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.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.
The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.
Good people end up in Hell because they can't forgive themselves.
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
I'm trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture - particularly in black male culture - and to help people to see that there's room enough for everyone.
Force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that_x000D_ tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.