20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend #Democracy from #Authoritarianism, According to Yale #Historian #TimothySnyder
in History | January 20th, 2017
"Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University, is one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. and Europe on the rise and fall of #totalitarianism during the 1930s and 40s. Among his long list of appointments and publications, he has won multiple awards for his recent international bestsellers '#Bloodlands: Europe between #Hitler and #Stalin' and last year’s 'Black Earth: The #Holocaust as History and Warning.' That book in part makes the argument that #Nazism wasn’t only a #German #nationalist movement but had global #colonialist origins—in #Russia, #Africa, and in the #UnitedStates, the nation that pioneered so many methods of human extermination, #racist #dehumanization, and ideologically-justified #LandGrabs.
"The hyper-#capitalism portrayed in the U.S.—even during the Depression—Snyder writes, fueled Hitler’s imagination, such that he promised Germans 'a life comparable to that of the American people,' whose 'racially pure and uncorrupted' German population he described as 'world class.' Snyder describes Hitler’s ideology as a myth of racialist struggle in which 'there are really no values in the world except for the stark reality that we are born in order to take things from other people.' Or as we often hear these days, that acting in accordance with this principle is the 'smart' thing to do. Like many far right figures before and after, Hitler aimed to restore a state of nature that for him was a perpetual state of race war for imperial dominance."
https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/20-lessons-from-the-20th-century-about-how-to-defend-democracies-from-authoritarianism.html
#History #Histodon #Hitler #Fascism #Authoritarianism #HyperCapitalism #CorporateFascism #CorporateColonialism
#woke 