The real question is: who has the responsibility to uphold human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.
Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price.
This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.
It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than to kill the ideas that gave them birth.
When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.
Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.
To reduce the sum of our existence to a competitive struggle for advantage among more than two hundred nations is not clear-eyed but myopic. People and nations compete, but that is not all that they do.
Presidents from Roosevelt to Obama have sought to help allies protect themselves and to engage in collective defense against common dangers. We did this not in a spirit of charity but because we had learned the hard way that problems abroad, if unaddressed, could, before long, imperil us.
This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is neither.
He didn’t think it sanitary to shake hands, didn’t smoke, and had no taste for liquor, not even Italy’s fine wine. He was a poor listener who disliked hearing other people talk. He was loath to spend nights away from his own bed, and the time he allotted for meals – either alone or with his family – averaged about three minutes.
A dictatorship by any other name is still a dictatorship, whether its symbol is the czarist two-headed eagle or the hammer and sickle.
President Trump’s eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.
Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.
The complexity of immigration as an issue begins with a basic human trait: we are reluctant to share.