Timothy Snyder reads five, and speaks ten, European languages, which give him a tremendous advantage when researching and writing about European history. An undergraduate at Brown University, he continued his studies at Oxford where he received his doctorate in 1997 while a British Marshall Scholar. In addition to fellowships in Paris, Vienna and Warsaw, he held an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He is currently Housum Professor of History at Yale University where he teaches modern East European political history.
According to the biography on his website:
Among his publications are six single-authored award-winning books, all of which have been translated: Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998, second edition 2016); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1659-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (2008); and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010).
Bloodlands won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. It has been translated into thirty-three languages, was named to twelve book-of-the-year lists, and was a bestseller in six countries. His most recent book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015) will appear in twenty-four foreign editions. It has been a bestseller in four countries and has received multiple distinctions including the award of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee. [...]
Snyder was the recipient of an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2015 and received the Havel Foundation prize the same year. He has received state orders from Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Collection of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and sits on the advisory councils of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and other organizations.
Actually, his most recent book, published in February of 2017, is a slender volume which might turn out to be one of the most important books published this year.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
On Tyranny is perhaps the shortest, most insightful, and most impactful book that I have read this year. Condensing his voluminous European knowledge into this slender little book, Timothy Snyder brings the reality of what we are now facing into its historical context, with all of the unsettling parallels, and provides us with lessons to learn and concrete steps to take.
He opens his book with
History does not repeat, but it does instruct.
And proceeds to demonstrate what we can learn from the experiences and behavior of the men and women of the twentieth century who faced the tyranny of fascism and communism.
Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation.
Americans, believing as we do, that we are somehow exceptional, fail to take seriously the threat that fascism presents. Although we just watched an election unlike any we have ever before seen, and a president unlike any we have ever had, we are really sure that fascism can never happen here, and so we tend to stand back and stare, not unlike the Jewish editorial writers of Germany who were so sure that it couldn’t happen there:
We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check … and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture.
Snyder points out that institutions cannot protect themselves, and it is the institutions, the media, the courts, even the bureaucracy, that serve as checks on presidential power. We need to defend them, to fight off attacks by men like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon who want nothing more than to tear them all down.
But that is only one lesson we can learn from those who have faced the same threat. He cautions against self-censorship and anticipatory obedience, both of which encourage authoritarian regimes to forge ahead. He also encourages us all to vote in all elections, no matter how minor the office or proposal appears to be because we can never know which election will be the last.
Another lesson Snyder teaches is for us to take responsibility for the face of the world, to not allow swastikas or other symbols of hate to be publicly displayed. Tear them down and encourage others to do the same.
He emphasizes the need to believe in truth.
You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
Snyder then demonstrates how the president has very carefully worked to destroy truth.
At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”
I don’t know about you, but I could have sworn I read the very same words about Trump in one of those never-ending New York Times articles about Trump supporters. They may not have used the word Führer, but then, they are not Germans. They are Americans. And they are believers.
Snyder is not very fond of the internet, or at least he feels that there are better ways to communicate and encourages more face to face meetings, getting to know one’s neighbors, and participating in community actions and protests. Contributing to good causes also helps create and maintain a civil society. If we know one another, if we work together, any authoritarian government will have a harder time gaining power.
Until recently, we Americans had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same. The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. […]
The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation.
In On Tyranny, Snyder takes the fate of nations and places it firmly in the hands of the citizens who live in them. Tyrannies arise when the populace is not paying attention, when it becomes too complacent and fails to heed the lessons that the past can provide. The advice he gives is remarkable, he warns us of paramilitaries and their infiltration into the military and police units. He tells us to be patriots, to stand out, even if it means standing alone. He writes of Churchill’s refusal to acquiesce in Hitler’s plans, of one woman’s determination and eventual success in saving a Jewish family from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto. They each, in their own way, stood alone. And they each won. His final advice is to “be as courageous as you can.”
When this book was published early in 2017, there was a tendency to think that perhaps some of what Timothy Snyder had to say bordered on hyperbole, or was overblown. Today, almost a year in, his work strikes me as being prophetic. History can instruct only if we let it.
Buy the book. Read it. Read it again, then buy copies for your friends.