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Sebastian
https://www.goodreads.com/sgmidence
read
(218)
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currently-reading (4)
to-read (1558)
fiction (1050)
english-translation (362)
nobel-laureates (347)
africa (250)
science-fiction (243)
europe (230)
adapted-into-movie (209)
history (165)
latin-america (146)
short-stories
(105)
amerindian (102)
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biography-memoir (81)
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india (69)
aapi (68)
amerindian (102)
united-kingdom (97)
middle-east (88)
china (87)
south-asia (83)
biography-memoir (81)
japan (80)
southeast-asia (70)
caribbean (69)
india (69)
aapi (68)
Sebastian
is currently reading
by Nisi Shawl
bookshelves:
aapi,
african-american,
latin-america,
science-fiction,
short-stories,
currently-reading,
caribbean,
fantasy,
anthologies,
fiction
![Loading... Loading...](https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/loading_big-5baaead7062b26142a19d19a9bccf5c2.gif)
![Sinclair Lewis](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1205204856i/7330._CR0,35,200,200_.jpg)
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well, what if they are?”
― It Can't Happen Here
― It Can't Happen Here
![Hannah Arendt](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1608634661i/12806._UX200_CR0,0,200,200_.jpg)
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
![A.R. Moxon](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1558817152i/18840710._UY200_CR24,0,200,200_.jpg)
“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”
―
That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”
―
![Jamaica Kincaid](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1613135013i/39237._UX200_CR0,0,200,200_.jpg)
“That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.”
― A Small Place
― A Small Place
![William L. Shirer](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1261137098i/13360.jpg)
“I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”
― The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
― The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
![97](https://images.gr-assets.com/groups/1512419099p1/97.jpg)
Here is an overview of the group reads & activities: Regional reads Nominations and Book discussions. Buddy Reads Find someone to read along with!. Af ...more
![1281](https://images.gr-assets.com/groups/1191704698p1/1281.jpg)
Do you adore a good piece of travel literature/travelogue? Than this is the group for you!
![220](https://images.gr-assets.com/groups/1269147049p1/220.jpg)
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Sebastian’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Sebastian’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
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