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“Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live.
For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption.
Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.”
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For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption.
Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.”
―
“fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat. As the historian Richard Grunberger writes in his book The 12-Year Reich, It was a paradoxical situation. Having dinned it into the collective consciousness that democracy and corruption were synonymous, the Nazis set about constructing a governmental system beside which the scandals of the Weimar regime seemed small blemishes on the body politic. Corruption was in fact the central organizing principle of the Third Reich—and yet a great many citizens not only overlooked this fact, but actually regarded the men of the new regime as austerely dedicated to moral probity.2”
― How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
― How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
“Sadly, humans must continually be reminded that whether we are black or white, gender nonconforming or conforming, woman or man, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or atheist, we all need a weekend off, food to eat, and time and support to care for our aging parents.”
― How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
― How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
“Ben-Gurion articulated clearly the place of expulsion in the future of the Zionist project in Palestine when he wrote that same year, "With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it.”
― Ten Myths About Israel
― Ten Myths About Israel
“… in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles… The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology – authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity and struggle. … While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized. These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nation’s past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true “nation”. [...] When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotional of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory”
― How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
― How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
Nicholas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Nicholas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
134 books
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21 friends
26 books
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125 friends
0 books
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2 friends
94 books
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233 friends
0 books
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33 friends
3 books
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51 friends
0 books
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569 friends
32 books
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9 friends
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