Quotes from Anne Applebaum

War, compared the selection process he went through in 1946 to a slave market: Everyone was ordered to the courtyard and told to strip. When your name was called you appeared before a medical team for a health inspection. The exam consisted of

el Gobierno y la industria no se asignaban a los más trabajadores ni a los más capaces, sino a los más leales.

tratando de aprender a evitar que una nueva democracia se convirtiera en una tiranía.

people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were.

People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts. At the same time, in an information sphere without authorities—political, cultural, moral—and no trusted sources, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories. False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up.

algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal.

Nuestra época es de hecho la época de la organización intelectual de los odios políticos. Este será uno de sus principales rasgos a destacar en la historia moral de la humanidad. JULIEN BENDA, La trahison des clercs, 1927

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka—Lenin's secret police, the forerunner of the KGB— personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random "enemies" he came across while doing his job.12

pero fue su actitud de desafío, su determinación de ser alguien que decide, y que no solo negocia, lo que de hecho le hizo ganarse su admiración. Por entonces pensaba

hay otros Estados Unidos —los de Buchanan, los de Trump— que no ven que exista una diferencia importante entre democracia y dictadura.

government policy.

Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat.

Others throw their children into the Volga, preferring to see them drown rather than be brought up in the communist faith, which they believe is an anti-Christ doctrine

Let us all swear at this great moment as one man to take up the great cause unanimously, with one accord, and not to rest or cease our labour until we build that free Ukraine!' The crowd shouted back: 'We swear!

Arendt observed the attraction of authoritarianism to people who feel resentful or unsuccessful back in the 1940s, when she wrote that the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

They didn't just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it."81

Un sistema amañado y poco competitivo suena mal si queremos vivir en una sociedad dirigida por personas de talento; pero si ese no es nuestro principal interés, ¿qué hay de malo en ello?

Alexander Hamilton and John Adams] wanted to build democracy in America on the basis of rational debate, reason, and compromise. But they had no illusions about human nature: They knew that men could sometimes succumb to "passions," to use their old-fashioned word. They knew that any political system built on logic and rationality was always at risk from an outburst of the irrational.

El autoritarismo es algo que atrae simplemente a las personas que no toleran la complejidad: no hay nada intrínseco «de izquierdas» o «de derechas» en ese instinto. Es meramente antipluralista; recela de las personas con ideas distintas, y es alérgico a los debates acalorados. Resulta irrelevante que quienes lo tienen deriven en última instancia su postura política del marxismo o del nacionalismo. Es una actitud mental, no un conjunto de ideas.

In the former Soviet Union in the years following 1989, nationalism was still popularly believed to be progressive; nationalist leaders were still believed, at least in the beginning, to speak for the many people whose voices had been suppressed in the past.

A traveler can meet a man born in Poland, brought up in the Soviet Union, who now lives in Belarus – and he has never left his village.

disappeared beneath Soviet avenues of cracked concrete; how variety – medieval stone foundations, baroque seminarium doors, classical columns, Prussian red brick walls, and delicate shop windows – had vanished behind spectacular monotony; how churches and pastry shops, farmers' markets, tobacconists, a university and schools and law courts gave way to numbered apartment blocks.

Sometimes, when you go on foot there, when you walk in the woods near the old pagan temples, you feel something very strong. It is like the energy you feel in a church, or the energy you feel when a boy and a girl are in love and touch hands for the first time.

If it happens, the fall of liberal democracy in our own time will not look as it did in the 1920s or 1930s. But it will still require a new elite, a new generation of clercs, to bring it about. The collapse of an idea of the West, or of what is sometimes called "the Western liberal order," will need thinkers, intellectuals, journalists, bloggers, writers, and artists to undermine our current values, and then to imagine the new system to come.