Nicholas

“… in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles… The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology – authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity and struggle. … While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized. These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nation’s past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true “nation”. [...] When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotional of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Japanese American internment during World War II, Vincent Chin’s 1982 murder, and the Department of Justice’s long-running “China Initiative,” among many others. If you’re new to this subject and want to learn more, I hope you’ll look at The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee; Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats; Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II, by Richard Reeves; and From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement, by Paula Yoo, as a few starting points.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat. As the historian Richard Grunberger writes in his book The 12-Year Reich, It was a paradoxical situation. Having dinned it into the collective consciousness that democracy and corruption were synonymous, the Nazis set about constructing a governmental system beside which the scandals of the Weimar regime seemed small blemishes on the body politic. Corruption was in fact the central organizing principle of the Third Reich—and yet a great many citizens not only overlooked this fact, but actually regarded the men of the new regime as austerely dedicated to moral probity.2”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Sadly, humans must continually be reminded that whether we are black or white, gender nonconforming or conforming, woman or man, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or atheist, we all need a weekend off, food to eat, and time and support to care for our aging parents.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them