On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century in Daily Show / Colbert Report / Nightly Show / The Opposition

May 15, 2017 Andy rated it did not like it

Update, May 2025:
The author has left the U.S. for Canada, ostensibly to help lead a resistance from a safe place. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/op...). This validates my main point in the review below.

2017 Review:
If this is the response to creeping fascism in America, we are in trouble.
Obviously, Hitler is bad. And some of the advice is unassailable (Contribute to good causes, etc.) But beyond that, the little essays that make up this book seem pretty messy.

-Before Hitler comes to power, i ...more

191 likes · Like · see review

Jan 21, 2018 Jack rated it really liked it

Shelves: politics, nonfiction, history

This is a really short book. It's clearly written by someone not happy about Donald Trump as president, for it's a list of things to look for to see if one's beloved country is creeping towards tyranny, and it came out after Trump's electoral college victory (and popular vote loss). It's the kind of thing more liberals will read than conservatives, which is fine. But although most left-leaning folks will read it and think hard about Donald Trump as president, it's all the more important to keep ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Aug 29, 2017 Carol rated it liked it

While skimming through the pages of this tiny book -- I had really hoped for some acknowledgement and anaylsis on the tyranny of racism, heterosexism, imperialism and colonization --- but it never came. And I believe it should never be omitted from any discourse.

Tyranny is not just puppeteered at the hands of one powerful or charismatic being -- but holds it's power in the silence and complicity of the masses which allows for violence and dominance to take hold and fester. And the comforts of p ...more

Like · see review

Nov 06, 2018 Dea rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This reads like something banged out over the weekend as a response to the results of the 2016 election. Don't get me wrong, having a 150 page book is much more handy to reference than one that is 1000 pages, but shrinking the page count does a disservice to knowing and understanding the whole picture, also known as the truth.

At this point I am very used to lengthy citations sections at the end of the books I read, yet this book had none. I found it startling to not be able to look up this or t ...more

Like · see review

Feb 06, 2018 Letitia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: textbooks, human-rights, 2018-to-read

A gem of a book. A quick, well-written read that succinctly analyzes enormous concepts. When I picked it up I did not realize it would in fact be a "how to resist tyranny" step by step. In this respect it actually has broader utility than the simple political description I expected.

There were moments in the center where I feared Snyder might be sliding into generational condescension, sounding a bit like the old man who doesn't understand kids these days, but once I finished the entire work and A gem of a book. A quick, well-written read that succinctly analyzes enormous concepts. When I picked it up I did not realize it would in fact be a "how to resist tyranny" step by step. In this respect it actually has broader utility than the simple political description I expected.

There were moments in the center where I feared Snyder might be sliding into generational condescension, sounding a bit like the old man who doesn't understand kids these days, but once I finished the entire work and pondered his points about technology and privacy and personal relationships in context, I retract that thought. He makes a well-developed point and uses valid historical examples to illustrate the importance of it.

Some favorite quotes:

“The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” (page 24)

"Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much." (page 33)

“What is truth?" Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.” (page 73)

“Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.” (page 103)

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better." (page 113)

“Some spoke critically of neoliberalism, the sense that the idea of the free market has somehow crowded out all others. This was true enough, but the very use of the word was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony. Other critics spoke of the need for disruption, borrowing a term from the analysis of technological innovations. When applied to politics, it again carries the implication that nothing can really change, that the chaos that excites us will eventually be absorbed by a self-regulating system. The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. —” (page 121)

“The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.” (page 121)
...more

Like · see review