Genres

Authoritarianism

Lists

A Flower Traveled in My Blood by Haley Cohen Gilliland

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista

"Strongmen" and Resilience

16 books — 1 voter

Totalitarianism: A Primer

43 books — 10 voters

Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman

Corruption, Plutocracy, Oligarchy, Kleptocracy, Corporatocracy — The Problem (nonfiction)

717 books — 192 voters

Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the De... by George Lakoff

Fire + Fury - Nazis & Commies, Fascists & Socialists by Dead Writers Club

Taking On the System by Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga

The resistance

22 books — 9 voters

The Rise and Fall of Antocracy by Terry Birdgenaw

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Apprentice's Sorcerer by Ishay Landa

Liberalism & Fascism - Capitalism

25 books — 3 voters

All The Best Dystopian Novels | TheCozy.Cat

2 books — 2 voters

Featured News & Interviews

New Nonfiction to Read This Women's History Month

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Quotes Tagged “Authoritarianism”

“ 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 as 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 reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer. ...more ”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

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“ Vladimir Putin pledges no allegiance to to the democratic articles of faith, but he does not explicitly renounce democracy. He disdains Western values while professing to identify with the West. He doesn’t care what the State Department puts in next year’s human rights report, because he has yet to pay a political price in his own country for the sins reported in prior years. He tells bald lies with a straight face, and when guilty of aggression, blames the victim. He has convinced many, apparen ...more ”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

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