2) "The Unwinding" by George Packer - Packer is my favorite US journalist working today. He argues that societies go through periodic periods of unwinding and that US has experienced one since the 1970s. The books follows six people in-depth but also uses the stories of famous individuals who have influenced the unfolding of this period.

He recently published a magisterial article in the Atlantic worth checking out: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/phoenix-climate-drought-republican-politics/678494/

#Books #Bookstodon #History #USA #georgepacker

2/10

"The #REPUBLICAN brand of #patriotism smacks of cigarette smoke & dog racing." #GeorgePacker / book 'Last, Best Hope'

'This past June, the library & publishers’ assocs reissued 'The Freedom to Read' on its 70th anniversary, a manifesto signed by scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty orgs, authors. And yt many of those institutional signatories —includ'g the 'Big 5' publishing conglomerates— often violate its stand, maybe nt even aware they’re doing so. It’s worth askg why the American literary world in 2023 is less able to uphold its principles than in 1953." #GeorgePacker #TheAtlantic

The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save

Censored and then forgotten, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s "Babi Yar," about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, is again painfully relevant. By George Packer.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/03/nazi-holocaust-literature-kyiv-babi-yar-book/672782/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

#ukraine @TheAtlantic #bookstodon #babiyar #kuznetsov #georgepacker

"This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. 'Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,' Orwell wrote in 1946. 'What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side'.”

#GeorgePacker

"...in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive... Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink."

#GeorgePacker

"Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information ... with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions."

#GeorgePacker

"We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves."

#GeorgePacker

"Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: 'The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you'.”

#GeorgePacker

"[Orwell's] introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication ... Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony ... that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare but he took the erasure of truth hard."

#GeorgePacker

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/1984-george-orwell/590638/