On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

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.

The minor choices we make are themselves 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.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

He expected Churchill to come to terms after the fall of France. Churchill did not. He told the French that “whatever you may do, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.” In June 1940, Churchill told the British parliament that “the battle of Britain is about to begin.” The German Luftwaffe began the bombing of British cities. Hitler expected that this would force Churchill to sign an armistice, but he was mistaken. Churchill later called the air campaign “a time when it was equally good to live or die.”

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.

Likewise, although we may not see the other person in front of his or her computer, we have our share of responsibility for what he or she is reading there. If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same.

History, which for a time seemed to be running from west to east, now seems to be moving from east to west. Everything that happens here seems to happen there first.

Since so much of what has happened in the last year is familiar to the rest of the world or from recent history, we must observe and listen.

Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

When politicians today invoke terrorism they are speaking, of course, of an actual danger. But when they try to train us to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.

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.

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

History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

One thing is certain: 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.