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As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is t… - Timothy Snyder
" "As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.
The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.
Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of
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About Timothy Snyder
Timothy David Snyder (born 1969) is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust.
Biography information from Wikipedia
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Timothy David Snyder
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Timothy D. Snyder
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T.D. Snyder
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Tim Snyder
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Shorter versions of this quote
The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
Additional quotes by Timothy Snyder
The Nazis treated health care as a way to divide the humans from the subhumans and nonhumans. If we see others as bearers of ailments and ourselves as healthy victims, we are little better than they. If we truly oppose the Nazi evil, we will try to think our way to its opposite, to the good. A part of that effort is to understand that all humans are subject to malady, and have an equal claim to care.
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Personally about Mr. Trump, it tells me that his desire to protect himself, his ego, his appearance, his sense of being right, is bottomless, because if there's anything that you should hold back from doing, it's from punishing someone like Lt. Colonel Vindman. ...[I]t calls up to me... a memory of what s are like, because that... is what is happening. People who refuse to tow the line, a line of fiction. A line which said that Ukraine plotted against the United States, and not Russia. A line that said a server was in Ukraine, which has never been the case. A line which said that Ukraine was corrupting us, when were trying to corrupt Ukraine, in fact, in the Trump administration. A line which was false. A set of statements which were clearly false and which Republican senators also know to be false. That you don't follow a line like that, and then get purged. That's what happens in... totalitarian systems.
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