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totalitarianism

Will we survive “the desert of organized forgetting?”

March 1, 2024 by Spencer Critchley

As we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both…

Most of us in the U.S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead have been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us. They’ve been trying to warn us for decades.

[Read more…] about Will we survive “the desert of organized forgetting?”

Filed Under: Politics & Society Tagged With: authoritarianism, totalitarianism

Life in Trumpworld Looks a Lot Like Life Under the Soviets

February 13, 2021 by Spencer Critchley

Vaclav Havel
Photo of Vaclav Havel by Jiří Jiroutek, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Watching the Trump lawyers’ impeachment defense, I was reminded again how closely life in Trumpworld matches life under the old Soviet bloc as described by dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz: Everything is a lie, everyone knows it’s a lie, and everyone goes along with the lie anyway.

Thus they become both victims of the lie and partners in keeping it going.

[Read more…] about Life in Trumpworld Looks a Lot Like Life Under the Soviets

Filed Under: Politics & Society Tagged With: democracy, totalitarianism, trump

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Patriots of Two Nations by Spencer Critchley
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Cover image for the song "Jailbreak:" a ruined motel by the side of a lonely desert road.

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Director Elizabeth Thompson & Composer/Audio Producer Spencer Critchley with the Emmy for the PBS documentary "Blink."

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