Home > Work > On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
141 " 一九三○與一九四○年代的納粹黨、法西斯、共產黨都是在勝選之後,結合政治展演、鎮壓,以及分層擊破敵人的「切香腸戰術」(Salami tactics)03,逐一消滅反對者。他們轉移大部分民眾的注意力,關押部分反對人士,如此一來剩餘的人便不再是威脅。 "
― Timothy Snyder , On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
142 " Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection. "
143 " 如果專業人士讓當下的政治氣氛影響應謹守的倫理原則,那麼,他們便會說出過去自己不可置信之妄語,犯下自己無法想像之惡行。 "
144 " Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armoury that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell's and Bradbury's books could not do this - but we still can. "
145 " For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For "
146 " 要擴建思考框架,我們需要更多概念,而要獲取更多概念,我們就必須閱讀。因此請把螢幕搬出房間,在你的周圍放滿書吧! "
147 " The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. It took less than a year for the new Nazi order to consolidate. By the end of 1933, Germany had become a one-party state in which all major institutions had been humbled. That November, German authorities held parliamentary elections (without opposition) and a referendum (on an issue where the “correct” answer was known) to confirm the new order. Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope. "
148 " Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side. We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. "
149 " Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it. "
150 " In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had. "
151 " Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side. We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government. "
152 " It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. "
153 " Our time is certainly out of joint. We have forgotten history for one reason and, if we are not careful, we will neglect it for another. We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty. "
154 " It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It "
155 " the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection "
156 " For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so. James Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency. "
157 " Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope. "
158 " Germany then remained in a state of emergency for the next twelve years, until the end of the Second World War. Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world. "
159 " We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call “post-truth,” and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. "
160 " Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. T "