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.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
I worry about global anti-Semitism - not just as a bad idea that originates from bad people, but also as something that arises as a challenge to global order.
Interpretation
The quote addresses the dangers of anti-Semitism as a threat to global stability and moral order.
Timothy D. Snyder highlights the significance of addressing global anti-Semitism not merely as a moral failing of individuals but as a broader challenge that disrupts the foundations of world order. This perspective emphasizes the impact of harmful ideologies on societal cohesion and the importance of vigilance in combating intolerance to preserve peace and stability on a global scale.
In practice
In a speech addressing community leaders about the rise of hate groups.
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.
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.
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.
With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?
Man's shortcomings and sins are all due to substance of the body and not to its form, while all his merits are exclusively due to his form.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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