Anne Applebaum Quotes

If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

Trump's fawning attitude towards dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

[Guests at a party held by Applebaum and her husband Radosław Sikorski on December 31, 1999 in their Polish home] You could have lumped the majority of them, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right—the conservatives, the anti-Communists. But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of my guests liberals—free-market liberals, or classical liberals—or maybe Thatcherites. Even those who might have been less definite about economics certainly believed in democracy, in the rule of law, and in a Poland that was a member of nato and on its way to joining the European Union—an integrated part of modern Europe. In the 1990s, that was what being "on the right" meant.

More important, he [Trump] has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had "total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. ... Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals "a bunch of dopes and babies," and America's intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the "deep state" and whose advice he has ignored.

Fake research institutions, “peace movements,” fictitious political groupings, useful idiots, and agents of influence, both paid and unpaid…We’ve been here before, too. True, the ideology has changed. These days Russia supports whoever is willing to promote its interests, whether far-left or far-right, and whoever can help undermine the established European order.

Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura—of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame—to rub off on him and enhance his own image.

Almost all of the men who currently rule Russia (and they are all men) were taught and trained by the KGB. Their teaching and training shows. Why would it not?

So, yes, this is another mysterious death, but it is a new kind of mysterious death. With this plane crash, the violence on the periphery of Russia’s empire has now migrated to its very heart. Putin's rule has always been maintained by a heady combination of opportunism, bribery, and the facade of Russian nationalism, propped up by the subtle threat of violence. In the aftermath of Prigozhin's rebellion, Putin needs something more spectacular: theatrical, public violence; violence of the kind that brings down a plane soon after takeoff in the middle of a sunny day; violence designed to terrify anyone who secretly wished for Prigozhin’s victory.

Of all the different kinds of damage done by the Second World War, the hardest to quantify is the psychological and emotional damage. The brutality of the First World War created a generation of fascist leaders, idealistic intellectuals, and expressionist artists who twisted the human form into inhuman shapes and colors in an attempt to convey their disorientation. But... the Second World War entered far more deeply... Constant daily violence shaped the human psyche...

Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long.

Putin’s overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If [Alexei] Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.

The <nowiki> </nowiki> crisis in Ukraine, and the prospect of a further crisis in NATO itself, is not the result of our triumphalism but of our failure to react to Russia’s aggressive rhetoric and its military spending. Why didn’t we move NATO bases eastward a decade ago? Our failure to do so has now led to a terrifying plunge of confidence in Central Europe...Our mistake was not to humiliate Russia but to underrate Russia’s revanchist, revisionist, disruptive potential.