#newyorker

birne@diaspora.psyco.fr

“Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women [...] The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it’s 3,000 miles away and has never moved.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died

Thank you, @joseph_teller@diaspora.glasswings.com, for bringing it to our attention!

#NewYorker #Democracy #1930s

eccodrum@diasp.org

The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War
For centuries, the country has lived in the shadow of empire. But its past also provides the key to its present.
By Timothy Snyder
April 28, 2022

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pron#warounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.

#history #politics #geopolitics #russia #ukraine #colonization #imperialism #war #europe #bolshevik #poland #kyiv #cossack #WWI #WWII #germany #christianity #stalin #NewYorker

dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

Give TOM O'DONNELL some free-market love, peeps.

#libertardianism #parody #politics #newyorker