Commonplacing
The post-[1968] invasion regime in Czechoslovakia spoke of “normalization,” which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal.
– Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2018), chap. 2.
📽️ Am watching “So Ends Our Night,” dir. John Cromwell (United Artists, 1941), a “story of people without passports” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1939 novel Flotsam.
A great line early on spoken by an Austrian police officer sending two stateless Germans across the border to Czechoslovakia in 1937:
You refugees! It’s not like handling a first-class criminal. You’re detracting from the dignity of my profession.
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!…
Galileo: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.
– Bertolt Brecht, “Life of Galileo,” in Collected Plays: Five, trans. John Willet (Bloomsbury, 1995), scene 13.
Trump’s supporters, who felt increasingly anxious or displaced in the prevailing consensus reality, could see what was happening. But those of us who were relatively at ease—our field of vision was obstructed. So we scoffed and mocked as Trump put a half nelson choke hold on reality.
– Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman Publishing, 2017).
Sometimes you got to Ukrainesplain shit to people.
– Roy Wood Jr., “Have I Got News for You,” season 2, episode 3, youtu.be….
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
– Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” (1940)*
* Quoted in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2002), 21.
The one who deals the blow forgets.
The one who carries the scar remembers.
– Haitian proverb*
* Quoted in Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism (St: Martin’s, 2022), front matter.
Valuing loyalty over expertise and allowing violence to become an end in itself can result in a deprofessionalized and demoralized military, especially if misguided wars end in defeat.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen (Norton, 2020), concl.
Democratic heads of state often see their departures from office as an opportunity to build on their leadership legacy. The authoritarian regards the end of being adulated by followers and controlling everything and everyone as an existential threat.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen (Norton, 2020), chap. 10.
Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Hitler had been in his early twenties when he made an important discovery. He felt most alive when losing himself in something he found sublime, like a Richard Wagner opera or the sound of his own voice.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020), chap. 1.