Commonplacing

    The response to truth is often even more truth; that is why regimes fear even small bits of it.

    – Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War, trans. Daisy Gibbons (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), Part I (“Among the Guiding Stars—Oleksandra Matviichuk I”).

    The United States is not a forgotten Elysian island. Our two oceans connect us with the rest of the world; they do not separate us. They are carrying, at this moment, machine tools, automobiles, raw materials, and all manner of manufactured goods to the whole world and they are bringing here other materials, such as rubber, tungsten, and tin, that are absolutely essential to the continuance of production at even its present level. They protect us, still, from armed attack upon our soil, but they do not protect us from assaults upon our economy or upon the public mind. They in no way relieve us of the responsibility of doing everything that a great nation can do to maintain a world order in which the interests of its people, and the values that they cherish, can survive and improve.

    – Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), p. 9.

    Placing will above reason; the ideal over reality; appealing, unremittingly, to totem and taboo; elevating tribal fetishes; subjugating and destroying the common sense that grows out of human experience; of an oceanic boundlessness, Naziism … is the enemy of whatever is sunny, reasonable, pragmatic, common-sense, freedom-loving, life-affirming, form-seeking, and conscious of tradition.

    – Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), p. 3.

    Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: “Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it’s the KKK he’s copying.”

    – Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap 6.

    Strategic bombing’s limited efficacy:

    The question that has dominated strategic warfare since it emerged a century ago remains the central question today: Does strategic warfare work? For the moment, the answer seems to be no; at the very least, it cannot on its own win wars or … induce an adversary to change its posture.

    – Raphael S. Cohen, “The False Promise of Strategic Bombing,” Foreign Affairs, February 18, 2025, archive.ph….

    Western journalists are … 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, The Road to Unfreedom, chap. 5.

    Putin has correctly surmised that lies unite rather than divide Russia’s political class. 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 power.

    – Charles Clover, quoted in Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap 5.

    No war was taking place, and it was thoroughly justified.

    – Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap. 5, regarding Russian propaganda in 2014.

    Nations are new things that refer to old things. It matters how they do so.

    –Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), chap. 4.

    The game just got bigger. Did you?

    – Helen Hunt playing Nancy Campbell in “A World On Fire” (PBS, 2020), s. 1, ep. 1.

    Congress was once the proud equal of the executive and judicial branches of our government. Now it stands drained of both power and respect, partly through abdication of its responsibilities and partly through the eager gathering of power by a burgeoning presidency. That phenomenon started with Franklin Roosevelt, and every President since has been unable to resist taking more decision-making responsibility on himself. The power to make war and to decide how our money is spent is no longer the unquestioned province of Congress …

    – “Fresh Blood for a Sick Congress,” Life, November 17, 1972, p. 42.

    Rule of Law

    Dwight D. Eisenhower’s address from the White House on September 24, 1957, regarding his use of federal troops in Little Rock makes for interesting reading. Here’s a taste (www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov…):

    The very basis of our individual rights and freedoms rests upon the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and insure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts, even, when necessary with all the means at the President’s command.

    Unless the President did so, anarchy would result.

    There would be no security for any except that which each one of us could provide for himself.

    HT @[email protected]

    The ink of political fiction is blood.

    – Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap. 2.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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

    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.

    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).

    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.

    Nahal Toosi, Politico, March 19, 2025

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