Nimitha > Recent Status Updates

And you’ll go for the bread ration, and we’ll come home and eat. We’ll get through another day. We’ll still be on earth. As long as you’re alive, I'll stay alive.
You promise?
Yes l promise.

Tatyana will go on walking, the snow will fall, and Onegin will go on failing to love her until it is much too late. Suddenly he’ll recognize her for what she really 1s, and she'll explain to him why nothing more can happen between them. Everything that seems arbitrary has been laid down since time began. Soon the brown, earth-coloured landscape will be covered by snow.

Onegin, do you remember that hour Picked by fate for our meeting In the alley, in the garden .. .

“You don’t even notice the people who love you. To you, they are nothing. You don’t value yourself, and that belittles everyone who loves you.’

Here I am back in Leningrad, worse off than when I was eighteen. But Misha, for God’s sake, let’s stop making such a tragedy out of it. We’ve done far too much of that. Other people have lives, but we just keep on having emotions. We think things have been so terrible for us, but we’re alive. We’re not even in prison.

A man appears, thrusting a baby at him. ‘My wife can’t walk any farther. He’s only two weeks old, he won’t take up any space.’
‘I've got to tend these men. Your baby’s safer with you.’

'If they drop a shell on the barn you'll be fine,' goes on Evgenia, 'as long as you've got your blanket round your head. It's just a question of having the correct attitude.'

A tiny gasp. Can she really have meant to mock Party talk like that? Jokes are the worst thing, everyone knows. Nothing gets you disappeared faster than a joke overheard by the wrong person.

The wind breathes softly. Water laps under the midnight bridges. And suddenly you know that there's no greater possible happiness than to be here, even when you're so old you're beyond walking. You lean out of your apartment window, with stiff joints and fading strength, over the city that will outlive you.

The Klannish spirit—fearful, angry, gullible to sensationalist falsehoods, in thrall to demagogic leaders and abusive language, hostile to science and intellectuals, committed to the dream that everyone can be a success in business if they only try—lives on.

Illiberal in their suspicion of dissent and the rights of minority groups, clinging to fictive images of their nations as homogeneous and destined to be so, resentful of cultural elites yet accepting the dominance of economic elites, they direct anger at big-city cosmopolitans and at groups outside their imagined homogeneity.

Every such movement (right-wing populists) arises also from specific local and national contexts, and all are different. But they share characteristics, as a particular but recognizable type of conservatism.

When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

The journalist Dorothy Thompson, who spent years covering Nazi Germany,& lived through the 1920s heyday of the Klan, pointed out that “no people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. . . .

Like most other right-wing populisms, the Klan could not survive a peace treaty or even an armistice with its enemies. It needed a sense of danger to thrive. Klanspeople had to visualize themselves as soldiers defending against threats, and in doing so created belief in those threats. Right-wing populisms often produce this doubled effect.

"To be manly was to fight; not to fight was to be weak. All this was fundamental to fascism, and the Nazis used it in violent, even sadistic attacks on and humiliations of its “aliens.” The northern Ku Klux Klan rarely did that. Klan leaders realized that they could gain more from electoral than from martial action."
RSS seems to be modelled more after KKK than other fascist parties.

Fascism is distinguished not only by its ideologies, which are often incoherent, but also through its visual symbolism and its aggressive mobilizations. The Klan similarly organized performances of masculinity and male bonding through uniforms, parades, rituals, secrecy, and hierarchical military ranks and titles.

In this respect the KKK was authoritarian, even as it denounced Catholics for their subservience to papal authority. Klan anti-intellectualism protected it from skeptics. In this respect it differed from European fascisms, which, partly because they were less religiously narrow, did not typically display hostility to science.

The emphasis on faith as opposed to evidence-driven inquiry both reflected and fed suspicion of science, especially evolutionary theory. That suspicion strengthened its hostility to intellectuals in general. Klan doctrine was impregnable to disproof. Its discursive mode—anecdotal, testimonial—resisted challenge.

Condemning Jews and Catholics while honoring “right” Americans for the same practices speaks to the Klan’s demand that supporters accept its allegations on faith. Because the Klan was a religious as well as a nationalist organization, the beliefs required of its members were all the more obligatory. Challenging its truths constituted treason or heresy or both.

In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, the fictional fascist senator Berzelius Windrip promises ‘to make America a proud, rich land again.’ That concept of national destiny fueled hostilities even toward neighbors, even those who had long been part of Klanspeople’s communities

Similarly, like fascism and especially its Nazi version, the Klan promulgated a racialized nationalism: it conflated the “nation” with a master “race,” that is, “Nordics". Sinclair Lewis warned that should fascism come to the United States, it would appear as patriotic and entirely American.

These movements often co-opt grievances associated with the Left, notably economic inequality, but typically blame foreigners, racial minorities, and cosmopolitan, liberal elites. These movements also share patterns of thought and rhetoric, such as conspiracy-mongering, apocalyptic narratives, anti-intellectualism, and intense nationalism, often called “patriotism".

The 1920s Klan was not a uniquely American phenomenon. It was part of a group of movements around the globe that have come to be called right-wing populisms, fascism one of them. It was growing throughout central and eastern Europe just as the second Klan arose, and is reawakening today. Similar movements avoid the fascist label but share its modalities, especially hostility to immigrants.

from people of the wrong religion or race require the action of private citizens. Then, when courts acquit vigilantes, as they did so often in the 1920s—and virtually always in the South—the vigilantes’ self-justifications become yet more acceptable.

However reprehensible hidden bigotry might be, making its open expression acceptable has significant additional impact. Stigmatizing bigoted talk conveys the message that it is shameful. Moreover, silent bigotry exerts less influence on others.