Post

Avatar
As well-meaning publishers try to navigate the coming storm of state laws against diversity, I hope they'll consider Timothy Snyder's Rule #1 (from his slim book ON TYRANNY).
Avatar
For anyone who wants to read more, I highly recommend the graphic novel version of On Tyranny. The text remains the same, you aren’t losing any of the message, but the visuals add a certain little something that somehow makes it even better
Avatar
Cool! Did not know this exists. Thank you! 👏🏽
Avatar
Avatar
I should note that this version makes for a PHENOMENAL high school graduation “welcome to the real world” gift. (With or without some $$ inside it, depending how much you actually like the teenager in question.)
Avatar
Hell with that, my kindergartener’s gonna be getting the comic version for Christmas. Thanks fir the tip!
Avatar
I often give this as a gift to young people. (My 87 year-old mother bought one for every member of the family the year it came out.) If I had unlimited funds, I’d buy copies by the thousands and hand them out to strangers on the street.
Avatar
I will def be checking out this book! But … is the Nazi cross tree a real thing? Seems like a joke?
Avatar
It's probably not literal, but there is a literal example of nazis using trees to make a swastika: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_...
Forest swastika - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
Avatar
I think it's a symbolic example.
Avatar
Thank you! Just reserved at the library
Avatar
On your recommendation I got it on Kindle and have already read half.
Avatar
I avoid Snyder due to his Holocaust denial, personally.
Avatar
dissonance between "well-meaning" and pre-emptively cooperating with fascism...
Avatar
they're well meaning in the sense that they think they're **reacting** to protect their people from the perceived threat, but in reality they're **acting** by setting a new socially acceptable level of threat
Avatar
still hard to grasp what "well" they meant though
Avatar
Sales/adoptions. The people who work in publishing can be good, decent, well-meaning human beings. People can want good outcomes for other people, like safety, health, and education. Companies, however, cannot! Companies can only want monetary success. Publishers want to sell their products.
Avatar
This rule reminds me of Scholastic Books and their total capitulation to a few book banners.
Avatar
I try to walk the line, tho I've been corporate for many years. Don't self-censor, but do remember the human. And always, Wheaton's Law. Don't be a dick
Avatar
I wish the (retail) corporation I work for remembered the human. They claim to, but they do everything they can to prevent us from planning our lives. They also don't care if we can pay our bills consistently.
Avatar
There seems to be a point when executives forget that their primary productive drivers are people, not statistics
Avatar
Because the higher up in management one goes, the less they view their enployees as people and the more they see them as an expendable commodity.
Avatar
Not just expendable; disposable
Avatar
Avatar
Sounds like time to change jobs.
Avatar
Avatar
Rule #1 makes me think of all the TSA employees who heard that Trump ordered a “Muslim ban” and started enforcing it without any questions, objections, or even preliminary directions.
Avatar
I once asked my cousin what he would have done if he had been alive in 1933 Germany, like our Oma and Opa. "There are only 4 possibilities," he said. "1) submit and adapt, 2) fight and live in constant danger, 3) flee, and 4) commit suicide."
Avatar
We do not yet live under a fascist regime, for if we did, none of us who live here would be having this conversation in the open, those of us who would openly be having this conversation wouldn't live here, many of us would already have been murdered, and some of us would have taken our own lives.
Avatar
Perhaps some of those qualifiers could be checkmarked in some circumstances, but all of them can't be checkmarked in all circumstances.
Avatar
This is why fascism becomes popular in uncertain times? Ppl do this for stability?
Avatar
Yep. The trajectory is most often: - progressive social change - cishet conservative anxiety over privilege loss - rising authoritarians promise return to golden age, - simplify complex social issues into us/them scapegoating, - insist on suspension of democratic norms to eliminate threat
Avatar
OMG that's so true, over and over again. Which is why education is so important to control.
Avatar
! Authoritarian attempt to control education in a fascist manner detected. Would you like to try approaching the subject a different way?
Avatar
I believe they were indicating that, for the proto-totalitarians, they recognize that controlling education is important for their control, not that the person you are replying to thinks that.
Avatar
Yes, I could have been more clear. I was thinking it's no wonder conservatives started their power grab with school boards. Strategic on many levels.
Avatar
I'm in the middle of watching Metropolis (1927) and thinking about what it was communicating about the the world in its time and everything that came before and after in Germany. This is such a good framework. 93 years later we're fighting the same fight.
Avatar
I think about that movie so often these days. Even the aesthetics are similar (see cybertruck). It's gross.
Avatar
I'm going to need some proof for this one. Hitler's rise was not predicated by progressive social change. Quite the opposite, it happened in the wake of Germany's impoverishment by the debts imposed in the treaty of Versailles.
Avatar
a lot of resentments built up over the "cosmopolitanism" of Weimar urban cultural revival of the mid-late 1920s not 100% castigating intellectuals, gay and jewish people, for one
Avatar
You've internalized right-wing propaganda about why people supported the Nazis. It was mostly the national humiliation in WWI.
Avatar
sorry, it's right-wing propaganda to... acknowledge the well documented right-wing reactionary position at the time that the democratic republic's culture was "degenerate"? It was not an actually popular/mainstream opinion much less a legitimate one but that Was what the Nazis believed
Avatar
No the scapegoating definitely was part of the Nazi's platform historically. You can try to clean it up by blaming the national debt incurred by the treaty of Versailles, but there were a great many people in Germany who were willing to work to pay that debt rather than taking the lazy route of
Avatar
fwiw my list is a consolidation of the work of Eco, Ben-Ghiat, Stein, Paxton, and others (I haven't done focused study on Weimar Germany); given that I was consolidating, I deliberately added "most often"; I thought that caveat would allow me some good faith in the event of individual exceptions.
Avatar
Essentially I picked the case of Hitler because the case of Hitler is well known and well documented, I would like to see the full research you've compiled leading you to the conclusion that these are the typical steps. :)
Avatar
We had the 2008 Great Recession, 9-11, Global War on Terror, Clinton's Impeachment, SARS, 24 hour news cycle, the internet and social media, etc. I'm sure there are more I've forgotten. All are big stressors that affected us.
Avatar
Avatar
Alright, that's part of historical record that German women gained the right to vote in 1919 but that was part of a global suffrage movement giving women the right to vote in many countries globally. That would not be a factor unique to Germany.