Historians From The United States

"Although we like to think our nation is exceptional, the choices made by defenders of democracy in 1922 Italy and 1933 Germany are worth revisiting. The parallels are not perfect. Our two-party tradition sets us apart from Germany and Italy, each of which had five major parties. But legislative gridlock and voter cynicism today are reminiscent of conditions that marked the last months of democracy in Italy and Germany. The threat to our democracy does not command s, but incite violence. Our economy is stable but many Americans feel left behind. Most worrying, Republicans march in lockstep behind Donald Trump, while Democrats fragment – like opponents of authoritarianism in interwar Europe. Of course, we can’t know whether different strategies in Italy and Germany would have preserved democracy, but since hindsight is 20-20, let’s use it."

"Democratic presidential candidates are struggling to distinguish themselves from their party rivals and competing for endorsements. Their horizontal vision in these disagreements diverts their gaze from the peril we face as Donald Trump dismantles the norms that have guided our political life since 1776. Whatever their differences, Democratic candidates must agree to broad principles related to key issues, for example, immigration, health care, and the growing wealth gap. A general consensus would leave plenty of room for healthy debates about implementation, but failure to emphasize shared ideals in relationship to two or three major questions will blunt Democrats’ offensive against a candidate whose campaign is based on slander and fear."

"Urban planning is a long history of cities (and their planners) seeing, and deliberately not seeing, the people who live in them. Working in city planning makes me consider the city as an organism, as a machine for living in…"

"I hope the first set we meet are kind and smart and savvy, and also mammals who breathe oxygen and have hierarchical structure, because otherwise we’re going to not be able to figure out how to say anything useful and understandable, and if they’re not kind, they may decide they’re better off without us…"

"I take umbrage at the lionization of lightweight empty-suited empty-headed motherfuckers like Ibram X. Kendi, who couldn't carry my book bag, who hasn't read a fucking thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said he would have no idea. I'm sorry, he's an unserious, superficial, empty-suited lightweight. He's not our equal, not even close."

"Kendi is so unbelievably stupid, mindbogglingly dogmatic, boring and limited in range that I would much rather read MLK [Martin Luther King] than have to endure sitting down with Kendi. I teach Kendi because he is useful. Where he is useful is there are no nuances in him. None whatsoever. No ambiguities. Everything is racism, all the time. I did learn something very interesting from Kendi. There's one line that appears in his two major books. This is what my life has come to, that I have read the two major books, "Stamped from the Beginning" and "How to be an antiracist". It reappears each time, and the line is "There is nothing wrong with black people." I think that line explains why Kendi is writing, and why white people buy Kendi's books. It's to be reassured that racism explains everything, and that there isn't one drop, one percent, one element, of black responsibility in black life outcomes today."

"I feel as if empire is something that is either taken for granted in space opera—uninterrogated, simply present as a fact of worldbuilding—or it is rendered so evil as to be incomprehensibly bad…"

"Academics ... taught the many altruistic African American college students to believe that their personal advancement up the American ladder of success advanced African America as a whole through the societal doors that graduates opened and through their function as role models. Meanwhile, academics, politicians, and capital allowed colleges and universities to serve as ladders, removing African Americans politically, economically, and culturally from the black masses."

"Reverend Barber, at one point during the debate, a fly landed on Pence's head for nearly two-and-a-half minutes, prompting widespread commentary online. Professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of the best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist, tweeted, "As soon as Pence started denying the existence of systemic racism, the fly got him!" Amy Goodman You know, I couldn’t help but go to the Book of Exodus, where it talked about where God said, "If you don't let my people go, I'm going to cause flies to come as a sign of what’s wrong. But I won’t let the flies be on the people, but the fly will be a symbol that you're just wrong. You're lying. Let my people go." And Trump and Pence need to let the people go. They’ve been holding poor and low-wealth people hostage, essential workers hostage. It's time for a change in this country."

"Fanfiction lets you share the kind of story you like with other people who take delight in it, too, and lets you participate in making that sort of story for those people…"

"If you have read one Kendi book, you have read them all. And whether one agrees or disagrees with his arguments, they are the very opposite of complex. He thinks in binaries. For Kendi, there are no ambiguities when it comes to understanding racism, no shades of grey... This definition is excellent, but Kendi has never demonstrated any aptitude for the qualities he lists. He is not interested in complicating, but in simplifying. He is not reflective or inquisitive, but dogmatic... We are often told that we need to discuss racism more openly, but the popularity of a thinker such as Kendi illustrates how hollow this pronouncement is. It also reflects poorly on the broader state of our intellectual culture. We need to treat racism with greater sophistication, but in his books there is little room for insightful discussion or debate. Kendi doesn’t offer true illumination, only thought-terminating bromides."

"Notions of objectivity, removed scientific inquiry, unbiased scholarly assessments, empiricism, standardized tests, universalism, evolutionism, and Eurocentric thinking are a few of the many constructs that academics, politicians, and benefactors used to mask the preponderance of whiteness—white ideas, people, and scholarship—as normal. Thus, white racists and capitalists and black accommodationists actively created and maintained this white normality by masking it, by removing the adjectives, by denigrating and downgrading everything non-European, everything outside of the Eurocentric or capitalist homily. European history and literature were not presented as such. Academics labeled it the history and literature. By conceiving of European (and Euro-American) scholarship as superior to all others, they racialized it, they gave it whiteness—an officious social construct of racial superiority."

"As soon as Pence started denying the existence of systemic racism, the fly got him!"

"I define an antiracist as someone who is expressing an antiracist idea or supporting or an antiracist policy, policies that yield racial equity, while antiracist ideas talk about the equality of racial groups..."

"I think most Americans, without recognizing it, say and believe both racist and antiracist ideas. What I'm seeking to do is get them to recognize those racist ideas, get them to essentially get rid of them and essentially strive to be antiracist, strive to see the racial groups as equals."

"The working class in the United States has never been united; it’s always been divided along the lines of race. … Racism and capitalism emerged at the same time, in 15th-century western Europe, and they’ve reinforced each other from the beginning."

"I don't hate white folk because I'm a Christian. How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?... Europeans are simply a different breed of human. They are socialized to be aggressive people. They are taught to live by the credo, "survival of the fittest." They are raised to be racist. Caucasians make up only 10 percent of the world's population and that small percentage of people have recessive genes. Therefore they're facing extinction. Whites have tried to level the playing field with the AIDS virus and cloning, but they know these deterrents will only get them so far."

"Part of the reason so many Americans are so defensive is because we’ve been led to believe that racist is a fixed category, that it’s a tattoo, it’s a label. Of course they’re going to say, “I’m not a racist, I’m not a bad person.” But racist is describing what you’re saying in the moment."

"I woke up in the middle of the night to the news that Chadwick had passed. And at first I thought it was a nightmare. Like many people, I was shocked. And then of course I came to see that it was real. And then I saw that he died of colon cancer. And my first thought was, why him? Why not me? It was really—it was crushing. It was crushing because of how much he had given the world, how much I adored him. It was crushing because I know how beloved he was and still is. And it still is crushing... I don’t even know if I can even—as you know, Amy, I don’t even know if it can even be described in words what Black Panther meant, what T’Challa meant, what many of those incredible characters meant, what Wakanda meant, what Wakanda still means to black people. And particularly those of us who are really striving to be antiracist... And like other black people who went to see the film and just as nonblack people, it gave me the ability to really step outside of myself, step outside of my world and imagine what’s possible. And there is nothing more radical and critical to transforming the world than a radical imagination. Of thinking about what is possible. I think Black Panther gave that to so many people."

"As a father, as a girl dad, the portrayal of women in Black Panther is almost certainly what I admired the most, from the chief technology officer to even the baddest person on the film, who to me was the general, who was my favorite character and certainly my wife’s favorite character. But then also, I just want to again emphasize that this is possible. We currently have a tech industry where women and particularly women of color are far and away underrepresented or imagine that it’s not their place or imagine that they don’t have the intellectual capacity. And these are all sexist and racist lies. And women, particularly women of color, can be the chief technology officer of the baddest place, I should say the most technologically advanced sort of companies or places on earth. That’s possible, if we can create that type of sort of society."

"Certainly, before colonization, some of the greatest and most powerful and wealthiest and most technologically and intellectually advanced empires in the world were in Africa, from Ghana, Mali and Songhai...We’re not taught about precolonial West Africa. We’re not even taught about Africa today!... And I don’t think we should focus on Europe because that is a demonstration to me of racism."

"If you're saying "Well, the general resurrection is coming soon" or "The apocalyptic consummation is coming soon", you can say that all you want because it's in the future and you can't be wrong unless you're stupid enough to date it."

"My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally."

"Technicalities are, however, of more interest to historians than to contemporaries."

"People at large were not enjoying an intellectual awakening where so recently they had succumbed to superstitious panic."

"Being ignored was a therapy that had rarely been tried upon these girls."

"If such were the will of God, what wonder that so many had turned to the devil?"

"A fact will often show poor and plain in contrast to the leapings of imagination."

"Silence may have an eloquence of its own, but only in the long run."

"Treat a child like a witch and you’ll have one."

"Yes, he had been loyal to his friends, but even a wolf is loyal to other wolves."

"It’s bad business meddling with the devil; it makes you superstitious."

"As every minister knows, a prayer is a superb device for airing an opinion."

"At such moments the voice of reason always sounds like blasphemy and dissenters are of the devil."

"Yet Fiona Hill sat before a House committee and under oath insisted that all of the above was a Trumpian conspiracy theory, thereby reminding us that the neocon Russophobes are so unhinged that they are prepared to lie at the drop of a hat to keep their false narrative about the Russian Threat and Putin’s “invasion” of Ukraine alive. Needless to say, Fiona Hill is among the worst of the neocon warmongers, and has made a specialty of demonizing Russia and propagating over and over flat out lies about what happened in Kiev during 2014 and after."

"This is another remnant for Bush neocon team, a protégé of Bolton. Trump probably voluntarily appointed this rabid neocon, a chickenhawk who would shine in Hillary State Department."

"This time it was Dr. Fiona Hill who sanctimoniously advised the House committee that there is nothing to see on the Ukraine front that involved any legitimate matter of state; it was just the Donald and his tinfoil hat chums jeopardizing the serious business of protecting the national security by injecting electioneering into relations with Ukraine."

"On Thursday Fiona Hill, the former White House Russia expert, was all business, a serious woman you don’t want to mess with. She reoriented things, warning that those who excuse or don’t wish to see Russian propaganda efforts against America, and targeting its elections, are missing the obvious. The suspicion of the president and his allies that Ukraine is the great culprit in the 2016 election is a "fictional narrative." They are, in fact, bowing to disinformation Russia spreads to cover its tracks and confuse the American people and its political class. She dismissed the president’s operatives' efforts to get Ukraine’s new president to investigate his country’s alleged meddling as a "domestic political errand." She and other diplomats were "involved in national security, foreign policy," and the interests of the operatives and the diplomats had "diverged." She warned Mr. Sondland: "This is all going to blow up.""

"Likewise, his (President Trump's) boss on the National Security Council Staff, Fiona Hill, sounded more like she had just stepped out of the 1950s with her heated Cold War rhetoric... And who gets to decide US foreign policy objectives in Europe? Not the US President, according to government bureaucrat Fiona Hill... Who was Fiona Hill’s boss? Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who no doubt agreed that the president has no right to change US foreign policy."

"Folks, we are getting just plain sick and tired of this drumbeat of lies, misdirection and smug condescension by Washington payrollers like Fiona Hill. No Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election? Exactly what hay wagon does she think we fell off from?"

"This is a great power conflict, the third great power conflict in the European space in a little over a century. It’s the end of the existing world order. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before.”"

"I respect the work that this Congress does in carrying out its constitutional responsibilities, including in this inquiry, and I am here to help you to the best of my ability. If the President, or anyone else, impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic political or personal interests, that is more than worthy of your attention. But we must not let domestic politics stop us from defending ourselves against the foreign powers who truly wish us harm. I am ready to answer your questions.'"

"Hill conflated two separate theories of Ukrainian collusion in the 2016 election. One of these is discredited, the other is quite viable. Hill helped the Democrats suggest that they have both been debunked. Hill is too smart not to have grasped the effect of her testimony. This is exactly the kind of cynicism that fuels concerns about the unaccountable “deep state.""

"Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock — as we used to say of smart know-nothings ... A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) “Intelligence Community Assessment” published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the “mainstream” media and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton’s defeat on the Russians."

"The Russian government’s goal is to weaken our country — to diminish America’s global role and to neutralize a perceived U.S. threat to Russian interests. President Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter U.S. foreign policy objectives in Europe, including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert political and economic dominance. I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable. I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests. As Republicans and Democrats have agreed for decades, Ukraine is a valued partner of the United States, and it plays an important role in our national security. And as I told this Committee last month, I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016. These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes. President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a Super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each another, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy."

"If U.S. Attorney John Durham is allowed to do his job probing the origins of Russiagate, and succeeds in getting access to the “handpicked analysts” — whether there were just two, or more — Hill’s faith in “our intelligence agencies,” may well be dented if not altogether shattered."

"Putin was personally angered by events in Libya and the death of President Mammar Qaddafi at the hands of rebels as Qaddafi tried to flee Tripoli after NATO’s intervention in the civil war there. In Putin’s view (again expressed openly in his public addresses and in interviews), the United States was now responsible for a long sequence of revolutions close to Russia’s borders and in countries with close ties to Moscow."

"I appreciate the importance of the Congress’s impeachment inquiry. I am appearing today as a fact witness, as I did during my deposition on October 14th, in order to answer your questions about what I saw, what I did, what I knew, and what I know with regard to the subjects of your inquiry. I believe that those who have information that the Congress deems relevant have a legal and moral obligation to provide it. I take great pride in the fact that I am a nonpartisan foreign policy expert, who has served under three different Republican and Democratic presidents. I have no interest in advancing the outcome of your inquiry in any particular direction, except toward the truth."

"I would like to communicate two things. First, I’d like to share a bit about who I am. I am an American by choice, having become a citizen in 2002. I was born in the northeast of England, in the same region George Washington’s ancestors came from. Both the region and my family have deep ties to the United States. My paternal grandfather fought through World War I in the Royal Field Artillery, surviving being shot, shelled, and gassed before American troops intervened to end the war in 1918. During the Second World War, other members of my family fought to defend the free world from fascism alongside American soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The men in my father’s family were coalminers whose families always struggled with poverty. When my father, Alfred, was 14, he joined his father, brother, uncles and cousins in the coal mines to help put food on the table. When the last of the local mines closed in the 1960s, my father wanted to emigrate to the United States to work in the coal mines in West Virginia, or in Pennsylvania. But his mother, my grandmother, had been crippled from hard labor. My father couldn’t leave, so he stayed in northern England until he died in 2012. My mother still lives in my hometown today. While his dream of emigrating to America was thwarted, my father loved America, its culture, its history and its role as a beacon of hope in the world. He always wanted someone in the family to make it to the United States."

"Our problem is that we do not fully understand Putin’s calculus, just as he does not understand ours. In Putin’s view, the United States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further."