In 2017, Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, wrote an important book published in the UK: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. After a tumultuous and unsettling year in America, Snyder’s concise book offers some pertinent, timely, and important warnings, and for that reason this author has been careful to stay close to his words and how he uses them.
In this piece, we will consider Snyder’s first ten lessons, and then later, the remaining ten.
As an adjunct to Snyder’s warnings, we might consider a question posed by Juvenal, an ancient Roman poet who lived in the first century A.D and wrote satires on the government corruption and immorality he observed. He asked a significant question: “who watches the watchmen?”
Snyder writes that history is instructive, therefore, knowing and understanding it is important. It is also something of an American tradition to look to history when our political order is in peril. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle warned that inequality brings instability. His teacher Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech in order to install themselves as tyrants. However, America’s founding fathers established a system of checks and balances, which would help foresee and prevent destruction of the democracy they had formed. They set up a system whereby a single individual (or group) would not be able to usurp power and rule primarily for the benefit of that person or group. However, these checks and balances will not automatically protect us from threats.
We as citizens must “examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny and consider the proper responses to it. Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism…. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
Snyder believes that history can also warn. He mentions three dangerous periods in history. One in 1918 after the end of World War I when European democracies in the 1920s and 30s fell into right-wing authoritarianism; another was in 1945 after World War II; and the third was after the fall of communism in 1989.
Lesson I
Do not obey in advance. Snyder cautions that anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy and can lead to heedless acts of conformity. As Hitler became more secure in his rule, he caused the awful fate of the Austrian Jews. A Yale research study showed that people were obedient and even willing to harm others for some purpose if a new authority instructed them to do so.
Lesson II
Defend institutions. Institutions like laws, the press, and labor unions help us preserve decency and balance within the society. However, they need our support to preserve and strengthen them. This must be done from the outset and sooner rather than later. Otherwise these institutions will fall. A 1933 editorial in a Jewish newspaper expressed trust that Hitler would not deprive Jews of their rights nor put them in ghettos, but we know differently. People must be vigilant and not assume that those elected through institutions cannot change or destroy those same institutions.
By the end of 1933, Germany was a one-party state.
Lesson III
Beware the one-party state. A multi-party system must be supported, and citizens should vote in all elections — local, state, and federal. Democracies must be supported from within, and constant vigilance is the price of liberty. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips explained the importance of timeliness and urgency: “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.” The author writes that the “odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech and so…far more voting power, than other citizens.” The author is referencing the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Snyder writes that America has rarely faced a situation like the present one where the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power in federal government as well as most of the state governments. “The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular — and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.” Snyder specifically suggests fixing the gerrymandered system so that each voter has one equal vote and each ballot can be simply counted. He also advocates the use of paper ballots that cannot be tampered with remotely and can be recounted.
Snyder makes a chilling comment and a call to action: “[T]he elections of 2018, assuming they take place, will be a test of American traditions. So there is much to do in the meantime.”
Lesson IV
Snyder notes that today’s symbols can be tomorrow’s reality. We should notice the swastikas and other signs of hate and not allow ourselves to get accustomed to seeing them; we should have the courage to remove them and thereby set an example for others to do so. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures count, as do their absence.
In Germany in the early 1930s, the Nazi designations “Jewish” or “Aryan” had a huge impact on household economics and determined whether shops would survive or not. And so Snyder believes that accepting certain language as part of the landscape (“fake news” for the Washington Post and the New York Times, for example) can be dangerous. And if we are offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty, we should be sure that these include, not exclude our fellow citizens.
Lesson V
Remember professional ethics. The author points out that if lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had heeded their rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, and if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, the Nazis would have had a much more difficult time of carrying out atrocities.
If professionals see themselves as groups with common interests and with norms that are always to be followed, then they can be more confident and have collectively a kind of power of resistance. “If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.”
Lesson VI
Be wary of paramilitaries. “When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”
Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler opponents during his rallies. This created a climate of fear that helped the Nazis in the 1932 and 1933 elections. The SS ran the concentration camps as lawless zones where ordinary rules did not apply. “The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.” Snyder notes that the use of violence in the US is already privatized by our use of mercenaries in warfare and the government’s use of private corporations to run our prisons.
What is new, Snyder writes, is that the president maintains while in office a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters (egged on by a number of people in the audience). The candidate was videotaped encouraging them. He is also on record encouraging the audience to help remove the dissenters, and some supporters obeyed his call. He then said,“Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” Snyder reminds us that Nazi language rejected legitimate opposition. He believes that the emotions at rallies like this can be dangerously incorporated into the training of armed guards. This can evolve from first challenging the police and military, then penetrating them, and finally transforming them.
Lesson VII
Be reflective if you must be armed. Snyder advises that if you must carry a weapon in public service, be aware that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves doing irregular things. Such a public officer must be prepared to say no.
In 1937 and 1938 in the Soviet Union there were 682,691 executions of supposed “enemies of the state”, who were mostly peasants or members of minority groups. But these people could not have been executed without the help of local police, legal professionals, and civil servants. “Every large scale shooting action of the Holocaust… involved the regular German police.” They conformed, and most followed their orders to kill.
Lesson VIII
Stand Out. “Someone has to…. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken and others will follow.”
Lesson IX
Be kind to our language. Avoid using the phrases everyone else does. Think for yourself and think up your own way of speaking even if only to convey what you think everyone else is saying. Don’t be a robot. Make an effort to separate yourself from the Internet. Read books. Hitler’s language rejected legitimate opposition.
“The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli.” Snyder believes we have fallen into a collective trance. He believes that we should surround ourselves with books. He thinks that any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intention of others. A few specific books that he recommends for this particular moment in time are The Brothers Karamazov, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Plot against America, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The author writes that we must be concerned with what is true and what is false and discern which is which.
X
Believe in Truth. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom…. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
Victor Klemperer, an observer of totalitarianism, notices that truth dies in four ways:
1) open hostility to verifiable reality by presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. An attempt to track the veracity of the president’s utterances in the 2016 campaign found that 78% of his factual claims were false. “This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction.” Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.”
2) Klemperer believed that the fascist style depends on endless repetition of nicknames like Lyin Ted and Crooked Hilary, a kind of shamanistic incantation. The author believes that the traits he attributes to Ted and Hilary might more appropriately be affixed to the president himself. He transforms individuals into stereotypes through unrelenting repetition. Repeated chants of “Build the wall” or “Lock her up” created a bond between the speaker and his audience.
3) Magical thinking or the “open embrace of contradiction.” Promises made during the campaign to cut taxes for everyone, eliminate the national debt, and spending more on social policy and national defense are inherently contradictory. So believing and accepting this kind of radical untruth requires an abandonment of reason.
4) Misplaced faith by people who hear and believe the self-deifying claims by the candidate that “I alone can solve it.”
The author believes that once truth has become oracular rather than factual, evidence becomes irrelevant. He references the Romanian playwright Ionesco and his play Rhinoceros about propaganda and how easy it is to yield to it. Fascists in the 1930s used the then new medium of radio to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain the facts. Snyder believes that many people can have a distorted view of the world because of their blind and unwavering faith in a “heavily-flawed leader.”
Snyder’s final ten lessons will be explored in an upcoming review essay.
