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.”
How did you get financially trapped?
People in the rest of the western world and also mostly elsewhere in the entire world can actually travel.
What do you have to lose if you can’t walk away from where you are? You already lost your freedom and can no longer go anywhere else, because finances? In the richest country in the world?
If I ever find myself in that kind of serfdom without a dime in my pocket, I will put on my shoes and start walking.
It may shock you know that even in the richest country in the world there are homeless people. There are people who live paycheck to paycheck. There are many people who a single unexpected expense would ruin.
…Okay Denmark.
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.
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.
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.
You can still walk away, it’ll be more difficult and take longer, but you can do it.
Tell that to the natives.