Professor Timothy Snyder on “Fascism and Fear”

An author who I have respected for some time is Timothy  Snyder - ever since I read his book ”On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” (pub. Vintage Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-1847924889 [Amazon] ). I also subscribe to his Substack column, and consider his latest article there to be important enough to merit its own post. 

The article’s details are: 

“Fascism and Fear”   https://snyder.substack.com/p/fascist-froth   “The Moment, The Media, The Election”     

In this article, Professor Snyder examines (and excoriates! [my word] ) the mainstream media’s (again, my words) mostly (he identifies one exception) incompetent, pro-fascism by laziness/ineptness/greed “reporting” on the US Presidential election.

“The Biden administration is being held to standards, while the previous Trump administration is not; and Biden personally is being held to standards, while Trump as a person is not. This helps to generate a fascist aura.   ...   surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside? ... I know the counter-arguments ... The first misses an important point. There are quite a few Americans who have not made up their minds. The second amounts to obeying in advance. If you accept that a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.”  

There is a lot of excellent, deep analysis and explanation around that quote (particularly the “fascist aura”) - and I make no apologies for omitting a few key sections:   

 

   I  want  you to  read  the  article!   

 

The Democrats are also commented on. 

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

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Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/