the road to unfreedom russia europe america

'ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,'.We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad.The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions.Americans today are no wiser than than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

ocieties can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s.

European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and '30s.

failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own.

Since the American colonies declared their independence.

In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny.

As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.

On Tyranny (2017) : Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003).

In combination with Lithuanian and Polish successes, this Belarusian failure helps us to perceive what national movements actually need.

In the twentieth century, this “ethnic group” did not become a modern nation.

In Vil’na, Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev, and Vitebsk provinces, contiguous territories of historic Lithuania, speakers of Belarusian were three quarters of the population. According to the Russian imperial census of 1897, more people spoke Belarusian in Vil’na province than all other languages combined. Here we have an “ethnic group” which is the largest by far in the area in question.

The Belarusian failure therefore provides a useful test.

Headed Towards Tyranny? (February 18, 2020)

The road to unfreedom russia europe america