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I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. It's an absolutely brutal book that made me appreciate truly liberal democratic

I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. It's an absolutely brutal book that made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats, even in our current world. Even if they don't quite match the suffering of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine under the power of autocrats. When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.

chemeril 2y ago
Thirded, it fundamentally changed the way I understand government. Would also recommended The Road to Unfreedom for some context around current geopolitics.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  Can you expand? What was your understanding before, and how did the book change it?
  - epistasis 2y ago
    I'm not the person you asked, so I can only answer for myself. Previously, I had viewed Nazism as more of an aberration that overtook one society, and was the sole cause of the brutality of the Holocaust. Learning about the other forms of brutality that played out over the exact same geographic area, from a political direction that claims to be the arch-enemy of Nazism, points out that people's political representations are often quite distinct from the material effects they enact on people's lives. The Holodomor was not widely reported, and in fact covered up by the few Western journalists that witnessed it, and in the informational blackhole caused by Stalinism and the abduction, imprisonment, torture, and frequent death of anybody who stood out, much less spoke of the massive damage caused by Stalin, well, the full nature of what happened was not visible to the world until the fall of the USSR. The eyewitnesses to the starvation were often silent to their own natural death a decade after the fall of the USSR, due to the depth and depravity of the oppression of expression that happened in the USSR. Basically the book points out the same lessons that Hannah Arendt and others have been pointing out for a long time, that such mass death of innocent people is quite possible even outside the strange ideologies of Nazis. The conditions for evil are quite endemic to the human condition, especially in those that abandon truth in pursuit of political strength.
    - ModernMech 2y ago
      Thanks for responding that makes a lot of sense. I think you're right about that, and if we view these movements as cults rather than political movements then it starts to make sense how different projects / ideologies can end up at the same conclusion of destruction.
throw0101d 2y ago
> I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. Ditto: > In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis delineates the "bloodlands" as a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia; in this region, Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed beyond what each regime would have inflicted independently.[1] […] > The book was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous".[4][5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
qntmfred 2y ago
> When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history. This same phenomenon has hit me like a ton of bricks over the last few years. I spend half my time learning about humanity's past and the other half trying to keep up with the burgeoning AI explosion. It's a little disorienting tbh.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  It really feels like the time is accelerating more and more. We used to say that law cannot keep up with technology. Now I think the society starts to not keep up with technology.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Can you imagine being a technology that was waking up in our time? I wouldn't really blame it if it decided that humans weren't worth keeping around.
    - giardini 2y ago
      You mean an intelligence such as ......you?
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        No I think we're worth saving, but I have a bit of bias.
  - trilbyglens 2y ago
    Society has been behind the curve for 30 years already. I mean look at what a negative force social media is and how we've done nothing about it
suraci 2y ago
> made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats always see sayings like this from westerners, or americans, to be specific everytime when something shit happened in the US: - what are we becoming? DPRK/africa/china? - at least we are not like Russia this makes me wonder, were there similar sayings in 1940 german? "at least we are not in communism" "the worst fascism is still better than communism"
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  The reason you see these kind of takes from people in liberal democracies is that other countries generally do not permit critical analysis of their governments, even if the conclusion is ultimately that it's better than the alternatives.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > were there similar sayings in 1940 german? This is why studying history is important. It makes clear the dividing line between systems that use violence as a legitimate political tool and those that don’t.
  - suraci 2y ago
    by studying history, i learnt that violence is the fundamental polical tool of the ruling class https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_and_Ideological_State_Apparatuses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_and_Ideological_Sta... it's in the history of american too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Mangione https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Mangione i think americans should have a deeper understanding abt this now
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > violence is the fundamental polical tool of the ruling class A Weberian state is defined by its monopoly on violence [1]. So yes, the state--and by extension, almost by definition, its rulers--will use violence to further their state's political aims. (Mandatory Clausewitz: war is the continuation of politics by other means.) That's very different from people within a state using violence to further political aims. Politics as a civic activity collapses when the population and its rulers fail to appreciate the difference between the two, which is why perhaps the singular question in designing governments throughout the ages has been how to enable rulers to deploy violence to further the state's collective aims while disabling them from doing so further their personal aims. (Althusser's simplification of the ruling class into a monolith is analytically enabling, but the political scientific equivalent of a spherical cow. You see a similar mistake made by foreigners describing others' political systems; no man rules alone, and no man rules unopposed.) Also, when the political systems break down, i.e. personal political aims begin being openly pursued through violence, the order of impact starts with the poor. Even in the French Revolution, most of the rich escaped. In modern violent revolutions, the rulers have tended to leave with their wealth intact and egos bruised; the poor lose their lives and the middle class become the new poor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
mjfl 2y ago
[flagged]
- tomrod 2y ago
  Who elected Elon? When was Trump elected to Congress to change the law? You may like the specific actions they are taking, but imagine someone you don't like doing the action. The Rule of Law is a core principle of the US secret sauce, and they are violating it.
  - mjfl 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - tomrod 2y ago
      No, he has an extremely small vote margin so any claim of mandate clearly isn't represented in the vote tally. He is usurping the rule of law, which was not on the ballot. [0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-size-of-donald-trumps-2024-election-victory-explained-in-5-charts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-size-of-donald-tru...
t0bia_s 2y ago
[flagged]
- em-bee 2y ago
  government does not influence society as much as society influences government. if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too, and the only way to change the government is to change the society too. simply abolishing government doesn't solve the problem.
  - t0bia_s 2y ago
    "if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too" Politics attracts sociopaths, narcissists and egoistic individuals. Individuals that are focused on competency most likely not survive in this predatory environment thus not reflecting common society. I'm not calling for abolishing government, just for change of thinking about governance and abandoning individual responsibility to the institutionalized electorate.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      ok, that sounds more reasonable. changing of how to think about governance is quite different from rejecting any form of governance. i agree that rethinking is necessary. politics is different from governance. it currently looks the same because politics controls current governments. what i believe needs to happen is the removal of politics. to develop a system of governance that is neutral and free of politics. please elaborate what you mean by individual responsibility to the institutionalized electorate.
      - t0bia_s 2y ago
        Idea of giving our responsibilities to politics by voting for them and let them later decide what we should/shouldn't do loks wrong to me. Centralised planning is more or less compromise of mixed ideas that at the end do not satisfy democratic majority. Look how many minorities scream about their rights. It just a consequence of writen above. Decentralisation of power, like principle of subsidiary, looks like a way. Also... Law do not educate society about consequences of our actions. You probably don't drive on red light due to threat of fines, fo you?
sizzle 2y ago
What can we do based off what you learned from this book to improve things currently?
- epistasis 2y ago
  Bloodlands is more of a history of what happens after unrestrained autocrats implement blood hungry murderous societies. The linked article is an excerpt from the same author's book on his thoughts of what to do to prevent authoritarians taking control and destroying all opposition, and I have not read it except this excerpt. IMHO it's far easier to report on the history than to get counter factual reasoning correct enough to propose preventative measures. That said it's good to have a plan, but the plan must adapt to reality and our view of reality is never perfect.

chemeril 2y ago

Thirded, it fundamentally changed the way I understand government. Would also recommended The Road to Unfreedom for some context around current geopolitics.

ModernMech 2y ago
Can you expand? What was your understanding before, and how did the book change it?
- epistasis 2y ago
  I'm not the person you asked, so I can only answer for myself. Previously, I had viewed Nazism as more of an aberration that overtook one society, and was the sole cause of the brutality of the Holocaust. Learning about the other forms of brutality that played out over the exact same geographic area, from a political direction that claims to be the arch-enemy of Nazism, points out that people's political representations are often quite distinct from the material effects they enact on people's lives. The Holodomor was not widely reported, and in fact covered up by the few Western journalists that witnessed it, and in the informational blackhole caused by Stalinism and the abduction, imprisonment, torture, and frequent death of anybody who stood out, much less spoke of the massive damage caused by Stalin, well, the full nature of what happened was not visible to the world until the fall of the USSR. The eyewitnesses to the starvation were often silent to their own natural death a decade after the fall of the USSR, due to the depth and depravity of the oppression of expression that happened in the USSR. Basically the book points out the same lessons that Hannah Arendt and others have been pointing out for a long time, that such mass death of innocent people is quite possible even outside the strange ideologies of Nazis. The conditions for evil are quite endemic to the human condition, especially in those that abandon truth in pursuit of political strength.
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    Thanks for responding that makes a lot of sense. I think you're right about that, and if we view these movements as cults rather than political movements then it starts to make sense how different projects / ideologies can end up at the same conclusion of destruction.

throw0101d 2y ago

> I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. Ditto: > In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis delineates the "bloodlands" as a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia; in this region, Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed beyond what each regime would have inflicted independently.[1] […] > The book was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous".[4][5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands

qntmfred 2y ago

> When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history. This same phenomenon has hit me like a ton of bricks over the last few years. I spend half my time learning about humanity's past and the other half trying to keep up with the burgeoning AI explosion. It's a little disorienting tbh.

me_me_me 2y ago
It really feels like the time is accelerating more and more. We used to say that law cannot keep up with technology. Now I think the society starts to not keep up with technology.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Can you imagine being a technology that was waking up in our time? I wouldn't really blame it if it decided that humans weren't worth keeping around.
  - giardini 2y ago
    You mean an intelligence such as ......you?
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      No I think we're worth saving, but I have a bit of bias.
- trilbyglens 2y ago
  Society has been behind the curve for 30 years already. I mean look at what a negative force social media is and how we've done nothing about it

suraci 2y ago

> made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats always see sayings like this from westerners, or americans, to be specific everytime when something shit happened in the US: - what are we becoming? DPRK/africa/china? - at least we are not like Russia this makes me wonder, were there similar sayings in 1940 german? "at least we are not in communism" "the worst fascism is still better than communism"

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
The reason you see these kind of takes from people in liberal democracies is that other countries generally do not permit critical analysis of their governments, even if the conclusion is ultimately that it's better than the alternatives.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> were there similar sayings in 1940 german? This is why studying history is important. It makes clear the dividing line between systems that use violence as a legitimate political tool and those that don’t.
- suraci 2y ago
  by studying history, i learnt that violence is the fundamental polical tool of the ruling class https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_and_Ideological_State_Apparatuses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_and_Ideological_Sta... it's in the history of american too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Mangione https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Mangione i think americans should have a deeper understanding abt this now
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > violence is the fundamental polical tool of the ruling class A Weberian state is defined by its monopoly on violence [1]. So yes, the state--and by extension, almost by definition, its rulers--will use violence to further their state's political aims. (Mandatory Clausewitz: war is the continuation of politics by other means.) That's very different from people within a state using violence to further political aims. Politics as a civic activity collapses when the population and its rulers fail to appreciate the difference between the two, which is why perhaps the singular question in designing governments throughout the ages has been how to enable rulers to deploy violence to further the state's collective aims while disabling them from doing so further their personal aims. (Althusser's simplification of the ruling class into a monolith is analytically enabling, but the political scientific equivalent of a spherical cow. You see a similar mistake made by foreigners describing others' political systems; no man rules alone, and no man rules unopposed.) Also, when the political systems break down, i.e. personal political aims begin being openly pursued through violence, the order of impact starts with the poor. Even in the French Revolution, most of the rich escaped. In modern violent revolutions, the rulers have tended to leave with their wealth intact and egos bruised; the poor lose their lives and the middle class become the new poor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

mjfl 2y ago

[flagged]

tomrod 2y ago
Who elected Elon? When was Trump elected to Congress to change the law? You may like the specific actions they are taking, but imagine someone you don't like doing the action. The Rule of Law is a core principle of the US secret sauce, and they are violating it.
- mjfl 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tomrod 2y ago
    No, he has an extremely small vote margin so any claim of mandate clearly isn't represented in the vote tally. He is usurping the rule of law, which was not on the ballot. [0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-size-of-donald-trumps-2024-election-victory-explained-in-5-charts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-size-of-donald-tru...

t0bia_s 2y ago

[flagged]

em-bee 2y ago
government does not influence society as much as society influences government. if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too, and the only way to change the government is to change the society too. simply abolishing government doesn't solve the problem.
- t0bia_s 2y ago
  "if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too" Politics attracts sociopaths, narcissists and egoistic individuals. Individuals that are focused on competency most likely not survive in this predatory environment thus not reflecting common society. I'm not calling for abolishing government, just for change of thinking about governance and abandoning individual responsibility to the institutionalized electorate.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    ok, that sounds more reasonable. changing of how to think about governance is quite different from rejecting any form of governance. i agree that rethinking is necessary. politics is different from governance. it currently looks the same because politics controls current governments. what i believe needs to happen is the removal of politics. to develop a system of governance that is neutral and free of politics. please elaborate what you mean by individual responsibility to the institutionalized electorate.
    - t0bia_s 2y ago
      Idea of giving our responsibilities to politics by voting for them and let them later decide what we should/shouldn't do loks wrong to me. Centralised planning is more or less compromise of mixed ideas that at the end do not satisfy democratic majority. Look how many minorities scream about their rights. It just a consequence of writen above. Decentralisation of power, like principle of subsidiary, looks like a way. Also... Law do not educate society about consequences of our actions. You probably don't drive on red light due to threat of fines, fo you?

sizzle 2y ago

What can we do based off what you learned from this book to improve things currently?

epistasis 2y ago
Bloodlands is more of a history of what happens after unrestrained autocrats implement blood hungry murderous societies. The linked article is an excerpt from the same author's book on his thoughts of what to do to prevent authoritarians taking control and destroying all opposition, and I have not read it except this excerpt. IMHO it's far easier to report on the history than to get counter factual reasoning correct enough to propose preventative measures. That said it's good to have a plan, but the plan must adapt to reality and our view of reality is never perfect.