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144 books
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38 voters
“Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “To which I respond: There aren’t any,” Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent in the country's last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was 'to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Tim’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Tim’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
676 books
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40 friends
9,447 books
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314 friends
2,053 books
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70 friends
1,580 books
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73 friends
467 books
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120 friends
435 books
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144 friends
173 books
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4 friends
319 books
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192 friends
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