WIST Quotations

Snyder, Timothy -- Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, “Conclusion: Our World” (2015)

Dave — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 14:24:46 +0000

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.

Timothy Snyder (b. 1969) American historian, author
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, “Conclusion: Our World” (2015)

Snyder, Timothy -- Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, “Conclusion: Our World” (2015)

Dave — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 14:16:22 +0000

When states are absent, rights — by any definition — are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited, or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort.

Timothy Snyder (b. 1969) American historian, author
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, “Conclusion: Our World” (2015)

Snyder, Timothy -- Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, “Conclusion” (2015)

Dave — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 15:49:44 +0000

Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized.

Timothy Snyder (b. 1969) American historian, author
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, “Conclusion” (2015)

Snyder, Timothy -- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, “Conclusion” (2010)

Dave — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:48:50 +0000

It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. […] Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.

Timothy Snyder (b. 1969) American historian, author
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, “Conclusion” (2010)

Snyder, Timothy -- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)

Dave — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 14:44:13 +0000

A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well — and wishing that it would do better.

Timothy Snyder (b. 1969) American historian, author
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)

See Orwell.

Snyder, Timothy -- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)

Dave — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 13:58:26 +0000

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual — and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.