Captured up close in photographer’s backyard …
[Incredible close-up macro lens shots of tiny insects could be straight out of a horror movie! By Glasgow based photographer, David Hamilton.] – Follow The Face of Shame
«If people want consultative government, the price is increased complexity and delay in arriving at decisions. If they want speed of government, then they must accept a greater degree of authoritarianism. I suspect that the real answer is that most people prefer the latter so long, that is, as government’s decisions conform with their own views»
(John James Cowperthwaite)
Violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism
(Errico Malatesta, «Anarchism, Authoritarian Socialism and Communism» in Fede (28 October 1923); also in What Is Anarchism? : An Introduction edited by Donald Rooum (1992, 1995) p. 59)
However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.
However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.
(Gloria Steinem – Writer and journalist for Ms. and New York magazines)
Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
George Orwell, 1984
When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.
It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.
( Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century )
The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that’s why they’re called public servants.
They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.
(Glenn Greenwald)
Social conservatism and neoconservatism have revived authoritarian conservatism, and not for the better of conservatism or American democracy. True conservatism is cautious and prudent.
Authoritarianism is rash and radical. American democracy has benefited from true conservatism, but authoritarianism offers potentially serious trouble for any democracy.
(John W. Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience )
The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people
(James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison
The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.
A nationalist, ‘although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,’ wrote Orwell, tends to be ‘uninterested in what happens in the real world.’
Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism ‘has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.’ A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.
(Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century )
Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order
The one source of criticism even the most repressive authoritarian leader cannot silence is the outside world.
Autocrats are usually thin-skinned and like to be admired, so at least, at first, they often seek to be praised abroad.
Authoritarianism is not pretending anymore to be a real alternative to democracy, but we can see many more authoritarian practices and styles basically being smuggled into democratic governments.
(Ivan Krastev )
We live in very volatile times. And it is super necessary that all of us resist this move toward the militarization and establishment of a more and more authoritarian regime, not just in the United States but in Europe and elsewhere.
(Roger Waters )
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable;
they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.
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The images in their original form can be seen in the link below the image.
Sorce: New York Times
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