A free thinker, I love her so,
Her mind and her heart freely flow.
No cage can confine,
Her love is divine,
Only in liberty, will true love grow.
Prompt: “I love a free thinker, because only a free thinker is totally free, to love without constraint.” By: ElRoyPoet, 2021
Quote inspired by: Sophia Magdalena Scholl was a “woke” 21 year old German student and Antifa political activist within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.
The Courts were never going to save us. So, who is?
“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe from what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.” By: Sophie Scholl
“Many people think of our times as being the last before the end of the world. The evidence of horror all around us makes this seem possible. But isn’t that an idea of only minor importance? Doesn’t every human being, no matter which era he lives in, always have to reckon with being accountable to God at any moment? Can I know whether I’ll be alive tomorrow morning? A bomb could destroy all of us tonight. And then my guilt would not be one bit less than if I perished together with the earth and the stars.” By: Sophie Scholl
“The blame did not lay on evil men, for evil men always do evil things. The blame lay on all of those millions who just wanted to survive.” By: Sophie Scholl
How could so many people support Hitler?
“One of the challenges that violent extremists have is how to expand their base of support. If they don’t expand their support base, they just remain fringe movements forever. One way is to provoke a harsh government response. Let’s say that there are peaceful protests, but then there are provocateurs there who try to get the police to open fire or to bash a few heads. Violence entrepreneurs will use those actions as evidence that the police or the government or the opposition are evil and intent on crushing them.
That tactic is often successful in radicalizing at least some portion of average citizens. It pushes them towards the extremists. Donald Trump is what I would describe as an “ethnic entrepreneur.” He and his loyalists want to regain power. He is an autocrat. Trump has no interest in ruling democratically. But Trump is not going to get that power back without the support of the average white American. This means that [he] has to convince them somehow that his is a worthy cause to defend.” Excerpt from: Political warlord Trump now targets his enemies…
“Governments are good at recognizing the faults in other places and times, but they are terrible judges of the injustices built into their own foundations. If a country could sail the seas unrivaled and put humans into outer space, it had little incentive to look inward at what was rotten at the core. “The regime considers itself the acme of perfection and therefore has no wish to change its ways either of its own free will or, still less, by making concessions to anyone or anything.”
Countries decay only in retrospect. Powerful states, as well as their inhabitants, tend to be congenital conservatives when it comes to their own futures. The “comfort cult,” as Andrei Amalrik called it—the tendency in seemingly stable societies to believe “that ‘Reason will prevail’ and that ‘Everything will be all right’”—is seductive. As a result, when a terminal crisis comes, it is likely to be unexpected, confusing, and catastrophic, with the causes so seemingly trivial, the consequences so easily reparable if political leaders would only do the right thing, that no one can quite believe it has come to this.
“This isolation has created for all—from the bureaucratic elite to the lowest social levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place in it”, “Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.”
Where is the breaking point? How long can a political system seek to remake itself before triggering one of two reactions—a devastating backlash from those most threatened by change or a realization by the change makers that their goals can no longer be realized within the institutions and ideologies of the present order?” Excerpts from: How a Great Power Falls Apart, Decline Is Invisible From the Inside
This High School Turned Into a Fascist Regime in 5 Days
“Being good is hard if you live under an authoritarian regime… Dictatorships elevate the nation and the leader as ultimate ends, while mere individuals have no inherent worth outside of their service to the state… Damir Marusic, an Atlantic Council senior fellow, recently wrote, ‘Putin is a wholly authentic Russian phenomenon, and the imperialist policy he’s pursuing in Ukraine is too.’ This is right, but only up to a point. We simply don’t know what individual Russians would choose, want—or become—if they had been socialized in a free, open democracy, rather than a dictatorship where fear is the air one breathes. Like everyone else, they are products of their environment. Authoritarianism corrupts society. Because punishment and reward are made into arbitrary instruments of the state, citizens have little incentive to pool resources, cooperate, or trust others. Survival is paramount, and survival requires putting one’s own interests above everything else, including traditional morality. In such a context, as the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, ‘life is nasty, brutish, and short; the pleasure of life is that it can be made nastier, more brutish, and shorter for others.’ This is the zero-sum mindset that transforms cruelty into virtue.
In short, authoritarianism twists the soul and distorts natural moral intuitions. In so doing, it renders its citizens—or, more precisely, its subjects—less morally culpable. To be fully morally culpable is to be free to choose between right and wrong. But that choice becomes much more difficult under conditions of dictatorship. Not everyone can be courageous and sacrifice life and livelihood to do the right thing.” Excerpt from Why the Russian People Go Along With Putin’s War
Fascism definition: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” By: Benito Mussolin
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” By: Ayn Rand
“Every convinced opponent of [fascism] must ask himself how he can fight against the present ‘state’ [authoritarianism] in the most effective way, how he can strike it the most telling blows. Through passive resistance, without a doubt. The imperialist ideology of force, from whatever side it comes, must be shattered for all time.” By: Sophie Scholl
“Only a fool believes that draconian laws, don’t turn liberty into tyranny.” By: B. Bondsman
Why are Most People Cowards? | Obedience and the Rise of Authoritarianism
Fear Psychosis and the Cult of Safety – Why are People so Afraid?
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