Remembrance of Nazis past

A review of a new book by Dennis Glover on what the past can teach us about the threat of contemporary autocrats

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

—William Faulkner

Kamala Harris has announced that her running mate for the upcoming Presidential election will be Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and I suspect this means a world of pain for Donald Trump and JD Vance. Walz exudes precisely the sort of small-town authenticity that JD Vance has desperately tried to manufacture and it will be a quite a sight to see them on the same debate stage. Vance, like Trump, is no doubt already prepping his excuses.

I’m on a bit of Walz learning curve, and found this incredible little story about him that you mightn’t have seen. It has direct bearing on the review I am offering here of Dennis Glover’s new book.

Walz used to be a high school teacher and was an early adopter of GIS technology as a teaching aid. GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, is “a computer system that analyzes and displays geographically referenced information. It uses data that is attached to a unique location.”

Waltz used GIS to teach h…