'Think up your own way of speaking,' he challenges readers. Snyder warns against the treacherous use of patriotic expressions and the mindless repetition of political catchphrases, whether in the news media or from the government. 'Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.' 'It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges,' he writes. Snyder emphasizes that the professional classes - civil servants as well as doctors, lawyers and businesspeople - bear special responsibility when individual freedoms are at risk. The early days of the Trump presidency have seen acts of subversion by civil servants, including damaging leaks and social-media rebellions, signaling opposition to particular policies or actions by the new administration. 'Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy,' the author writes. Snyder recalls how, when Hitler threatened to invade Austria, regular Austrian citizens looked on, or joined in, as local Nazis detained Austrian Jews or stole their property. Much of the initial power granted to nondemocratic leaders is given freely, via 'heedless acts of conformity,' long before popular docility is requested or required. The author dwells on 'the politics of the everyday' to show the small ways people succumb to or fend off the encroachment of tyranny. political system, he notes, was designed 'to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.' 'Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.' The U.S. 'Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century,' he writes. Steeped in the history of interwar Germany and the horrors that followed, Snyder still writes with bracing immediacy, providing 20 plain and mostly actionable lessons on preventing, or at least forestalling, the repression of lives and minds.ĭon't count Snyder among the American-exceptionalism crowd, at least not as the concept is usually understood. 'On Tyranny' is a slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital. Historian Timothy Snyder does not offer a corrective to the pessimism of this genre - he is a scholar of the Holocaust, after all - but begins to illuminate a path forward from it.

Book on tyranny by timothy snyder