Fascism says what you and I experience as facts or what reporters experience as facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions and emotions and myths.
Interpretation
Fascism prioritizes subjective emotions and impressions over objective facts and reality.
In this quote, Timothy D. Snyder emphasizes that fascist ideologies distort the understanding of truth by dismissing objective facts and instead fostering a narrative based on emotions, impressions, and myths. This manipulation creates a reality where perception holds greater weight than factual evidence, allowing those in power to shape opinions and beliefs without accountability to the truth.
In practice
In a discussion about misinformation in politics.
Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of 'our institutions' unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all.
If we don't have access to facts, we can't trust each other. Without trust, there's no law. Without law, there's no democracy.
Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can't be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced.
The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law - that form of government is usually temporary.
Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.
To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?
There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country.
Many media commercials encourage us to believe that if we buy a certain product, we can be physically appealing, or popular, or successful. According to the commercial message, it may be easy to make friends and influence people if we simply do what we're told to do. It would be wonderful if that were true, but unfortunately life does not seem to work that way. What is inside of us can be much more important and influential than what is outside.
Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.
History has its truth; and so has legend hers.
Work, apart from devotion or love of God, is helpless and cannot stand alone.
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