Alex Jupiter

“Right-wing populist movements appeal to historically dominant population groups that have been left behind economically relative to their expectations: the poorly educated, those who live in rural areas, and workers who have lost jobs because of international trade.18 Arguments made by the leaders of right-wing populist movements for trade barriers and immigration restrictions fall on willing ears. But rather than explicitly appeal to class identity or distributive justice, the leaders of right-wing populist movements appeal to the ethno-nationalist creed of “blood and soil.” These groups look nostalgically back to a past when people like them enjoyed greater economic security and higher status.”
― Eric A. Posner, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

“How many refugees have fled from Britain, or from the whole of the British Empire, during the past seven years? And how many from Germany? How many people personally known to you have been beaten with rubber truncheons or forced to swallow pints of castor oil? How dangerous do you feel it to be to go into the nearest pub and express your opinion that this is a capitalist war and we ought to stop fighting? Can you point to anything in recent British or American history that compares with the June Purge, the Russian Trotskyist trials, the pogrom that followed vom Rath’s assassination? Could an article equivalent to the one I am writing be printed in any totalitarian country, red, brown or black? The Daily Worker has just been suppressed, but only after ten years of life, whereas in Rome, Moscow or Berlin it could not have survived ten days. And during the last six months of its life Great Britain was not only at war but in a more desperate predicament than at any time since Trafalgar. Moreover – and this is the essential point – even after the Daily Worker’s suppression its editors are permitted to make a public fuss, issue statements in their own defence, get questions asked in Parliament and enlist the support of well-meaning people of various political shades. The swift and final ‘liquidation’ which would be a matter of course in a dozen other countries not only does not happen, but the possibility that it may happen barely enters anyone’s mind.”
― George Orwell, Fascism and Democracy

“And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.”
― George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

“Until recently, when both of them went extinct, there were two species of frogs, known as gastric-brooding frogs, that carried their eggs in their stomachs and gave birth to little froglets through their mouths.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History