent. In Nazi Germany in 1933, people wore lapel pins that said “Yes” during the elections and referendum that confirmed the one-party state. ~ Timothy Snyder,
443:Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
444:We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the myth of an "end of history". In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return. ~ Timothy Snyder,
445:What is truth?" Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. ~ Timothy Snyder,
446:A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical. ~ Timothy Snyder,
447:But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer. ~ Timothy Snyder,
448:...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life... ~ Timothy Snyder,
449:lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
450:On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. ~ Timothy Snyder,
451:Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable. ~ Timothy Snyder,
452:Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.

P. 41 ~ Timothy Snyder,
453:Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with oth ~ Timothy Snyder,
454:If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
455:Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. ~ Timothy Snyder,
456:Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. ~ Timothy Snyder,
457:Beware the one-party state: the parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. ~ Timothy Snyder,
458:smile, a handshake, or a word of greeting—banal gestures in a normal situation—took on great significance. When friends, colleagues, and acquaintances looked away or crossed the street to avoid contact, fear grew. You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people ~ Timothy Snyder,
459:European public opinion was so polarized by 1936 that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler. This, of course, was the shared binary logic of National Socialism and the Popular Front: Hitler called his enemies “Marxists,” and Stalin called his “fascists.”34 They agreed that there was no middle ground. ~ Timothy Snyder,
460:having a passport is not a sign of surrender. On the contrary, it is liberating, since it creates the possibility of new experiences. It allows us to see how other people, sometimes wiser than we, react to similar problems. Since so much of what has happened in the last year is familiar to the rest of the world or from recent history, we must observe and listen. ~ Timothy Snyder,
461:When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can. ~ Timothy Snyder,
462:Here, perhaps, is a purpose for history, somewhere between the record of death and its constant reinterpretation. Only a history of mass killing can unite the numbers and the memories. Without history, the memories become private, which today means national; and the numbers become public, which is to say an instrument in the international competition for martyrdom. ~ Timothy Snyder,
463:So having a passport is not a sign of surrender. On the contrary, it is liberating, since it creates the possibility of new experiences. It allows us to see how other people, sometimes wiser than we, react to similar problems. Since so much of what has happened in the last year is familiar to the rest of the world or from recent history, we must observe and listen. ~ Timothy Snyder,
464:If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. Professions ~ Timothy Snyder,
465:All citizens do have a measure of control, at least in democracies where their votes are counted, of how they belong to their nations. Perhaps they will have more confidence in unconventional choices if they see that each nation's founders were disobedient and unpredictable, men and women of imagination and ambition. The steel of every national monument was once molten. ~ Timothy Snyder,
466:Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life. ~ Timothy Snyder,
467:A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. Democracy ~ Timothy Snyder,
468:As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton,
469:Extremism' certainly sounds bad, and governments often try to make it sound worse by using the word 'terrorism' in the same sentence. But the word has little meaning. There is no doctrine called 'extremism.' When tyrants speak of 'extremists', they just mean people who are not in the mainstream - as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. ~ Timothy Snyder,
470:Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups … with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain … confidence, and indeed a certain kind of power. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) ~ Bandy X Lee,
471:Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places were the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection. ~ Timothy Snyder,
472:One of Russia’s long-range bombers, a Tu-95 built to drop atomic bombs on the United States, was renamed “Izborsk” in honor of the club. In case anyone failed to notice this sign of Kremlin backing, Prokhanov was invited to fly in the cockpit of the aircraft. In the years to come, this and other Tu-95s would regularly approach the airspace of the member states of the European Union, ~ Timothy Snyder,
473:The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity. ~ Timothy Snyder,
474:The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission. ~ Timothy Snyder,
475:What would have happened if Poland, rather than the Soviet Union, had accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop’s proposals in 1939? Would the Soviet Union have withstood an invasion of Germany allied with Poland and, perhaps, Romania and Hungary as well? That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war. ~ Timothy Snyder,
476:Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
477:Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
478:Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant. During ~ Timothy Snyder,
479:After the Second World War, Europeans, Americans, and others created myths of righteous resistance to Hitler. In the 1930s, however, the dominant attitudes had been accommodation and admiration. By 1940 most Europeans had made their peace with the seemingly irresistible power of Nazi Germany. Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First. ~ Timothy Snyder,
480:In the name of defending and modernizing the Soviet Union, Stalin oversaw the starvation of millions and the shooting of three quarters of a million people in the 1930s. Stalin killed his own citizens no less efficiently than Hitler killed the citizens of other countries. Of the fourteen million people deliberately murdered in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, a third belong in the Soviet account. ~ Timothy Snyder,
481:Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side. ~ Timothy Snyder,
482:In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had. ~ Timothy Snyder,
483:odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. ~ Timothy Snyder,
484:Whether the recollection is of fascist Italy in the 1920s, of Nazi Germany of the 1930s, of the Soviet Union during the Great Terror of 1937–38, or of the purges in communist eastern Europe in the 1940s and ’50s, people who were living in fear of repression remembered how their neighbors treated them. A smile, a handshake, or a word of greeting—banal gestures in a normal situation—took on great significance. ~ Timothy Snyder,
485:The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. ~ Timothy Snyder,
486:The authoritarians of today are also terror managers, and if anything they are rather more creative. Consider the current Russian regime, so admired by the president. Vladimir Putin not only came to power in an incident that strikingly resembled the Reichstag fire, he then used a series of terror attacks—real, questionable, and fake—to remove obstacles to total power in Russia and to assault democratic neighbors. ~ Timothy Snyder,
487:When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer. ~ Timothy Snyder,
488:Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. ~ Timothy Snyder,
489:When politicians today invoke terrorism they are speaking, of course, of an actual danger. But when they try to train us to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two. Sometimes we do indeed gain one by losing the other, and sometimes not. People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both. ~ Timothy Snyder,
490:We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
491:the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. ~ Timothy Snyder,
492:In a new Russian colonialism that began in 2013, Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighboring Ukrainians out of existence or presented them as sub-Russians. In characterizations that recall what Hitler said about Ukrainians (and Russians), Russian leaders described Ukraine as an artificial entity with no history, culture, and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans, and Americans. In ~ Timothy Snyder,
493:Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become more dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth. ~ Timothy Snyder,
494:Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become most dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth. ~ Timothy Snyder,
495:Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of political parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. DO NOT FALL FOR IT. ~ Timothy Snyder,
496:In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans began to separate the Jews not into two but into three groups: the men, the older women, and the young women. They sent the young women into the gas last, because they liked to look at their naked bodies in the cold. By then the corpses were burned rather than buried. The pyres were huge grills made from railway rails laid upon concrete pillars, some thirty meters across. By spring 1943, fires ~ Timothy Snyder,
497:The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. ~ Timothy Snyder,
498:All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. The cynic who decides that there is no truth is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant. ~ Timothy Snyder,
499:Before you deride the “mainstream media,” note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult. So try for yourself to write a proper article, involving work in the real world: traveling, interviewing, maintaining relationships with sources, researching in written records, verifying everything, writing and revising drafts, all on a tight and unforgiving schedule. ~ Timothy Snyder,
500:Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-fascism. ~ Timothy Snyder,
501:More than any of the other new states that came into being at war’s end, Poland changed the balance of power in eastern Europe. It was not large enough to be a great power, but it was large enough to be a problem for any great power with plans of expansion. It separated Russia from Germany, for the first time in more than a century. Poland’s very existence created a buffer to both Russian and German power, and was much resented in Moscow and Berlin. ~ Timothy Snyder,
502:Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the secession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. ~ Timothy Snyder,
503:Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. ~ Timothy Snyder,
504:The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. ~ Timothy Snyder,
505:The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar. ~ Timothy Snyder,
506:The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When ~ Timothy Snyder,
507:In fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe. And indeed some of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the German task forces that perpetrated some of the murders, were tried at Nuremberg and later in West German courts. But even these trials were a kind of minimization of the scale of the crime. Not the SS commanders alone, but essentially all of the thousands of men who served under their command were murderers. ~ Timothy Snyder,
508:Over a million lives were shortened by exhaustion and disease in the Soviet Gulag between 1933 and 1945—as distinct from the Soviet killing fields and the Soviet hunger regions, where some six million people died, about four million of them in the bloodlands. Ninety percent of those who entered the Gulag left it alive. Most of the people who entered German concentration camps (as opposed to the German gas chambers, death pits, and prisoner-of-war camps) also survived. ~ Timothy Snyder,
509:Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders. ~ Timothy Snyder,
510:If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. ~ Timothy Snyder,
511:Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler’s language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning), and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel). ~ Timothy Snyder,
512:We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Our own tradition demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
513:We share Hitler's planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. if we think that we are the victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world. ~ Timothy Snyder,
514:Both fascism and communism [in the 20th Century] were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. They put a face on on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
515:Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler’s language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning), and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel). Politicians ~ Timothy Snyder,
516:To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling. ~ Timothy Snyder,
517:Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct.” Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized. A ~ Timothy Snyder,
518:Dead human beings provided retrospective arguments for the rectitude of policy. Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory. ~ Timothy Snyder,
519:Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who endured Stalin’s Gulag while his brother was sheltering Jews, wrote that “a man can be human only under human conditions.” The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal. The state is for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected. The state endures to create a sense of durability. ~ Timothy Snyder,
520:Western journalists are also taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap. ~ Timothy Snyder,
521:When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy. The Russian recap of the first telephone call between the president and Vladimir Putin is telling: The two men “shared the opinion that it is necessary to join forces against the common enemy number one: international terrorism and extremism. ~ Timothy Snyder,
522:The danger we now face is of a passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity, from a naive and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy. The politics of inevitability is terribly vulnerable to the kind of shock it has just received. When something shatters the myth, when our time falls out of joint, we scramble to find some other way to organise what we experience. The path of least resistance leads directly from inevitability to eternity. ~ Timothy Snyder,
523:Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. This sort of work can be done at the local and state levels. We can be sure that the elections of 2018, assuming they take place, will be a test of American traditions. So there is much to do in the meantime. 4 Take responsibility for the face of the world. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
524:The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So long as there was a contest between communist and capitalist systems, and so long as the memory of fascism and Nazism was alive, Americans had to pay some attention to history and preserve the concepts that allowed them to imagine alternative futures. Yet once we accepted the politics of inevitability, we assumed that history was no longer relevant. If everything in the past is governed by a known tendency, then there is no need to learn the details. ~ Timothy Snyder,
525:The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
526:Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.9 ~ Timothy Snyder,
527:For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so. After the Reichstag fire, Hannah Arendt wrote that “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander. ~ Timothy Snyder,
528:Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armoury that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell's and Bradbury's books could not do this - but we still can. ~ Timothy Snyder,
529:Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can. What ~ Timothy Snyder,
530:The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). ~ Timothy Snyder,
531:Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. ~ Timothy Snyder,
532:There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream—as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny. ~ Timothy Snyder,
533:If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable. ~ Timothy Snyder,
534:History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have. ~ Timothy Snyder,
535:When we take an active interest in matters of doubtful relevance at moments that are chosen by tyrants and spooks, we participate in the demolition of our own political order. To be sure, we might feel that we are doing nothing more than going along with everyone else. This is true - and it is what Arendt described as the devolution of a society into a "mob." We can try to solve this problem individually, by securing our own computers; we can also try to solve it collectively, by supporting, for example, organisations that are concerned with human rights. ~ Timothy Snyder,
536:The lesson that Hitler had drawn from the Balkans, Schmitt presented as a purely German idea: There is no such thing as domestic politics as such, since everything begins with the confrontation with a chosen foreign enemy. The definition of the domestic was that which had to be manipulated to destroy what is foreign. Germany itself had no content. The idea of the people, the Volk, was there to persuade Germans to throw themselves into their murderous destiny as a race. The people were only what they proved themselves to be, which without struggle was nothing. ~ Timothy Snyder,
537:During the campaign of 2016, we took a step toward totalitarianism without even noticing by accepting as normal the violation of electronic privacy. Whether it is done by American or Russian intelligence agencies, or for that matter by any institution, the theft, discussion, or publication of personal communications destroys a basic foundation of our rights. If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. ~ Timothy Snyder,
538:The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin’s era, had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems. Revived today in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes. ~ Timothy Snyder,
539:In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the ~ Timothy Snyder,
540:In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the gate? If ~ Timothy Snyder,
541:complete extirpation of the concept of Jews.” For the Poles, Madagascar was an actual island in the actual Indian Ocean, an actual possession of the actual French empire, an actual site of an actual exploratory mission, a subject of actual political discussions, one of two places (along with Palestine) that were seriously considered as destination points for a mass migration of Polish Jewry. Polish leaders did not grasp that for the Nazis the issue was not the feasibility of one deportation plan, but the creation of general conditions under which Jews could be destroyed one way or another. ~ Timothy Snyder,
542:If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in places that the Soviet Union had just conquered. Everyone in the western Soviet Union knew about the mass murder of the Jews, for the same reason that the Germans did: In the East the method of mass murder required tens of thousands of participants and it was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people. The Germans left, but their death pits remained. If the Holocaust is identified only with Auschwitz, this experience, too, can be excluded from history and commemoration. ~ Timothy Snyder,
543:Our appetite for the secret, thought Arendt, is dangerously political. Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything. As we learned from these email bombs, this mechanism works even when what is revealed is of no interest. The revelation of what was once confidential becomes the story itself. ~ Timothy Snyder,
544:Right before the election, Russia placed three thousand advertisements on Facebook, and promoted them as memes across at least 180 accounts on Instagram. Russia could do so without including any disclaimers about who had paid for the ads, leaving Americans with the impression that foreign propaganda was an American discussion. As researchers began to calculate the extent of American exposure to Russian propaganda, Facebook deleted more data. This suggests that the Russian campaign was embarrassingly effective. Later, the company told investors that as many as sixty million accounts were fake. ~ Timothy Snyder,
545:The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
546:It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. ...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.

To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history. ~ Timothy Snyder,
547:Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth. If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. We ~ Timothy Snyder,
548:You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent. In Nazi Germany in 1933, people wore lapel pins that said "Yes" during the elections and referendum that confirmed the one-party state. In Austria in 1938, people who had not previously been Nazis began to wear swastika pins. What might seem like a gesture of pride can be a source of exclusion. In the Europe of the 1930s and '40s, some people chose to wear swastikas, and then others had to wear yellow stars. ~ Timothy Snyder,
549:legitimate comparison must begin with life rather than death. Death is not a solution, but only a subject. It must be a source of disquiet, never of satisfaction. It must not, above all, supply the rounding rhetorical flourish that brings a story to a defined end. Since life gives meaning to death, rather than the other way around, the important question is not: what political, intellectual, literary, or psychological closure can be drawn from the fact of mass killing? Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song. The important question is: how could (how can) so many human lives be brought to a violent end? ~ Timothy Snyder,
550:Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. "Ethnic Ukrainians" must be a group that acts in one way, and "ethnic Russians" in another. This is about as true as to say that "ethnic Americans" vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future. ~ Timothy Snyder,
551:The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

pp. 181-182 ~ Timothy Snyder,
552:Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, an demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed. ~ Timothy Snyder,
553:Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). ~ Timothy Snyder,
554:Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, of each of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have. ~ Timothy Snyder,
555:It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: “If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people.” Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, “the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east. ~ Timothy Snyder,
556:Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). Christians ~ Timothy Snyder,
557:Nevertheless, disorderly violence within the Reich itself was revealed to be a dead end. Most of German public opinion was opposed to the chaos. Visible despair led to expressions of sympathy with Jews, rather than the spiritual distancing that Nazis expected. Of course, it was possible for Germans not to wish to see violence inflicted upon Jews while at the same time not wishing to see Jews at all. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich immediately drew the conclusion that inspiring pogroms inside Germany had been a mistake. Not long after they would organize pogroms in much the same way as Goebbels had, but beyond the borders of Germany, in time of war, in places where German force had destroyed the state. ~ Timothy Snyder,
558:Extremism certainly sounds bad, and governments often try to make it sound worse by using the word terrorism in the same sentence. But the word has little meaning. There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream—as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny. ~ Timothy Snyder,
559:In the fury of their assault, Ilyin’s ideas clarify individualism as a political virtue, the one that enables all the others. Are we individuals who see that there are many good things, and that politics involves responsible consideration and choice rather than a vision of totality? Do we see that there are other individuals in the world who might be at work on the same project? Do we understand that being an individual requires a constant consideration of endless factuality, a constant selection among many irreducible passions? The virtue of individualism becomes visible in the throes of our moment, but it will abide only if we see history and ourselves within it, and accept our share of responsibility. ~ Timothy Snyder,
560:What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It ~ Timothy Snyder,
561:Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. ~ Timothy Snyder,
562:As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did. ~ Timothy Snyder,
563:The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
564:The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation. ~ Timothy Snyder,
565:American and British forces reached none of the bloodlands and saw none of the major killing sites. It is not just that American and British forces saw none of the places where the Soviets killed, leaving the crimes of Stalinism to be documented after the end of the Cold War and the opening of the archives. It is that they never saw the places where the Germans killed, meaning that understanding of Hitler’s crimes has taken just as long. The photographs and films of German concentration camps were the closest that most westerners ever came to perceiving the mass killing. Horrible though these images were, they were only hints at the history of the bloodlands. They are not the whole story; sadly, they are not even an introduction. ~ Timothy Snyder,
566:burned at Treblinka day and night, sometimes consuming the corpses of decomposed bodies exhumed from the earth by Jewish laborers, sometimes the bodies of those who had just been asphyxiated. Women, with more fatty tissue, burned better than men; so the laborers learned to put them on the bottom of the pile. The bellies of pregnant women would tend to burst, such that the fetus could be seen inside. In the cold nights of spring 1943, the Germans would stand by the flame, and drink, and warm themselves. Once again, human beings were reduced to calories, units of warmth. The burning was to remove any evidence of the crime, but the Jewish laborers made sure that this was not achieved. They left whole skeletons intact, and buried messages in bottles for others to find.48 ~ Timothy Snyder,
567:The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. ~ Timothy Snyder,
568:On February 2, 1933, for example, a leading newspaper for German Jews published an editorial expressing this mislaid trust: We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check … and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture. ~ Timothy Snyder,
569:Jews had been so numerous in Poland, and because the share of urban property owned by Jews had been high, this amounted to a dramatic transformation of the whole society. It was not that all Poles were poorer than all Jews before the war. Nor was it the case that Poles prospered during the occupation—the scale of destruction, even in the countryside, was something inconceivable in western Europe. What was telling for the future was the German politics of relative deprivation: taking something from everyone, but taking everything from the Jews, and then taking their lives. This created the gaps—the empty apartments and commercial and professional niches—that Poles filled with all the greater determination given their losses during the war and their uncertainty about what was coming next. ~ Timothy Snyder,
570:Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible. It is impossible to carry out democratic elections, try cases at court, design and enforce laws, or indeed manage any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the state also have access to violence. For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics. Such groups can take the form of a paramilitary wing of a political party, the personal bodyguard of a particular politician—or apparently spontaneous citizens’ initiatives, which usually turn out ~ Timothy Snyder,
571:Some spoke critically of neoliberalism, the sense that the idea of the free market has somehow crowded out all others. This was true enough, but the very use of the word was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony. Other critics spoke of the need for disruption, borrowing a term from the analysis of technological innovations. When applied to politics, it again carries the implication that nothing can really change, that the chaos that excites us will eventually be absorbed by a self-regulating system. The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. — ~ Timothy Snyder,
572:History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people. European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. ~ Timothy Snyder,
573:In 1976, Stephen King published a short story, “I Know What You Need,” about the courting of a young woman. Her suitor was a young man who could read her mind but did not tell her so. He simply appeared with what she wanted at the moment, beginning with strawberry ice cream for a study break. Step by step he changed her life, making her dependent upon him by giving her what she thought she wanted at a certain moment, before she herself had a chance to reflect. Her best friend realized that something disconcerting was happening, investigated, and learned the truth: “That is not love,” she warned. “That’s rape.” The internet is a bit like this. It knows much about us, but interacts with us without revealing that this is so. It makes us unfree by arousing our worst tribal impulses and placing them at the service of unseen others. ~ Timothy Snyder,
574:The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country's history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. ~ Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,
575:In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'

pp. 205-206 ~ Timothy Snyder,
576:In the euphoria of victory, Nazis tried to organize a boycott of Jewish shops. This was not very successful at first. But the practice of marking one firm as “Jewish” and another as “Aryan” with paint on the windows or walls did affect the way Germans thought about household economics. A shop marked “Jewish” had no future. It became an object of covetous plans. As property was marked as ethnic, envy transformed ethics. If shops could be “Jewish,” what about other companies and properties? The wish that Jews might disappear, perhaps suppressed at first, rose as it was leavened by greed. Thus the Germans who marked shops as “Jewish” participated in the process by which Jews really did disappear—as did people who simply looked on. Accepting the markings as a natural part of the urban landscape was already a compromise with a murderous future. You ~ Timothy Snyder,
577:When Americans think of freedom, we usually imagine a contest between a lone individual and a powerful government. We tend to conclude that the individual should be empowered and the government kept at bay. This is all well and good. But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer. Insofar as we take pride in these activities, and come to know others who do so as well, we are creating civil society. Sharing in an undertaking teaches us that we can trust people beyond a narrow circle of friends and families, and helps us to recognize authorities from whom we can learn. ~ Timothy Snyder,
578:Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation. Fascists ruled for a decade or two, leaving behind an intact intellectual legacy that grows more relevant by the day. Communists ruled for longer, for nearly seven decades in the Soviet Union, and more than four decades in much of eastern Europe. They proposed rule by a disciplined party elite with a monopoly on reason that would guide society toward a certain future according to supposedly fixed laws of history. We ~ Timothy Snyder,
579:The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. ~ Timothy Snyder,
580:The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. Democracy ~ Timothy Snyder,
581:Stalin’s position in east Asia was now rather good. If the Japanese meant to fight the United States for control of the Pacific, it was all but inconceivable that they would confront the Soviets in Siberia. Stalin no longer had to fear a two-front war. What was more, the Japanese attack was bound to bring the United States into the war—as an ally of the Soviet Union. By early 1942 the Americans had already engaged the Japanese in the Pacific. Soon American supply ships would reach Soviet Pacific ports, unhindered by Japanese submarines—since the Japanese were neutral in the Soviet-German war. A Red Army taking American supplies from the east was an entirely different foe than a Red Army concerned about a Japanese attack from the east. Stalin just had to exploit American aid, and encourage the Americans to open a second front in Europe. Then the Germans would be encircled, and the Soviet victory certain. ~ Timothy Snyder,
582:Confessions were elicited by torture. The NKVD and other police organs applied the “conveyer method,” which meant uninterrupted questioning, day and night. This was complemented by the “standing method,” in which suspects were forced to stand in a line near a wall, and beaten if they touched it or fell asleep. Under time pressure to make quotas, officers often simply beat prisoners until they confessed. Stalin authorized this on 21 July 1937. In Soviet Belarus, interrogating officers would hold prisoners’ heads down in the latrine and then beat them when they tried to rise. Some interrogators carried with them draft confessions, and simply filled in the prisoner’s personal details and changed an item here or there by hand. Others simply forced prisoners to sign blank pages and then filled them in later at leisure. In this way Soviet organs “unmasked” the “enemy,” delivering his “thoughts” to the files.54 ~ Timothy Snyder,
583:In Ukraine’s cities—Kharkiv, Kiev, Stalino, Dnipropetrovsk—hundreds of thousands of people waited each day for a simple loaf of bread. In Kharkiv, the republic’s capital, Jones saw a new sort of misery. People appeared at two o’clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until seven. On an average day forty thousand people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. Some were so weak from hunger that they could not stand without the ballast of strangers. The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. Pregnant women and maimed war veterans had lost their right to buy out of turn, and had to wait in line with the rest if they wanted to eat. Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear. ~ Timothy Snyder,
584:Citizenship in modern states means access to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has the reputation of killing Jews; it would be closer to the truth to say that it was the removal of bureaucracy that killed Jews. So long as state sovereignty persisted, so did the limits and possibilities afforded by bureaucracy. In most offices, time is slowed and matters are considered, perhaps with the help of petitions or bribes. When people in sovereign states beyond Germany wished to be noble, bureaucracy provided them with the opportunity to frame their arguments on behalf of individual Jews in the pragmatic or patriotic terms that employees of the state could understand and endorse. The bureaucracies beyond Germany also exhibited the typical tendencies of passing the buck, awaiting clear orders from higher authorities, and insisting on clarity of expression and proper paperwork. Many of the things that make bureaucracies annoying in daily life could and did mean survival for Jews. ~ Timothy Snyder,
585:The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so. ~ Timothy Snyder,
586:Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did. ~ Timothy Snyder,
587:How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?

Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food.

p. 158 ~ Timothy Snyder,
588:This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of "subhumans," only to import millions of other "subhumans" to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves - had they not been abroad killing "subhumans." The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves had they not been abroad killing.)

pp. 244-246 ~ Timothy Snyder,
589:Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar as the Holocaust is limited to Auschwitz, it can be isolated from most of the nations it touched as well as from the landscapes it altered. The gates and walls of Auschwitz can seem to contain an evil that, in fact, extended from Paris to Smolensk. Auschwitz, a German word defining a bit of territory that before and after the war was in Poland, does not seem like an actual place. It is surrounded by mental as well as physical barbed wire. Auschwitz calls to mind mechanized killing, or ruthless bureaucracy, or the march of modernity, or even the endpoint of enlightenment. This makes the murder of children, women, and men seem like an inhuman process in which forces larger than the human were entirely responsible. When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters. ~ Timothy Snyder,
590:Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might suit our moment. Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here is perhaps not a great work of art; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is better. One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or your children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again. Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). Christians ~ Timothy Snyder,
591:The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it. ~ Timothy Snyder,
592:The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it. 20 Be as courageous as you can. If ~ Timothy Snyder,
593:Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.
Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.

P. 196 ~ Timothy Snyder,
594:Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans. ~ Timothy Snyder,
595:What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ. It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country. The ~ Timothy Snyder,
596:Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary.

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can. ~ Timothy Snyder,
597:As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.

Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer. ~ Timothy Snyder,

IN CHAPTERS [0/0]









WORDNET














IN WEBGEN [10000/296]

Wikipedia - Apple of Discord
Wikipedia - Category:Discordians
Wikipedia - Coleophora discordella -- Species of moth
Wikipedia - Discord and Harmony -- 1914 film by Allan Dwan
Wikipedia - Discordian calendar -- Calendar
Wikipedia - Discordianism -- Religion & parody religion
Wikipedia - Discord (software) -- Software for Internet communication
Wikipedia - Eris (mythology) -- Greek goddess of chaos and discord
Wikipedia - Eupithecia discordans -- Species of moth
Wikipedia - Internet troll -- Person who sows discord on the Internet
Wikipedia - List of Discordian works
Wikipedia - Malaclypse the Younger -- American writer and founder of Discordianism
Wikipedia - Principia Discordia
Wikipedia - Serodiscordant -- Mixed status, where one partner is infected by HIV and the other is not
Wikipedia - Template talk:Discordianism
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:Discord -- Use of Discord on Wikimedia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13648359-the-golden-apple-of-discord
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16059957-discordia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19371855-principia-discordia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529332-historia-discordia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22614400-discordia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2459807.In_Discordance_with_the_Scriptures
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25070534-discord
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25277182-past-life-strife-rise-of-the-discordant
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32452040-ages-of-discord
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3327554-selectivity-and-discord
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34032920-la-grande-discorde
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35969204-the-opus-discordia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448989-the-opus-discordia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37665173-house-of-discord
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38335842-daughter-of-discord
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39331232-discordia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7516001.Discord_s_Apple
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89937.Principia_Discordia_Or_How_I_Found_Goddess_and_What_I_Did_to_Her_When_I_Found_Her
http://aurakingdom.wikia.com/wiki/Aura_Kingdom_Wiki:Discord
https://googology.wikia.org/wiki/Googology_Wiki:Discord
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Apple_of_Discord
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Discordianism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Discordianism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Eris_(mythology)#Discordianism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/File:Golden_Apple_of_Discord_by_Jacob_Jordaens.jpg
https://warszawa.wikia.org/wiki/Warszawikia:Discord
selforum - agnosticism discordant note
dedroidify.blogspot - daily-dedroidify-discordianism
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Blog/DiscordedWhooves
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Blog/DiscorderlyConduct
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/FriendshipIsMagicDiscord
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/BrideOfDiscord
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/Discordant
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/DiscordsNewBusiness
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppleOfDiscord
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DiscordTropes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/SakuraDiscord
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/DiscordanceAxis
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS7E12DiscordantHarmony
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Roleplay/DiscordPlaysStellaris
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/AndThusDiscord
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/DarcDiscordia
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/Discord_and_Dine
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/Discordia
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/DiScOrDTHeLuNaTiC
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/Harpdiscord
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Discord
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:GoldenAppleDiscord.svg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Principia_Discordia
https://myanimelist.net/manga/85793/Sakura_Discord
Barefoot in the Park (1967) ::: 7.0/10 -- G | 1h 46min | Comedy, Romance | 25 May 1967 (USA) -- Paul, a conservative young lawyer, marries the vivacious Corie. Their highly passionate relationship descends into comical discord in a five-flight New York City walk-up apartment. Director: Gene Saks Writers:
Content Cop ::: TV-MA | 20min | Documentary, Comedy, Crime | TV Series (2015 ) In an effort to bring justice to the YouTube community, former police officer Ian Carter takes on the title of "Content Cop". Using his old police uniform and raw wit, Ian sets out to stop the creators that bring nothing but discord to his online city. Stars: Ian Carter, Calvin Vail, Bryan Le
https://discordia.fandom.com
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https://among-us.fandom.com/wiki/Innersloth_Discord_server
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https://bejeweled.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_Server_Bejeweled_Records
https://bigcitygreens.fandom.com/wiki/Big_City_Greens_Wiki:Discord
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https://blur.fandom.com/wiki/Blur_Wiki:Discord
https://campcamp.fandom.com/wiki/Camp_Camp_Wiki:Discord
https://candycrush.fandom.com/wiki/Candy_Crush_Saga_Wiki:Discord
https://characters.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
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https://combatarms.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_Servers
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https://comunitat.fandom.com/wiki/Ajuda:Perfil/Discord
https://craigofthecreek.fandom.com/wiki/Craig_of_the_Creek_Wiki:Discord
https://danball.fandom.com/wiki/Dan-Ball_Discord
https://dev.fandom.com/wiki/Dev_Wiki:Discord
https://dev.fandom.com/wiki/DiscordIntegrator
https://dev.fandom.com/wiki/DiscordIntegrator/instructions
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Diablo_Wiki:Discord
https://diepio.fandom.com/wiki/Project:Discord
https://discord.gg/Fandom
https://discord.gg/fandom
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Adam_Gorightly
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Bavarian_Illuminati
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Blog:Recent_posts
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Bowling_alley
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Bureflux
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Calendar
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Chaostic_Taber-Nickle_of_Discordia
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Confuflux
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Confusion
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discordian
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discordian_Construction_Company
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discordianism
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discordian_Wiki:Community_Portal
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discordian_Wiki:Policy
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discordipedia
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_(My_Little_Pony)
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/DrJon_Swabey
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Eris
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Erisian_Liberation_Front
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Green_Arkleseizure
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Help_desk
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Holyday
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Intermittens
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Law_of_Fives
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_chicks_and_dicks_Zeus_has_banged
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Local_Sitemap
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Malaclypse_the_Younger
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Miley_Spears
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Mojoday
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Mungday
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Norton_Cabal
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Omar_Khayyam_Ravenhurst
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Operation_Mindfuck
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Pope_cards
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Pope_Hildegard
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Prickle-Prickle
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Princess_Unicornia
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Professor_Cramulus
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Chao
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Syaday
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ancient_Illuminated_Seers_of_Bavaria
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hidden_Temple_of_The_Happy_Jesus
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Uncyclopedia
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Whollyday
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Wikipedia
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/YOLD
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Zaraday
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Song_of_discord
https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Age_Wiki:Discord
https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_House
https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/Dream_Logos_and_Fiction_Wiki_Discord_crisis
https://dr-stone.fandom.com/wiki/Dr._Stone_Wiki:Discord_Policy
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki:Discord_Moderators
https://elinor-wonders-why.fandom.com/wiki/Elinor_Wonders_Why_Wiki:Discord
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Isle_of_Discord
https://etrian.fandom.com/wiki/Etrian_Odyssey_Wiki:Discord
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki:Discord_Library
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Cacophonous_Discord
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Wiki:Discord
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Feed_The_Beast_Wiki:Discord
https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://garoseries.fandom.com/wiki/Garo_Wiki:Tokupedia_Discord
https://glitchtale.fandom.com/wiki/Glitchtale_Wiki:Glitchtale_Discord
https://glitchtechs.fandom.com/wiki/Glitch_Techs_Wiki:Discord
https://godofhighschool.fandom.com/wiki/The_God_Of_High_School_Wiki:Official_Discord_Server
https://guns.fandom.com/wiki/Gun_Wiki:Discord
https://halo.fandom.com/wiki/Halo_Alpha:Discord
https://harveygirlsforever.fandom.com/wiki/Harvey_Girls_Forever!_Wiki:Discord
https://helltaker.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://help.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://hildatheseries.fandom.com/wiki/Hilda_A_Netflix_Original_Series_Wiki:Discord
https://hypotheticalhurricanes.fandom.com/wiki/Hypothetical_Hurricanes_Wiki:Discord_Chat
https://i-am-the-sorcerer-king.fandom.com/wiki/I_Am_The_Sorcerer_King_Wiki:Discord_policy
https://inheritance.fandom.com/wiki/Inheriwiki:Discord
https://jedipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Jedipedia:Discord
https://justcause.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://justcause.fandom.com/wiki/Just_Cause_Wiki:Discord
https://kamenrider.fandom.com/wiki/Kamen_Rider_Wiki:Tokupedia_Discord
https://king-of-thieves.fandom.com/wiki/Unofficial_King_of_Theives_Discord_Server
https://letsgolunacanada.fandom.com/wiki/Let's_Go_Luna!_Wiki:Discord
https://letsgoluna.fandom.com/wiki/Let%27s_Go_Luna!_Wiki:Discord
https://letsgoluna.fandom.com/wiki/Let's_Go_Luna!_Wiki:Discord
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://lovenikki.fandom.com/wiki/Love_Nikki-Dress_UP_Queen!_Wiki:Discord
https://maomao.fandom.com/wiki/Mao_Mao_Heroes_of_Pure_Heart_Wiki:Discord
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Memory_Alpha:Discord
https://meta-runner.fandom.com/wiki/Meta_Runner_Wiki:Discord
https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Wikitroid:Discord
https://mewkledreamy.fandom.com/wiki/Mewkledreamy_Wiki:Discord
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki:Discord
https://miraculousladybug.fandom.com/wiki/Miraculous_Ladybug_Wiki:Discord_Policy
https://mixels.fandom.com/wiki/Mixels_Wiki:Mixels_Wiki_Discord
https://molly-of-denali.fandom.com/wiki/Molly_of_Denali_Wiki:Discord
https://mopeio.fandom.com/wiki/Discord.gg/nQAVB9c
https://mopeio.fandom.com/wiki/Project:Rules/Discord_Rules
https://mountandblade.fandom.com/wiki/Mount_&_Blade_Wiki:Discord
https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/MSPA_Wiki:Discord
https://myheroacademia.fandom.com/wiki/My_Hero_Academia_Law_Book:Discord_Policy
https://mysticons.fandom.com/wiki/Mysticons_Wiki:Discord
https://mythus.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_Apple_of_Discord
https://ok-ko.fandom.com/wiki/OK_K.O.!_Wiki:Discord
https://omniscient-readers-viewpoint.fandom.com/wiki/Omniscient_Reader's_Viewpoint_Wiki:Discord
https://onmyoji.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://owarinoseraph.fandom.com/wiki/Owari_no_Seraph_Wiki:Discord_Policy
https://pathologic.fandom.com/wiki/Pathologic_Wiki:Discord
https://pixelgun.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_Server
https://pixelgun.fandom.com/wiki/Pixel_Gun_Wiki:Discord
https://powerrangers.fandom.com/wiki/RangerWiki:Tokupedia_Discord
https://random-ness.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_(Integration)_is_Live!
https://readyjetgo.fandom.com/wiki/Ready_Jet_Go!_Wikia:Discord
https://rebeccaparham.fandom.com/wiki/Let_Me_Explain_Studios_Wiki:Discord
https://redstorm.fandom.com/wiki/Discord.me/redstorm
https://sci.fandom.com/wiki/Summer_Camp_Island_Wiki:Discord
https://sel.fandom.com/wiki/Lain_Discord_Server
https://shadowhunters.fandom.com/wiki/The_Shadowhunters'_Wiki:Discord
https://sml.fandom.com/wiki/SuperMarioLogan_Wiki:Discord_Server
https://soap.fandom.com/wiki/Project:Discord
https://soap.fandom.com/wiki/SOAP_Wiki:Discord
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/South_Park_Archives:Discord
https://spilnota.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://spolecznosc.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://spolecznosc.fandom.com/wiki/Pomoc:Profil/Discord
https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/SporeWiki:Discord
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_missile
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_missile/Legends
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wookieepedia:Discord
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/central/images/c/ce/Discord_field_location_check_on_Fandom.png/revision/latest?cb=20200905015113
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/central/images/e/e3/Discord_field_location_on_Fandom.png/revision/latest?cb=20200905014337
https://steven-universe.fandom.com/wiki/Steven_Universe_Wiki:Discord
https://supermarioglitchy4.fandom.com/wiki/SuperMarioGlitchy4_Wiki:Discord
https://sweethomewebtoon.fandom.com/wiki/Home_Sweet_Home_Wiki:Discord
https://swtor.fandom.com/wiki/SWTOR_Discord
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Discordia
https://teppen.fandom.com/wiki/TEPPEN_Wiki:Discord
https://theedgechronicles.fandom.com/wiki/The_Edge_Chronicles_wiki:DiscordLink
https://thefungies.fandom.com/wiki/The_Fungies!_Wiki:Discord
https://thefutureofeuropes.fandom.com/wiki/Mapperdonian_Discord
https://the-legendary-moonlight-sculptor.fandom.com/wiki/Discord
https://theloudhouse.fandom.com/wiki/The_Loud_House_Encyclopedia:Discord
https://theowlhouse.fandom.com/wiki/The_Owl_House_Wiki:Discord
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https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/TibiaWiki:Discord
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https://ukpolitics.fandom.com/wiki/UK_Politics_Wiki:Discord_server
https://undertale.fandom.com/wiki/Undertale_Wiki:Discord
https://unicornwarriorseternal.fandom.com/wiki/Unicorn:_Warriors_Eternal_Wiki:Discord
https://vagabond.fandom.com/wiki/Discord_Server
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https://wubbzy.fandom.com/wiki/Wubbzypedia:Discord
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https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Wikitubia:Discord
Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu: Die Neue These - Seiran 3 -- -- Production I.G -- 4 eps -- Novel -- Action Drama Military Sci-Fi Space -- Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu: Die Neue These - Seiran 3 Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu: Die Neue These - Seiran 3 -- At the behest of Admiral Yang Wen-li, defected intelligence officer Commander Baghdash makes an emergency broadcast announcing that the National Salvation Military Council staged a coup under the direction of the Galactic Empire. Despite the lack of physical evidence, this debilitating declaration inspires former Rear Admiral Andrew Lynch to reveal his own role in sowing discord within the Free Planets Alliance. A fatal shootout between Lynch and Admiral Dwight Greenhill acts as the final death knell to the short-lived period of martial rule. -- -- Within the Galactic Empire, footage of Duke Otto von Braunschweig's nuclear bombing of Westerland results in the dissolution of the Lippstadt League. Marquis Reinhard von Lohengramm's decision to allow the massacre for personal gain creates a rift between him and High Admiral Siegfried Kircheis, souring the taste of their inevitable victory. Now on the cusp of achieving absolute power, Reinhard is embattled by his apparent personal failings and the heavy responsibilities of leadership. -- -- Though the civil wars in both the Alliance and the Empire are coming to a close, neither side can ever regain what is lost. Yang Wen-li and Reinhard von Lohengramm each take bitter solace in the knowledge that just on the other side of the galaxy is a worthy opponent—and a true equal. -- -- Movie - Nov 29, 2019 -- 15,742 8.22
Hakuouki Reimeiroku -- -- Studio Deen -- 12 eps -- Visual novel -- Action Historical Supernatural Drama Samurai Josei -- Hakuouki Reimeiroku Hakuouki Reimeiroku -- The year is 1863 and as Japan's long festering wounds of political discord erupt into violent waves of street clashes and murder, the Tokugawa Shogunate sends a new force of masterless samurai called the Roshigumi to the aid of the Aizu forces in Kyoto. However the new "police" are anything but a cohesive force and assassination has already split them into two opposing factions. The stronger is led by the brutal Serizawa Kamo and the lesser by the more honorable but less assertive Isami Kondo. It is into this pack of wolves that Ryunosuke Ibuki is dragged by the rabid Serizawa. Forced to be a virtual slave by blood debt, he hates the samurai and everything they stand for. But as he sees how the other half of the samurai live, he begins to believe that there may still be a chance, for both himself and Japan, if only Kondo will step up and take down the mad dog Serizawa! -- -- (Source: Sentai Filmworks) -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- TV - Jul 10, 2012 -- 49,621 7.47
Hakuouki Reimeiroku -- -- Studio Deen -- 12 eps -- Visual novel -- Action Historical Supernatural Drama Samurai Josei -- Hakuouki Reimeiroku Hakuouki Reimeiroku -- The year is 1863 and as Japan's long festering wounds of political discord erupt into violent waves of street clashes and murder, the Tokugawa Shogunate sends a new force of masterless samurai called the Roshigumi to the aid of the Aizu forces in Kyoto. However the new "police" are anything but a cohesive force and assassination has already split them into two opposing factions. The stronger is led by the brutal Serizawa Kamo and the lesser by the more honorable but less assertive Isami Kondo. It is into this pack of wolves that Ryunosuke Ibuki is dragged by the rabid Serizawa. Forced to be a virtual slave by blood debt, he hates the samurai and everything they stand for. But as he sees how the other half of the samurai live, he begins to believe that there may still be a chance, for both himself and Japan, if only Kondo will step up and take down the mad dog Serizawa! -- -- (Source: Sentai Filmworks) -- TV - Jul 10, 2012 -- 49,621 7.47
Howl no Ugoku Shiro -- -- Studio Ghibli -- 1 ep -- Novel -- Adventure Drama Fantasy Romance -- Howl no Ugoku Shiro Howl no Ugoku Shiro -- That jumbled piece of architecture, that cacophony of hissing steam and creaking joints, with smoke billowing from it as it moves on its own... That castle is home to the magnificent wizard Howl, infamous for both his magical prowess and for being a womanizer—or so the rumor goes in Sophie Hatter's small town. Sophie, as the plain daughter of a hatmaker, does not expect much from her future and is content with working hard in the shop. -- -- However, Sophie's simple life takes a turn for the exciting when she is ensnared in a disturbing situation, and the mysterious wizard appears to rescue her. Unfortunately, this encounter, brief as it may be, spurs the vain and vengeful Witch of the Waste—in a fit of jealousy caused by a past discord with Howl—to put a curse on the maiden, turning her into an old woman. -- -- In an endeavor to return to normal, Sophie must accompany Howl and a myriad of eccentric companions—ranging from a powerful fire demon to a hopping scarecrow—in his living castle, on a dangerous adventure as a raging war tears their kingdom apart. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Walt Disney Studios -- Movie - Nov 20, 2004 -- 901,461 8.66
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Adoxobotys discordalis
Apple of Discord
Coleophora discordella
Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord
Discord
Discord (album)
Discord and Harmony
Discord (film)
Discordia (film)
Discordian calendar
Discordianism
Discord (software)
Eupithecia discordans
Hagnagora discordata
List of Discordian works
Semantic discord
Serodiscordant
The Seed of Discord
Tyloxoles discordans



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