If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. – Malcolm X

Title Edit2: "f -> If, fixed error on title; spacing

  • @[email protected]
    4•2 days ago

    Vasily Grossman:

    When people are to be slaughtered en masse, the local population is not immediately gripped by a bloodthirsty hatred of the old men, women and children who are to be destroyed. It is necessary to prepare the population by means of a special campaign. […] It is necessary to stir up feelings of real hatred and revulsion. […] Experience showed that such campaigns make the majority of the population obey every order of the authorities as though hypnotized. There is a particular minority which actively helps to create the atmosphere of these campaigns: ideological fanatics; people who take a bloodthirsty delight in the misfortunes of others; and people who want to settle personal scores, to steal a man’s belongings or take over his flat or job.

    • @jimmydoreisaleftyOP
      1•2 days ago

      TIL, Thanks for the quote!

      Vasily Grossman | Russian Soviet writer and journalist (1905-1964)

      Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation, he took a job in Stalino in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Grossman was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. Grossman’s eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter. There is some dispute over the extent of the state repression Grossman endured after the war.