ERIK VON KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN

Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities, silence opposition, and still remain democratic.

ERIK VON KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN

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Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities, and still remain democratic.

JUDITH BUTLER

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As long as "security" continues to justify the banning and dispersion of demonstrations, assemblies, and encampments, it serves the decimation of democratic rights and democracy itself. Only a broad-based mobilization—a form of embodied and transnational courage, we might say—will successfully defeat xenophobic nationalism and the various alibis that now threaten democracy.

HANNAH ARENDT

The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

REBECCA SOLNIT

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The Thousand Year Reich did not last two decades; the Soviet Union lasted three quarters of a century; Idi Amin ruled for eight years; the Confederacy didn’t make it to kindergarten; Argentina’s Dirty War lasted six years; Pinochet dominated Chile for sixteen years; nothing lasts forever, even the worst things. Hitler killed himself; Stalin and Franco lasted too long but ultimately dropped dead and last year Franco’s body was exhumed from its grand prison-labor-built monument and dumped in a municipal cemetery; Pol Pot died in prison; Mugabe had to step down; Putin is not immortal.

Every day under these monstrosities was too long, and part of the horror of life under a corrupt and brutal regime is that it seems never-ending, but nothing lasts forever. And believing that something can end is often instrumental to working toward ending it; how the people in Eastern Europe dared to hope that their efforts might succeed I cannot imagine.

VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO

November 9, 2022

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Quoted in Albert Einstein - The Human Side (Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, 1979)

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Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race.

W. E. B. DU BOIS

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Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

White christians reject the notion of free speech in every fibre of their blacked souls.
 

You don't say ....

Church vs. State