She could just imagine him lumbering away from her like a startled bison at such a naked statement of affection, redoubling the barriers he liked to erect if ever they got too close to each other.

Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood

I highly recommend this lecture by Timothy Snyder (audio). It’s not interesting in what it says about Russia and Ukraine but it’s fascinating in what concerns Snyder’s complete blindness to how perfectly what he calls fascism describes the liberal worldview of which Snyder himself is a passionate adept.

For Snyder, fascism does the following:

– it doesn’t accept the existence of facts. Only beliefs matter. Beliefs are reality.

– it can’t tolerate a plurality of opinions. A single correct viewpoint exists and everybody must hold it.

– it posits that there is a state of ideal, unmarred wholeness and purity that everybody must aspire to. Bad things exist in the world because it hasn’t accepted the redeeming single truth.

– it states that destroying people because they disagree with your single, correct, unifying vision for the whole planet is fine. They aren’t really people, so their destruction doesn’t matter.

Snyder ahistorically calls all this fascism but we know it today as wokeness.

The piano made the house vibrate. It sounded like a megaphone through which a human soul was screaming into the universe.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities