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Quote by Jia Tolentino

“To argue against an ideology, you have to acknowledge and articulate it. In the process, you might inadvertently ventriloquize your opposition. This is a problem that kneecaps me constantly, a problem that might define journalism in the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time.”

Quote by Jia Tolentino

Book:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
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Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

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Jia Tolentino

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“Then, between two sheets of paper, they discovered a third, left there by accident. Clearly written at the top were the words, 'Copy and circulate'. It was the front page of Résistance, mercifully unfinished. Ordered to explain it, I admitted with a suitable degree of reluctance that it was a copy of a tract exhorting the French people to hoard all their nickel coins. I said I had abandoned the project as I was such a bad typist, but that I had made five copies that I had left on seats in the Métro. All in all, it was a plausible story that would only cost me two or three months in prison. I chuckled inwardly as I thought about the Résistance file, with its four hundred names and addresses, lying quietly hidden — together with copies of all the tracts we had published since September 1940 — under the stair carpet between floors. After asking my permission with great ceremony, my gentleman visitors used my telephone to report back to their chief on the success of their mission. Then they hung up, and invited me to leave with them. It was at this point that I remembered the Roosevelt speech that Léo had given me two days before, which was still in my handbag! I asked permission to go to the toilet, which they granted, though not without first snatching my bag from me and ordering me not to shut the door.”

WarWorld War TwoThe Resistance
Book:Resistance: A French Woman's Journal of the War
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“... he informed me coldly that I was in the hands of the Gestapo, and that I was about to learn that the German police are quite a different matter from their French counterparts. Following this amiable introduction, two or three officers entered the room. I was made to stand in the middle of the space as the Germans circled round me, looking me up and down with jerky, staccato movements, screaming like lunatics all the while, to the accompaniment of some sort of music emitted at top volume from an enormous radio. The din was indescribable....* I asked a typist, who also seemed to be an interpreter, if she would be kind enough to translate what the gentleman were shouting at me, as if they were questions I should be happy to answer them. *Though these techniques seem farcical today, this was how the SS embarked on their 'work' in Paris. When they realized that these ridiculous performances were eliciting no information they improved their methods, so gradually attaining the finesse of semi-drowning in bathtubs filled with ice water, electric shocks and the rest.”

WarTortureCoercionWorld War TwoThe Resistance
Book:Resistance: A French Woman's Journal of the War
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