The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

I used “unfreedom” rather than “tyranny” or “authoritarianism” for this reason: “unfreedom” includes our own complicity, the part we play in the decline of democracy by our own willful confusion or needless complacency.

Americans have lost most of their local journalists; most of the country is what is called a “news desert,” with no independent local reporting at all.

The big lies have moved the world in the direction of unfreedom. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, a lie on a grand scale changes politics more than a thousand little ones. It was Hitler’s advice to tell a lie on such a scale that your followers would not believe that you would do such a thing to them. To believe a big lie is to enter into a world of conspiracy.

The Second World War was, in Hitler’s mind, a European war of colonial expansion. Its main target was Ukraine, as the breadbasket of Europe. The goal of Hitler’s war was to destroy the Soviet Union and seize Ukrainian territory as a German colony.

Ukraine, although at the very center of the Second World War, never figured in European histories of that war. European schoolchildren never learned that more Ukrainian civilians were killed during that war than Russians, nor that more Ukrainians were killed fighting the Wehrmacht than French, British, and Americans—taken together. Europeans were all too willing to accept Russian imperial stereotypes about Ukraine:

To end war in Europe, Europe will have to understand itself. European power and the European project will depend on Europeans taking a hard look at their own history, and drawing the right lessons. Getting past empire to democracy requires moral advance, not technocratic tales of progress.

As European history shows, empire ends only in exhaustion. The relevant category is therefore not peace but defeat. The war only ends when Russia is exhausted.

Ukrainians have reminded the rest of us of this by resisting totalitarianism, oligarchy, and lies, achieving things that almost no one beyond Ukraine thought possible. Beyond Ukraine, courage on such a grand scale is not needed, but some small dose of courage is.

If we give up on the ethics at a time of such clear moral choices, we will be giving in to those who say that nothing is true, and therefore everything is permitted. The progress of such ideas has a history, which I try to tell in this book. Whether it has a future will depend upon choices we make now.

In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present.

Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.

For Aristotle “oligarchy” meant rule by the wealthy few;