On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

History does not repeat, but it does instruct.

Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.

We've seen so much of this lately and it's disheartening.

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.

We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted.

THIS! I love technology but this is too important to leave room for doubt.

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.

Instead everyone is bending over backwards to do this regime's bidding

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.

If this had been written today, I bet Snyder would have updated this passage

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.

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.

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

In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was sixteen, the following year twenty-two. 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. Then came the Big Lie about an election, creating a fictional counterworld.

Wonder how many he's up to now

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. A billionaire can pay neither taxes nor debts. Liberating the wealthy from taxes will not increase the national debt. Fighting corruption means selling the presidency for favors. A disease that kills hundreds of thousands will vanish. The winner gets fewer votes. The vote is always rigged, and you should vote for me anyway. Black people are taking the vote away from white people, although American history shows that the opposite has been the case. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason.

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.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience.

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. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

Make America Great Again...

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

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.

We can learn these things on various media. When we learn them from a screen, however, we tend to be drawn in by the logic of spectacle. When we learn of one scandal, it whets our appetite for the next. 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 found a video of an American president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with him wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.

I'm convinced that our reality tv host of a president is fully aware of this fact. He's trying to outperform his own ratings by devolving his presidency into utter chaos. It keeps him in the news cycle and there's nothing a narcissist loves more.

In the most dangerous of times, those who escape and survive generally know people whom they can trust.

I've had to limit my friends and family to safe people only. It was hard but tough decisions had to be made.

Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

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.

THIS! Currently he's been operating under this so called invasion of our Southern border. And it has worked because Congress and the Supreme Court have effectively neutered themselves and, with that, our system of checks and balances.

Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world.

And this is what we're doing now, with the construction of our very own concentration camp. (Again. We did this to the Japanese in WW2 as well).

Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or on legal fees, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Kim Jong Un; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon foreign leaders to intervene in American presidential elections. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to appoint advisers with financial interests in Russian companies. It is not patriotic to appoint a National Security Advisor who likes to be called “General Misha,” nor to pardon him for his crimes. It is not patriotic when that pardoned official calls for martial law. It is not patriotic to refer to American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” It is not patriotic to take health care from families, nor to golf...

Long but a whole lot of yes

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.

!!!

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.

History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.

“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.”

Fitting passage from Hamlet to finish out the book