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.
We were not realizing that, with just a machete, you can do a genocide.
At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.
Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.
Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one's memory.
If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable.
I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.
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