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posted by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

New lecture series from authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today. “The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now.”

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Jason KottkeMOD

Description of the second lecture, which has a certain resonance with contemporary events:

Totalitarianism did not emerge from nowhere. It was a response to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more particularly to the empires that Europeans had created during the previous four or five centuries. In order to understand the aims of Hitler and other fascists, of Lenin and Stalin, we must first understand the world in which they matured, one in which Europeans dominated others and applied law only to themselves. In some ways the fascists and the Leninists sought to break this world order, in that they wanted to transcend other empires; in some ways they took imperial practices to a radical extreme.

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