1934


Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1)
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Tender Is the Night
I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)
The Thin Man
Appointment in Samarra
Cigars of the Pharaoh (Tintin #4)
Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins, #1)
Burmese Days
Miss Buncle's Book (Miss Buncle #1)
Good-Bye, Mr. Chips
A Handful of Dust
Voyage in the Dark
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In 1934, at the January Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the Soviet Communist Party, the Great Leader (having already in mind, no doubt, how many he would soon have to do away with) declared that the withering away of the state (which had been awaited virtually from 1920 on) would arrive via, believe it or not, the maximum intensification of state power. This was so unexpectedly brilliant that it was not given to every little mind to grasp it, but Vyshinsky, eve ...more
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

Hannah Arendt
The breakdown of the European party system occurred in a spectacular way with Hitler's rise to power. It is now often conveniently forgotten that at the moment of the outbreak of the second World War, the majority of European countries has already adopted some form of dictatorship and discarded the party system, and that this revolutionary change in government has been effected in most countries without revolutionary upheaval. Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession ...more
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

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