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.

We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government.

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.

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. That was a vain hope.

The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents.

Thomas Jefferson probably never said that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,”

the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of an election and a coup d’état. A party emboldened by a favorable election result, or denying an unfavorable one, might change the system from within.

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. Voting is like that.

Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. The Nazis remained in power until they lost a world war in 1945, the Czechoslovak communists until their system collapsed in 1989. The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere: via propaganda, subversion, and invasion.

Will we come to see the elections of 2024 much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932? This, for now, depends upon us.

We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. We need to remove private funding from what should be public campaigns for office. We will have to take seriously our own Constitution, which forbids oath-breaking insurrectionists from running for office.

Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

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.

Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

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.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.”

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.

people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics. Such groups can take the form of a paramilitary wing of a political party, the personal bodyguard of a particular politician—or

As paramilitaries known as the SA and the SS, they created a climate of fear that helped the Nazi Party in the parliamentary elections of 1932 and 1933.

The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.

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.

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.

If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.

The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

Be kind to our language.

Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.

When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

Jesus preached that it “is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” We should be modest, for “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” And of course we must be concerned with what is true and what is false: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Believe in truth.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.

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 second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible.

The Big Lie created its own world, where anyone who pointed to simple truths was the enemy.

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.”

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

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.

Like the leaders of authoritarian regimes, he promised to suppress freedom of speech by laws that would prevent criticism. As president, he used the word lies to mean facts not to his liking, and called journalists enemies of the people (as Hitler and the Nazis had done). Where the Nazis said “Lügenpresse,” he said “Fake news.”

Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become more dramatic with each episode.

If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same.

You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.

Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.

Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life.