Commonplacing
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.
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….
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.
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).