![]() ![]() After the Cold War, he writes, we were enthralled by the politics of inevitability, the notion that history moved inexorably toward liberal democracy. Perhaps the greatest contribution in Snyder's clarifying and unnerving work is buried in its epilogue, and it shows the slippery intellectual path from freedom to tyranny. In fact, this very book - easily the most compelling volume among the resistance literature emerging in response to Trump - took inspiration from a November 2016 Facebook post by the author. It is not an entirely persuasive course, as if television and online debates did not have the power to introduce new ideas or vital reporting into public circulation. "The characters in Orwell's and Bradbury's books could not do this - but we still can." "Get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books," he urges, like the good academic that he is. To break free of the incantations, we must loosen the hold that our televisions and phones have over us, Snyder argues. "Post-truth," Snyder writes, "is pre-fascism." ![]() Throughout history, despots have "despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism."Īnd that elevation of mythology over truth has consequences. "If nothing is true, then all is spectacle." And Trump thrives on spectacle indeed, his rise has been based on it.Ī leader's constant repetition of "shamanistic incantations," as Snyder puts it, and the people's misplaced faith in an oracular strongman over evidence and reason - these are ways truth begins to fade. "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom," Snyder writes. The popular understanding and interpretations of Trump are dominated by his words and phrases - "Sad!" "Fake news!" - and by his use of those words to rouse supporters, identify opponents and distort verifiable reality. "When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework," and permit a narrowing of vocabulary and thought that only empowers the strongman. "Think up your own way of speaking," he challenges readers. Snyder warns against the treacherous use of patriotic expressions and the mindless repetition of political catchphrases, whether in the news media or from the government. "Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor." "It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges," he writes. Snyder emphasizes that the professional classes - civil servants as well as doctors, lawyers and businesspeople - bear special responsibility when individual freedoms are at risk. The early days of the Trump presidency have seen acts of subversion by civil servants, including damaging leaks and social-media rebellions, signaling opposition to particular policies or actions by the new administration. "Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy," the author writes. Snyder recalls how, when Hitler threatened to invade Austria, regular Austrian citizens looked on, or joined in, as local Nazis detained Austrian Jews or stole their property. Much of the initial power granted to nondemocratic leaders is given freely, via "heedless acts of conformity," long before popular docility is requested or required. The author dwells on "the politics of the everyday" to show the small ways people succumb to or fend off the encroachment of tyranny. political system, he notes, was designed "to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection." "Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience." The U.S. "Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century," he writes. Steeped in the history of interwar Germany and the horrors that followed, Snyder still writes with bracing immediacy, providing 20 plain and mostly actionable lessons on preventing, or at least forestalling, the repression of lives and minds.ĭon't count Snyder among the American-exceptionalism crowd, at least not as the concept is usually understood. "On Tyranny" is a slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital. Historian Timothy Snyder does not offer a corrective to the pessimism of this genre - he is a scholar of the Holocaust, after all - but begins to illuminate a path forward from it. ![]()
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