“Believe in truth”

From the historian Timothy Snyder, the tenth of twenty lessons on tyranny:

Believe in truth.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).

I wish I’d begun reading this book before reading yesterday’s New York Times piece politics and critical theory.

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Politics and theory