On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation.

Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them.

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.”

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims a president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your retribution.”

It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.

In 1976, however, intellectuals and professionals formed a group to assist workers who had been abused by the government. These were people from both the Right and the Left, believers and atheists, who created trust among workers—people whom they would not otherwise have met.

“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” Thus Hamlet. Yet he concludes: “Nay, come, let’s go together.”