Michael Cresci
https://www.goodreads.com/mcresci
Michael Cresci
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Reading for the 2nd time
read in June 2025

I'm in flat out awe of this book and will be rereading it the rest of my life.
I am currently enraptured with the tension between oral story telling and capturing the wo ...more "


“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?”
―
That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?”
―

“Did they know what Communism, “Bolshevism,” was? They did not; not my friends. Except for Herr Kessler, Teacher Hildebrandt, and young Horstmar Rupprecht (after he entered the university, in 1941), they knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only the Communists but the Social Democrats, the trade-unions, and, of course, the Jews, the gypsies, the neighbor next door whose dog had bit them, and his dog; the bundled root cause of all their past, present, and possible tribulations.”
― They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
― They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury.”
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“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living”
― The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
― The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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