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Quote by Krista Marson

“I'll never forget how the gray October light reflected off the glass and filled the space with a weight that didn't seem to befit the room. I knew that the Treaty of Versailles was signed in that mirrored hallway, and with that gray light, it seemed as though the World War I era was still ensconced in there.”

Quote by Krista Marson

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Krista Marson

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“The history of the modern world is the story of nations having affairs with each other. These affairs have been based on caprice and on ambition; they have been oiled with diplomacy and intrigue and have been unsanctified by law, there having been no law covering the rights and obligations of the contracting parties. The result has been chaotic and there still is no law.”

PoliticsNationsDiplomacyTreatiesLawsForeign Relationships
Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; citizens with opinions about, and interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries. While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, the totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations. After the first World War, a deeply antidemocratic, prodictatorial wave of semitotalitarian and totalitarian movements swept Europe; Fascist movements spread from Italy to nearly all Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was one of the notable exceptions); yet even Mussolini, who was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule. Similar nontotalitarian dictatorships sprang up in prewar Rumania, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, Portugal and Franco Spain. The Nazis, who had an unfailing instinct for such differences, used to comment contemptuously on the shortcomings of their Fascist allies while their genuine admiration for the Bolshevik regime in Russia (and the Communist Party in Germany) was matched and checked only by their contempt for Eastern European races.”

CommunismFascismDictatorshipTotalitarianismNazismMassesPolitical Movements1967Party PoliticsMussolini
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.”

FascismTrumpismMussolini2018Drain The Swamp
Book:Fascism: A Warning
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“During the Cold War between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, there were, of course, many in the West who said, ‘Better dead than Red [communist]’; but many others subscribed to the slogan associated with Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century’s leading atheist philosopher: ‘Better Red than dead.’ Russell’s slogan was consistent with that of much of the well-educated class in Britain. On February 8, 1933, right after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Oxford Union Debating Society held a debate on the resolution, ‘This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.’ The resolution passed 275–153. The vote made an impression on Hitler and Mussolini, as it revealed that many of England’s best educated would prefer to live under Nazism or Fascism than to fight for freedom and risk death.”

FascismCold WarHitlerMussolini
Book:The Rational Bible: Exodus
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