She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.
In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.
Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ 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.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
I know of people in Denmark who walked by foot from Syria during the last refugee exodus. They came to Denmark from Norway, because they crossed the border in the arctic between Russia to Norway.
Try to plot that route into your map and then go on complaining about strolling through a few states in USA.
You know national borders exist, right?
Sure, but what about them?
In most cases they’re just lines on a map that don’t actually exist physically in the real world.
Tell that the the sovereign nations you’d be illegally entering
“What are walls, just some man made obstacles, I live in your house now”
Uh, why do you think those Syrians had to walk all the way to the Arctic to get to Europe when they were coming from Syria?
They wanted to admire the scenery of the bogs and pines?
Why didn’t they just take the direct route, because “they’re just lines on a map”?
Why did they more than double the over 4000km long journey to over 8000 km?
Oh, right, because of border control. They had to travel more than 4000 kilometres more to use less guarded crossings.
And good fucking luck crossing any Russo-European borders currently.
Yes, it’s true that borders are vast and not all controlled as easily. But nations sure as fuck try to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland–Russia_border
That alone added a few thousand km for them, as they went all the way to Norway to cross, because we Finns actually guard the border pretty intensely due to that fucker Vanja disrespecting it so.
Lol. You’re getting replies from people so complacent with their lifestyles that they can’t fathom the effort of just walking away from everything and starting up elsewhere. Literally millions of people have walked across continents in the last decade to live in places with better opportunities, but these people’ll find any excuse to say that that’s not possible for whatever reason, but really just because it’s a type of change they are unwilling (not unable) to make and they want to make themselves feel better by saying/believing all that isn’t a real option for them.
I doubt those people would be doing all that walking if they had any better option. It’s easy to leave when there’s nothing to leave