There is much to be thankful for this year if you are one of the academic bosses who run the University of Toronto. You might especially appreciate the return of Donald Trump to the White House, even as he has threatened to annex your country and make it America’s 51st state.
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In March, it was revealed that three superstar academics and specialists on fascism at Yale – the historians and couple Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder, and the philosopher Jason Stanley – have taken up senior positions at the premier university in my hometown in an act of self-exile.
In an emotional interview with The New York Times titled, “We study fascism, and we’re Leaving the US”, the trio said: “The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later. My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances …
“And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Shore is the author of The Taste of Ashes and translator of Michał Głowinski’s Holocaust memoir, The Black Seasons. Snyder wrote such bestsellers as Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and The Road to Unfreedom. Stanley wrote the influential How Propaganda Works as well as How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. In How Fascism Works, Stanley wrote: “What normalisation does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.”
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Richard Cullen, a friend and law lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, has reached a similar conclusion about America. Writing in an Australian publication, he warned: “Washington is savagely attacking its own leading universities to shut down basic operating freedoms; rounding up and heavily punishing – and imprisoning – students for expressing their views over the Gaza genocide and related matters; drawing up plans to cancel valid student visas en masse on political grounds; and organising mass deportations, with enthusiastic violence and scant or zero due process.”