On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.

You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them.

What might seem like a gesture of pride can be a source of exclusion.

If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.

When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh.

took advantage of the absence of the usual local authority to loot, beat, and humiliate Jews, thereby changing the rules of politics and preparing the way for the Nazi takeover of the country.

What was novel in 2016 was a candidate who ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies and encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions.

Because ANTIFA LBTQIA+ is CRAZY & LATER ON TRIED TO KILL THE PRESIDENT & WAS SUCCESSFUL WITH CHARLIE KIRK.

A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,”

Author chose the negative idiot minority at a rally as an example to fit their agenda. Multiple times fear-mongers with dangerous “right wing”

This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did. When that candidate lost the next election, he tried to falsify its results while his followers attacked our Capitol. Had that coup succeeded, our constitutional system would be no more.

wtf. What a twist of words. I had a feeling this felt biased mixing in truths with twisted reality and perspective.

emotions of rallies and insurrections and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards.

I might have to DNF this book but I’m determined to be a critical reader. The manipulation in this is irritating.

Be ready to say no.

wtf does the author mean by this? Regular armed citizens prepare to fight back & say no to law enforcement??? What happens when the armed citizens are the mentally ill ones & law enforcement isn’t prepared bc they were defunded? When law enforcement weakens then what ? When police are called pigs & nobody trusts them then what? Crimes against humanity can be committed & we become desensitized to evil?

Without the assistance of regular police forces, and sometimes regular soldiers, they could not have killed on such a large scale.

A small number of men carried out the neck shots, which meant that certain NKVD officers had thousands of political murders on their consciences. Even so, they could not possibly have carried out this campaign without the assistance of local police forces, legal professionals, and civil servants throughout the Soviet Union.

Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.” It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today.

At a time when it was natural to think only of oneself, she thought of others.

When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.

In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was sixteen, the following year twenty-two.

You gotta be kidding me. Every modern example is from Trumps term when Obama did the same shit but secretly!! He set everything in motion. Every President has said MANY lies. It’s obvious the perspective of this book is right wing = dictatorship. Dems dont get it. No politician is on your side. They all play both sides. They forget Trump was a Dem. Hilary Clinton ran as a Dem with Authoritarian views only thing she had going for her was “Climate change”. Why is only Trump the only 1 that’s not allowed to play dirty? Doesn’t seem very democratic to only see 1 side of a situation and never look in the mirror.

In 2020 he told on average about twenty-seven lies a day. This figure is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction.

This in itself is a lie. “Orange man= bad” brain rot

Then came the Big Lie about an election, creating a fictional counterworld.

🤦🏻‍♀️😂😂😂

The Big Lie about elections was also repeated over and over.

Hilary Clinton also believed the election was stolen from her in 2016

Black people are taking the vote away from white people, although American history shows that the opposite has been the case.

What the fuck even is this statement.

University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards, one after the other.

Same thing happening now with pro Israel, pro LGBTQIA+ propaganda

Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism.

Be for real. This author is calling us that question everything “conspiracy theorist” in the sneakiest way.

They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

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 2016, an American presidential candidate claimed on a Russian propaganda outlet that American “media has been unbelievably dishonest.” He banned many reporters from his rallies,

BC DEMS STARTED THAT RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA SHIT!!! I’m so sick of this book.

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.

Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything.

Today’s authoritarians (in India, Turkey, Russia, China, Brazil) are also highly allergic to the idea of free associations and non-governmental organizations.

To Ukrainians, Americans seemed comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and targeted lies. When Russian propaganda made Ukraine a target in 2013, young Ukrainian journalists and others reacted immediately, decisively, and sometimes humorously with campaigns to expose disinformation.

Russia deployed many of the same techniques against Ukraine that it later used against the United States—while invading Ukraine.

Ukrainians won, and the Americans lost, in the sense that Russia failed to get the regime it wanted in its neighbor, but did see its preferred candidate triumph in the United States. It supports him again in the 2024 elections. He is Putin’s great hope for the rise of a dictatorial world.

Being civil with your enemies does not mean u are on their side!!! Trump stopped the Russia/Ukraine war.

For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

Communism also offered a teleology, promising an inevitable socialist utopia.

What we need, he thought, were “riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

False. Trump never incited violence. The media twisted the his words. The same media this author keeps telling the reader to give attention too. You don’t need to do your own research CNN already did it for you 😆

If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.

Trumps assassination attempts & Charlie Kirk’s murder

If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.