History does not repeat, but it does instruct.
In the 20th century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the 20th century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. Now is a good time to do so.
A Must Read for Americans Timothy Snyder, a renowned Yale scholar of 20th century Western political history, has written an ideological call to arms about the encroaching tyranny that threatens democracy in the United States and elsewhere. He uses examples of how Nazis, Stalinists and fascists came to power by false claims, be it against media, ethnic populations, nationalism, and other means to obfuscate reality. Snyder offers ways to combat tyrannical governments, such as being vocal about wrongs to others,…
Essential reading for our time I have no doubt “On Tyranny” is a book Tim Snyder wished he didn’t have to write, in the same way, as he reminds us, that Hamlet was fated to “set things right”. No one knows the history of 20th century Germany, eastern Europe, and Russia better than prof. Snyder. He has accomplished immense scholarship in those countries and shared some of it in “Bloodlands”, “Black Earth”, scholarly papers and commentaries over the years. In measured…
Vital and Timely Breathtaking. Shatters any illusion that democracy is a given in the US or in any country. One detail I keep thinking about: Snyder’s argument that the evisceration of privacy and the humiliation of the individual is a very old fascist technique. Consider that when you think about the email breaches of the last election, or why doxing is a weapon of choice among the cyber brown shirts. Another: the long and terrible legacy of dismantling the rule and protections of law as “exceptions”…