She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.
In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.
Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Oh stop making excuses for cowards. I’m tired of hearing it. You guys on Lemmy are supposed to be the principled people who think about the deeper problems facing society and are willing to make some sacrifices to solve those problems and even you are stumbling all over yourselves to justify throwing your morals away in favor of a few more years living as a refugee. This country was founded on the belief that fighting tyranny was worth dying for and if you’ve all abandoned those ideals to the point that you’re willing to run away from an 80 year old fascist and his band of hillbilly supporters then America is already dead. You might as well give up now because you clearly don’t have what it takes to fight at all, much less win.
This is the kind of political purity nonsense that had people saying that the democrats should lose the election because of Gaza. That turned out great didn’t it!
No one really cares about your judgements.
If that were true you wouldn’t be responding
lol whatever psycho
You can call me what you like but at the end of the day I’m pretty much the only one in this thread advocating for people to stand up for their neighbors. If that makes me a psycho what does opposing that viewpoint make you?