life under authoritarian regimes is like war: most Americans don’t know that it’s often really normal and boring, up until the rarer, horrible moments when it isn’t
Pretty much. What it mostly boils down to is that most Americans really don’t have the faintest idea what living under modern authoritarian regimes actually looks like, and how it’s often at the same time way more boring and way more scary than they’d imagined.
My only experience of this is visiting Milosevic's Yugoslavia between the wars. So many people tried to impress this on me - everything was fine, until one day thugs who had government support were grabbing women off the street. It never left me, and I'm more worried than ever now.
if Yugoslavia is where your head is at, it's heartening to read about how the Otpor movement broke Milosevic's power. Mark and Paul Engler have a great chapter about it in This Is An Uprising, which they preview here:
