On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Snyder is a respected historian and lays out warnings: post-truth is pre-fascism. But also provides information on how to resist: don't quietly go along with what you think the regime wants before it even asks. Also, be weird because authoritarianism requires conformity and if you are weird, if you don't conform, you are less likely to begin believing the lies of the regime, but also resist it.

The book is both practical and terrifying and should absolutely be read by everyone in the United States who cares about democracy and the current political crisis in this country.

"When exactly was the 'again' in the slogan, 'Make America great again'? It is, sadly, the same 'again' that we find in 'Never again.'"

Timothy Snyder, a leading historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, has surveyed our current political landscape and offers 20 lessons and warnings about the precipice upon which we find ourselves. Some of the parallels he draws between where we are now and where countries in Europe found themselves in the early 1930s with the rise of Fascism and the late 1940s with the spread of Communism (as well as what happened with the collapse of the USSR and the later rise of Putin) are chilling. But his overarching point is that we have the benefit of learning from history, if show more only we pay attention. To that end, I encourage everyone to read this, if you have not already. It's very short and a quick read, but one I know I will be referring to often in the years ahead.

4 stars

"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. The characters in Orwell's and Bradbury's books could not do this - but we still can." show less

This is an expanded, audio-only edition of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. In what appears to be a series of extemporaneous monologues or lectures, Snyder directly examines Ukraine and Russia's invasion of it from history to Western democracies' response. Snyder frames the situation as a decision point for the world's capable democracies: Do they abide tyranny and conquest of sovereign nations, or not?

Putin has mislead his people and others that some genocide was underway by Ukrainian Nazis (who are also homosexuals, etc.) through an ethnonationalism that gives him claim over Russian speakers. Now he has Russian speakers killing Russian speakers to save Russian speakers.

Rating: 5* of five

Not for its perfection of style but for its perfection of wisdom and its amazing timeliness. As I write this today, 24 March 2018, I saw the face of our future president in Emma Gonzalez as she stood silent, focused, determined, at a march made by young people to demand their lives be protected from ammosexual assholes. She spoke for six minutes and twenty seconds in total, the same amount of time that it took one piece of shit human being to slaughter seventeen of her classmates.

I believe that her speech...the few words, the long silence...will be the spark of the youth revolution our country so very badly needs. I am hopeful that Emma Gonzalez will be, by her very adamantine sense of self and her charismatic show more gravitas, the voice that alerts her compatriots to Author Snyder's clarion call to clarity:

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.

The most unbelievably high stakes are at risk in the November 2018 elections. Buy this book not for yourself but for your hopes of a reasonably happy future for the United States of America, buy it in quantity and give it to everyone you know and/or can find who is under 25, and talk to them about why you're giving them this short, clear, concise, and urgently necessary book.

Your life, my life, the life of a truly great nation, depends on them showing up at the ballot box on 6 November 2018. This is neither hyperbole nor alarmism. It is simply the truth. Looking away from the horrors of the current kakistocracy's rise to any position of power higher than hall monitor at the local middle school will only ensure the brutal and vicious agenda of these lowlife scumbags and their horrifying cadres of disgustingly venal and/or stupid supporters will succeed. show less

Clear, concise, intelligent, and powerful.

Coming of age in America during the Trump presidency has been an odd thing. I feel as though my generation has been flung into the political sphere because we’re surrounded by constant crisis. We have school shooter drills, we see our peers massacred on the news every month, we read about the burning earth and the sea life all choked up with plastics and we’re aware of this massive screaming chaos around us, and it seems like politics in the United States is no longer a discussion between two parties trying to incorporate plans in different ways (if ever it was), but is now a naïve moderate establishment versus a fascist death cult.

We weren’t old enough to be terribly aware of the way show more past presidencies proceeded, but we know it was nothing like this. The first national election in which we’ll be eligible to vote has an incumbent who is a literal criminal. The news tells us it wasn’t always this way, and we can remember some semblance of normalcy, times when you could talk about politics without condemning yourself to a debate about which groups of citizens should be sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed. But for the majority of our adolescence and political consciousness, Trump has been our president. We hardly remember a time when each week didn’t come with an escalation of scandal or another crime on the president’s rap sheet. We are aware that we live in a turbulent time but we feel increasingly that we’ve been told to drive across the country in a car on fire without being given the tools to put the fire out.

Books like On Tyranny are exceptionally important because they contextualise moments like this one. This is as much a guide book to standing up against authoritarianism as it is a historical explanation for why doing so is critically important. It praises humanity and connection and courage in the face of crushing apathy and terror. It feels vital now in 2020, on the brink of a crucial election that has the power to change our course or solidify a new normal. I, like many of my peers after these last long four years, am nervous, I am furious, I am disillusioned, I am ashamed, I am disgusted, I am ready for change.

And I am registered to vote. show less

One of the most overlooked aspects of this book is simply its size. It is a small format book, designed to replicate those pocket US Constitutions that some people love to whip out and wave in your face, typically when they are trying to defend their right to open carry a rocket launcher. But that format similarity is also to say that this is the book that every US student should be made to study along with the Constitution, because it details how appallingly vulnerable the US system is to an authoritarian takeover. That should not be news at this point in time, but large parts of the US population, including many liberals, still don't get it. If I started pulling out my favorite quotes form his book I would never stop, so I won't. show more Instead, just buy it, read it, learn from it, and put it into practice. Most importantly, learn lesson 1 (I'm looking at you Washington Post and LA Times): don't obey in advance. show less

4/3/2018 - This is a most amazing book, so small and yet so powerful. As the American government seems to be drifting toward tyranny, Yale professor Timothy Snyder has provided a manual for how individuals might choose to proceed in an anxious time. He takes lessons from history to show that democracy is neither guaranteed nor necessarily permanent, even in the United States in the twenty-first century.

The book scared the hell out of me as well as gave me some idea of why we are at such a crossroads at this time. More important, it gave me some ideas for how to proceed. I found that I had to stop periodically to copy down many quotes. Everything the professor wrote seemed so important and true. The book left me with the feeling of how show more fragile democracy might be. show less