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Today's Document
styofa doing anything

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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
sheepfilms
Show & Tell
Keni
Acquired Stardust
Sade Olutola

Product Placement
trying on a metaphor
d e v o n
Peter Solarz

Andulka

blake kathryn
tumblr dot com

shark vs the universe
KIROKAZE

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Mexico
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seen from Philippines
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@fortunenglory
Large Adult Goat: the voice of reason white people never knew they needed.
For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South. ... Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Lost Cause Rides Again"
I don't believe it's possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you, as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.
Historian Howard Zinn (2004)
"President Donald Trump’s budget proposal—which includes slashing the Department of Education’s budget by 13.5 percent and allocating $1.4 billion for school choice initiatives—was released last week. Trump’s proposed $9.2 million in cuts would eliminate, for example, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which funds after-school programs for students from low-income families. Also on the chopping block: Title II, Part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which supports teacher training, recruitment and retention. ... Trump has proposed a $168 million increase for charter schools (which presently receive over $300 annually) and $1 billion to promote and increase school choice in Title I schools. Another $250 million would go to a new “private school choice program" ... Allocating taxpayer money to subsidize private and religious schools, while failing to provide the same robust support for public schools, will result in the exact opposite of equitable education. It will fail to serve students of color, those who come from low-income families or live in rural America."
Lisa Applegate, "Starving Schools to Feed Privatization"
What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.
Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
The Ways to Destroy Democracy: A Warning From History
A few months ago, I read the recently published book Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, written by German historian Volker Ullrich. It’s an astonishingly well-researched and captivating book-- both thrilling and frightening even for someone already well-versed on the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
The Nation posted a review of the book last month, appropriately titled “The Ways to Destroy Democracy: A Warning From History.” It was written by Richard J. Evans, a knighted British historian of twentieth-century Europe who is President of Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge and is an expert on Nazi Germany, having written books including The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War.
Both the book and the review have been on my mind daily.
Admittedly, contemporary comparisons that people make to Hitler are both overused and simplistic. They are often so overused, they are quickly dismissed. Still, important lessons can still be learned in relation to how demagogues consolidate power. The review from The Nation may not mention Trump outright, but clearly, the parallels are intentional. There is a popular narrative that Trump and his cronies are incompetent, in over their heads, confused by the realities of the presidency. I reject this narrative. Everything you see is deliberate.
I do not intend to be alarmist with this post. But I do ask that you read what I posted below in its entirety. If it alarms you, share it.Then, if you have the time, read the full review, read the book, and read even more... arm yourself and as many people as you know with knowledge of our shared past.
A few excerpts from the review include:
[T]he lower-middle classes, the bourgeoisie, the unorganized workers, the rural masses, and the older traditionalists—Protestants and evangelicals who wanted a moral restoration of the nation—switched their votes from the mainstream centrist and right-wing parties ... and gave them to Hitler instead.
Hitler issued an endless stream of slogans to win potential supporters over. He would make Germany great again. He would give Germans work once more. He would put Germany first. He would revive the nation’s rusting industries.
Hitler [carefully] prepared his speeches. Seemingly spontaneous, they were in fact calculated. Full of base allegations and vile stereotypes, they were precisely designed to gain maximum attention from the media and maximum reaction from the crowds he addressed.
Aided by his talented propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, Hitler not only flaunted his vulgarity and exploited tribal hatreds; he also lied and lied his way to success.
[I]n the last free elections of the Weimar Republic, the left-wing parties—the Communists and Social Democrats—won more votes and gained more seats in the national parliament than the Nazis did. But they were fatally divided, spending at least as much time fighting each other as they did trying to stop Hitler from establishing a dictatorship. Their rhetoric was feeble in comparison with his, their supporters less fanatical, their electoral propaganda less powerful and less sophisticated.
Hitler made sure that the armed forces were on his side by giving them massive increases in funding and a huge new armaments program.
His program for making Germany great again included a new aggressive attitude in international affairs.
Hitler’s seizure and remaking of the state was buttressed by a wholesale reorganization of the education system and an effort to redefine German culture. ... The intellectual quality of German universities, which had led the world in research before 1933, plummeted. It has never fully recovered. Hitler didn’t care. For him, education was a matter of practical instruction; it had nothing to do with the transmission of pure knowledge, let alone the traditional humanistic values that had underpinned the German educational system. ... The main objective of Nazi education and culture was not, however, to distract people from issues of political importance; it was to instill a new sense of patriotism.
The regime’s assault on culture extended to its policy toward the arts, which were “coordinated” by Goebbels in a Reich Chamber of Culture that ended funding for modern painting, sculpture, and music, and banned allegedly subversive artists from working.
[T]he regime constantly targeted minorities as a way of mobilizing popular approval and support. The Nazis may have dominated state power, but this wasn’t the kind of dictatorship that depended solely on repression, important though it was. Like many other modern dictatorships, it wanted to appear popular.
A key part of the process was the vilification of political opponents. ... Nazi media and officialdom heaped abuse on democrats and harassed them at every turn. These opponents of the regime bore the brunt of the new treason laws from 1933 onward; in 1935 alone, there were some 23,000 political prisoners in Germany’s jails, and more than 5,000 people were being tried and condemned for treason every year.
Ordinary Germans were not wholly won over by such acts of persecution and destruction; only a minority applauded them. But the great mass of Germans did nothing to stop any of this. Civil courage was in short supply in a country cowed into submission.
Hitler was a media figure who gained popularity and controlled his country through speeches and publicity. Far from being a consistent and undeviatingly purposeful politician, he was temperamental, changeable, insecure, allergic to criticism, and often indecisive and uncertain in a crisis.
Nice touch, Books-a-Million. I see what you did there.
It’s the meta-advice of the past: That things slip out of reach for you, psychologically very quickly, and then legally almost as quickly. It’s hard for people to act when they feel other people won’t act. It’s hard for people to act when they feel like they have to break the law to do so. So it is important to get out in front before people face those psychological and legal barriers. ... I think that the people who inhabit the White House inhabit a different ideological world in which they would like for the United States not to be the constitutional system that it now is. I was concerned about that in November. I’m concerned about it now. Nothing that has happened since has changed the way I see things. ... Fascism says, disregard the evidence of your senses, disregard observation, embolden deeds that can’t be proven, don’t have faith in god but have faith in leaders, take part in collective myth of an organic national unity, and so forth. ... [P]eople now, don’t understand how quick their neighbors will change; don’t understand how quickly society can change. They don’t understand the fact that a life that’s been predictable for a long time, doesn’t mean that it will be predictable tomorrow. ... [W]e are facing a real crisis and a real moment of choice. The possibilities are much darker than Americans are used to considering. But at the same time, what we can do is much more important than we realize.
Yale historian Timothy Synder, author of "On Tyranny" and an expert on fascism, totalitarian rule, and regime chance.