Anne Applebaum
Author
1964-07-25
Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian known for writing on authoritarianism and Soviet history.
Books by Anne Applebaum
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Quotes by Anne Applebaum
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Politics in Slovakia had long been a battle between egotistical men. Caputova sought to be the anti-ego alternative.
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Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.
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My favorite Polish foods are the soups, and particularly the sour soups, which I don't think I've ever had anywhere else. Zurek, sour bread soup, as well as chlodnik, a cold soup made with beetroot and yogurt, are really unique to Polish cuisine.
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We don't live in a culture of censorship, such as the Soviet Union's; we live in a culture where there is too much information, where words are drowned out, not banned, and important ideas and events are ignored.
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Profound political shifts - events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances - do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown.
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The behavioral scientist Karen Stenner has written very eloquently about people who have what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a personality type that is bothered by complexity and is especially enraged by disagreement. Trump has made himself into the spokesperson for precisely these American authoritarians.
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The hard truth is that Trump was not exceptional. He was just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite have promoted and sponsored around the world, with the hope that they might eventually be of some political or commercial use.
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Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.
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There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism - scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it - but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country.
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The most important funder of the British Brexit campaign had odd Russian contacts. So did some cabinet ministers in Poland's supposedly anti-Russian, hard-right government, elected after a campaign marked by online disinformation in 2015.
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It isn't citizens, or Congress, who decide how our information network regulates itself. We don't get to decide how information companies collect data, and we don't get to decide how transparent they should be. The tech companies do that all by themselves.
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The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.
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At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one's nation, of one's ideology, of one's morality, of one's values.
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Even in Poland, where the president is far less powerful than the prime minister, people have a deeper and more atavistic relationship with the person who is a serious contender to become head of state. They want their national leader - the tribal chief - to look like them, to live like them, to reflect their values.
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Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can't identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily.
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The impact of Brexit is likely to be slow and incremental, hardly the sudden transformation that some Leave voters wanted. Immigrants will not disappear, and manufacturing will not immediately return to northern-English cities - quite the contrary.
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Some voters live in a so-called populist bubble, where they hear nationalist and xenophobic messages, learn to distrust fact-based media and evidence-based science, and become receptive to conspiracy theories and suspicious of democratic institutions.
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Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.
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What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.
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Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises.
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