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. ↩︎
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Jason Pack uses it on the Disorder podcast, late in ep. 107, March 18, 2025. ↩︎
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See Heather Digby Parton, “Donald Trump’s Dead Cat Strategy Puts the Pressure on JD Vance,” Salon, September 16, 2024. ↩︎
- “Trump-Putin call: Russia agrees to 30-day pause of energy infrastructure strikes." (Kyiv Independent)
- Kremlin demands halt to foreign military aid, intelligence to Ukraine as condition for avoiding war escalation. (Kyiv Independent)
“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
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, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 19.
Committing war crimes against Ukrainian POWs trains perpetrators to abuse their fellow citizens in custody back in the motherland. See “How Russian prison officers are ‘honing their cruelty’ on Ukrainian POWs,” meduza.io/en…. 🇷🇺
Micro.blog's European Server Option
The IndieWeb blogging platform Micro.blog recently added an option to use a server in the European Union (Germany) instead of the United States. They began with the blogs themselves and then added images and other files. These changes comport with a broader movement to reduce exposure to services hosted in the United States, especially those dominated by or entangled with big tech, which has shown itself eager to cooperate with the lawless impulses of the Trump administration.
I’m not sure if the European option will make much of a practical difference to my particular situation at present. Nonetheless, I’ve made the switch because I like the idea of being more mindful about what services I use and where they are hosted. Doing so matters not only in the current political climate but also given big tech’s longstanding unethical treatment of user data, a circumstance lent more urgency by their development of LLM-based artificial intelligence.
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.
– Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 18.
The good thing about the security lapse revealed today is that many are talking about it instead of about the administration’s sadism and criminality, never mind its entanglements with Russia’s anti-Ukrainian disinformation campaign. Perfect. 🙄
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.
– Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 14.
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, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 10.
I’ve heard historian Timothy Snyder a lot in the past several years thanks to his fantastic public speaking, captured in freely available videos and podcasts. Today, I’ve finally begun reading him. First up: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017).
Just arrived from Berlin to an empty Dulles airport in DC. Assumed because Heathrow outage. “No,” says my WashFlyer cabbie, the past month has been super slow. “Fewer tourists, fewer business people. This is not normal, believe me.” Says he’s looking for a new job because he needs to pay his bills.
– Thomas Rid on Bluesky, March 21, 2025
I heard the term deadcatting for the first time today.1 It means employing a shocking distraction to pull peoples' eyes away from what matters. Why a dead cat? Imagine throwing one on a table at which people are engaged in a heated discussion. Their focus will be pulled to the cat instead of lingering on whatever difficulty is before them. This dead cat strategy can overlap with scapegoating and the politics of division, as when Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors' cats and dogs.2
It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose—blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.
– Masha Gessen, quoted in Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality, (Workman Publishing, 2017), chap. 3.
The Trump administration is slashing the State Department’s annual human rights report — cutting sections about the rights of women, the disabled, the LGBTQ+ community and more.
The goal appears to be a far thinner report that meets the minimum standards required by the law, according to documents obtained by POLITICO, as well as a current and a former State Department official who were familiar with the plan.
Carl T. Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, has written an excellent thread about his and his colleagues' experience of the White House’s attack on U.S. science and education.
Putin Playing Trump for a Fool Again
The 30-day partial cease fire that Putin and Trump agreed to is a one-sided joke.
Russia probably needs relief from strikes on its energy infrastructure more than Ukraine does because the former depends on energy to finance its war. Ukraine, at least, has made it through another winter, when attacks on its energy infrastructure hurt the worst. Moreover, its air defenses seem to be more effective than Russia’s.
The real kicker, though, are the accompanying demands and threats, which continue to assert Russia’s maximalist aim of destroying Ukrainian sovereignty by demanding it do nothing to improve its defense posture. Meanwhile, the White House and Kremlin “agreed to set up Russian and American expert groups to ‘resolve the war bilaterally,'” i.e., without Ukraine or the rest of Europe. Of course, the Kremlin issued yet another tired threat of “escalation.”
Will the White House side with Russia again, despite the Kremlin playing Trump for a fool? It wouldn’t surprise me, given that Trump has no advisors who will tell him what he needs to hear. I hope I’m wrong.
“After Trump DEI Order, Navajo Code Talkers Disappear From Military Websites,” www.axios.com….
From 1942 to 1945, the Navajo code talkers were instrumental in every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
America hasn’t felt this upside down since I was a child in an internment camp.
Seen in grocery store: Old guy prolly dependent on Social Security, etc., wearing a black windbreaker marked ICE. Maybe supposed to look cool or intimidating, like a big swastica, if you’re into that sort of thing, but it felt more like a big “I am an asshole” or “Kick me” sign.
“JACL condemns Trump erasure of 442nd and 100th Infantry Battalion,” asnews.com….
“The 100th and 442nd remain the most decorated military units in U.S. history for their size and length of service,” the Japanese American Citizens League said in a statement. “Their heroism, despite the racism and incarceration their families faced at home, is a testament to their loyalty and sacrifice, as is their unit motto, ‘Go For Broke.'”
Started rereading a little book I enjoyed when it first came out: Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman Publishing, 2017).