"A subsequent generation of historians rejected the totalitarianism model as grossly oversimplified and sought to analyze the Third Reich and tQuotes:
"A subsequent generation of historians rejected the totalitarianism model as grossly oversimplified and sought to analyze the Third Reich and the Soviet Union through more historically informed structural comparisons...Both were authoritarian dictatorships built around the cult of the leader; both used an ideological party apparatus to dominate the activities of the state; both fabricated emergencies to break down the rule of law and resorted to terror in the name of security against perceived enemies, internal and external; both relied on imprisonment and encampment to eliminate political, social, and racial or ethnic enemies."
"Gestapo records reveal that in East Prussia, it was mostly simple workers and the occasional rural farmer who risked showing kindness to Jewish neighbors."
"For many of the [Soviet] soldiers, discovering such abundance only compounded their frustration. The common question, as one solider explained to the US journalist Alexander Werth in Berlin, was why the Germans had gone to war at all. 'They lived well, the parasites. Great big farms in East Prussia, and pretty posh houses in the towns that hadn't been burned out or bombed to hell. And look at these datchas here! Why did these people who were living so well have to invade us?'"
"The expulsion of the Germans was not designed to provide newly arriving Soviet settlers with jobs, however. Endemic labor shortages became even worse after the Germans were dismissed...At first, they used the presence of German workers as a scapegoat for plan under-fulfillment; after the expulsion, they blamed failure to meet plan targets on the Germans' absence." (p 229)...more
"'It's terrible,' said Yurii Andreievich when they were in sight of their own village. 'You can't ima**spoiler alert** Favorite quotes from this book:
"'It's terrible,' said Yurii Andreievich when they were in sight of their own village. 'You can't imagine what the wretched Jewish population is going through in this war. The fighting happens to be in their Pale. And as if punitive taxation, the destruction of their property, and all their other sufferings were not enough, they are subjected to pogroms, insults, and accusations that they lack patriotism. And why should they be patriotic? Under enemy rule, they enjoy equal rights, and we do nothing but persecute them. This hatred for them, the basis of it, is irrational. It is stimulated by the very things that should arouse sympathy - their poverty, their overcrowding, their weakness, and this inability to fight back. I can't understand it.'"
"Beyond the windows lay silent, dark, hungry Moscow. Its shops were empty, and as for game and vodka, people had even forgotten to think about such things. And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all."
"And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark."
"I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."
"He saw the two sleeping heads on their snow-white pillows. The purity of their features, and of the clean linen and the clean rooms, and of the night, the snow, the stars, the moon, surged through his heart in a single wave of meaning, moving him to a joyful sense of the triumphant purity of being. 'Lord! Lord!' he whispered, 'and all this is for me? Why hast Thou given me so much?'"
"'The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.'"...more
Disappointingly heteronormative with a heavy emphasis on women's value being tied to childbirth, but I enjoyed taking a walk through different MesopotDisappointingly heteronormative with a heavy emphasis on women's value being tied to childbirth, but I enjoyed taking a walk through different Mesopotamian cultures and religions, and the author's research of historical texts and gnostic gospels was impressive....more
**spoiler alert** The relationship escalator: Making contact Initiation Claiming and defining Establishment Commitment Merging Conclusion
"I don't want anyone**spoiler alert** The relationship escalator: Making contact Initiation Claiming and defining Establishment Commitment Merging Conclusion
"I don't want anyone to do anything they don't want to do or for them to stop doing something they want to do because of my explicit or implicit demands. I want the relationships to be limited to our will to interact wtih each other. I don't want to make any demands or be subject to them. I believe that this is the only way to have meaningful relationships with another person when both are two humans with similar degrees of freedom to act."
"Relationship anarchy doesn't ever suggest avoiding commitment; rather, it suggests that you can design your own commitments with the people around you according to the circumstance, affinities, and the very course of events." (p 169)
"The idea that affective sexual relationships grant special privileges to those parties over any other relationship is one of the notions of hegemonic thought that relationship anarchy questions." (p 184)
"If I provide caretaking and feel cared for by a network of people whom I may be tied to by passions and atachments that may be different, with different ingredients: more or less intimacy, attention, shared life, and so on, then I will not experience interest in a new affection from a place of lack, I won't cling to a sinking ship, I will savor and appreciate the good in people without feeling the anxiety that it could enda at any moment. In that ideal situation, I will give away my engagement and my help, and I won't put conditions on them because I know I won't need compensation; perhaps returns won't come from the same place where I put energy in, but from others. But that will end up supporting us collectively because we will be a network." (p 281)
"The social construct eliminates affinity with women in men. A boy's identification with the feminine is censored and ridiculed from childhood on. The message is that women aren't comparable to me: they're something else entirely, and I have to remember that. It's the same way that a soldier is convinced that the enemy is not like him, so the tendency and even the ability to empathize is greatly reduced and he can kill." (p 317)
"Aporophobia, rejection of the poor, is a term proposed by Adela Cortina in response to the fact that int's not a problem when a foreigner or someone of another race comes to invest, participate in tourism, or contribute resources of any kind. It is a problem when the person is poor." (p 345)...more
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