Authoritarianism
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Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (Tim Duggan Books, 2017), chap. 20; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), prologue. ↩︎
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Marxism is nothing if not a philosophy of history itself, a scientific description of how and why human societies develop as they do. It also propagates worker consciousness, worker knowledge of their historical role. See, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Lenin, impatient to move things along, developed the notion of a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Revolution and communism wouldn’t just happen. They had to be wrought from above. See V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902). ↩︎
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Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎
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Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎
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Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎
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Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, prologue. ↩︎
“Teaching Gandhi in a Texas Detention Center,” by Nader Hashemi, New Lines Magazine, April 23, 2025.
A visit to the ICE facility housing the Georgetown postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, whose case parallels those of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.
There are so many illegal detention stories. I’m sharing this particular one because of the man’s inspired response to his incarceration. I’m also proud to have earned my PhD from an institution that has been standing up to the administration’s attacks on higher education, Georgetown University.
JD Vance is terrible at most things, including passing for a human, but he has accomplished one thing I wouldn’t have thought possible: He’s made me nostalgic for Mike Pence. 👀
Who needs a department of education or a legislature when we have the executive orders and social media posts of a malicious, camera-addicted, very presidential, orange buffoon?
Margarita Simonyan's Death Wish
The pro-Kremlin media personality Tigran Keosayan has been in a coma since late December. Recently, his grief-stricken wife, RT chief Margarita Simonyan, pondered going to front, if he dies (youtu.be…). I’ve never heard Simonyan say anything that wasn’t calculated, so this line made me scratch my head a little. Simonyan is still all-in on the “special military operation,” of course, but it is strange to hear her death wish expressed this way.
Don’t her words come close to admitting what Putin’s soldiers need when headed to the front? I’m thinking of the Russian “meat assaults” and their use of soldiers to fire at their own, should they dare not advance or even retreat. Still, Simonyan’s words lean on such a common literary trope that they needn’t be seen as destabilizing. If there is one thing about Simonyan we can still be sure of, she is an expert information warrior.
Prophetic Comedy
A prophetic comedy for these upside-down times: "Rapture-Palooza" (Lionsgate, 2013). Also foundational: "Idiocracy" (20th Century Fox, 2006).
Another chapter in the administration’s war on knowledge, accountability, and the public’s wellbeing: “Trump Halts Data Collection on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change, More,” www.propublica.org….
Knowledge Commons, which includes a public-access repository, has also been hit by the current administration’s war on knowledge. Here’s the latest from Kathleen Fitzpatrick: “On the NEH and Our Path Forward."
Echoes of Abu Ghraib and inspiration for more prison porn by Kristi Noem: “Russian Police Caught Beating, Humiliating Migrants in Footage of a Raid,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Librty, youtu.be…. This treatment also demonstrates an understanding of Russia’s economic limitations as keen as Trump’s.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers “advises academics against non-essential travel to the U.S.” Details: www.caut.ca/latest….
Ambassador Oleksii Makeiev’s speech on freedom for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Berlin, April 10, 2025: germany.mfa.gov.ua/de/news… (in German). 🇺🇦
Has anyone else been feeling nauseous about submitting their tax returns to a government led by criminals, profiteers, and incompetents? 🇺🇸
Regarding our past:
Americans would experience moments of unity … but its distinction has been its ability to withstand division …
– David M. Shribman, “History Lends Context to Contemporary Conflicts,” Conway Daily Sun, April 11, 2025
Shribman’s hope is necessary, even as the U.S. history he musters does little to banish the very real specter of fascism we know from Europe.
The ink of political fiction is blood.
– Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap. 2.
Turns out some 800 people were at the protest I attended in Conway, NH, on Saturday.
In a conversation about the information disorder we’re all grappling with, I found myself saying that the constant barrage of existentially bad news from Washington these past few months has been wearing me down, making me dumber.
Protest
My sign is hiding a lot of the crowd. I haven't heard an official number, but preliminary counts suggest at least 500 for my small town.
I joked cautiously with a neighbor who I think of as Republican or independent about Social Security worries. He told me that for him it’s a double whammy—Social Security and the Veterans Administration. News like this finds a way.
I saw a license plate from Quebec in North Conway yesterday, the first in a long time. It was on a flatbed truck. Earlier in the week, I heard French from north of the border in the grocery store. It was noticeable because it’s become so rare.
#TrumpTariffs
Other countries will boycott us, and we’ll be consuming less because of fear about the economy. Meanwhile, His Royal Donaldliness will dazzle us on our screens with his big-league genius ability to use a Sharpie in his unbridled pursuit of the dumbest, most unthinkable fuckery. 🤬
“FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States,” theonion.com….
Chris York of the Kyiv Independent interviews historian Marci Shore on why she’s leaving Yale University for the University of Toronto: youtu.be….
See also “Three prominent Yale professors depart for Canadian university, citing Trump fears” by Ariela Lopez and Yolanda Wang for the Yale Daily News yaledailynews.com….
Killing and Fueling Hatred
We Germans refuse to believe that people want to be free.… All we’re good at is killing, killing, killing! We’ve strewn all of Europe with corpses, and from their graves rises up an unquenchable hatred. Hatred… hatred everywhere! That hatred will devour us.
These words are the subtitle translations of lines spoken in the famous early postwar film, “Rome Open City,” dir. Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1945). They issue from the mouth of a drunk German officer to his Gestapo commander, who was sure he could make a staunch Italian partisan talk that same night.
The scene reminds me of assertions by Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince (1532): It is better to be feared than loved because fear is something the ruler can control. But the ruler should avoid awaking the hatred of his subjects because that emotion could prove fatal to him (chaps. 17 and 19).
For Machiavelli, hatred resulted from a ruler taking the property and women of his subjects. For the drunk officer in “Rome Open City,” the German masters' attacks on honor, dignity, and human life inspired deep hatred, but the Gestapo officer denied that emotion’s power.
In our own time, Putin seems to appreciate the personal danger that he is in. He likely doesn’t blame himself for this circumstance, but he knows that his system of rule will continue to demand political assassinations, the ruthless suppression of free speech, and predatory corruption.
His war against Ukraine helps him legitimize his tyranny inside Russia, but he seems incapable of grasping that he will never bend Ukraine itself to his will. No matter how much property he destroys, no matter how many bodies and lives he disfigures or ends, Ukrainians refuse to surrender their personhood, nationhood, and dignity. If anything, Putin has turned this European neighbor into a formidable enemy. The hatred he fuels as he robs Ukrainians of their children and other loved ones cannot be overstated.
Timothy Snyder and the Existential Significance of History
Timothy Snyder posits an important nexus between our current political moment and how we as a society understand history.1 When communist states proved unable to achieve their Marxist-Leninist ambitions, we did not feel the need to look too closely for an explanation in the histories of these states and their peoples. The communist project didn’t succeed because it was wrongheaded. Its failure lay in its problematic view of human development, that is, in its false, teleological philosophy of history.2
We didn’t see a problem with teleological thinking as such, despite historians' emphasis on provable historical causality over imagined directions that history is somehow destined to take. Instead, we assumed that the failure of their philosophy of history proved that our own was right. The world was on an inexorable path toward mutually reinforcing free trade and free societies. Why sweat the details?
Writing at the beginning of the first Trump administration, Snyder argued the need for a genuine historicization of our world.
The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.…
The acceptance of inevitability stilted the way we talked about politics in the twenty-first century. It stifled policy debate and tended to generate party systems where one political party defended the status quo, while the other proposed total negation. We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things…3
Our tunnel vision, our focus on everything supposedly going the way it was supposed to, left us complacent. Trump’s 2016 election blindsided us, and the contingency of history continues to punch us in the face.
The enemies of democracy are guided by an equally ahistorical or “antihistorical” notion of human development. Snyder uses “eternity” to describe their image of history and politics.
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 concern with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.…4
Of course, this view includes enemies and grievances, which can make nostalgia and an antihistorical worldview of unending merit dangerously aggressive. Consider the Lost Cause interpretation of the American Civil War, the poisonous stab-in-the-back myth in Weimar Germany, or the giant chip on Putin’s shoulder left by the USSR’s dissolution.
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?
The stakes of such a worldview for our culture and our development are existential.
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.5
What we need, argues Snyder, is to be better grounded in history so that we can understand what was and what is. In resisting the coma and the trance, we might imagine other futures and look for opportunities to shape the way history develops.
Historicizing our world includes applying historical analysis to our immediate past. Snyder’s 2018 The Road to Unfreedom considers a period less than a decade old at the time.
As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair.…6
The project of this contemporary historian is as urgent as it is ambitious.
It did not hurt my feelings to see reports of a Putin limo going up in flames. I also enjoyed seeing how scared the president is of his own honor guard. See commentary on Silicon Bites #119, March 29, 2025. youtu.be… (6 min.)
#ПутінХуйло #RussiaIsATerroristState