On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder – review
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The Yale historian’s important book argues that we must learn from the horrors of the past if we want to protect our democracy
In the brief chapter that follows the suggestion to “think up your own way of speaking”, Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, dwells on the insights of Victor Klemperer, the great Jewish philologist who studied the ways that the Nazis commandeered language before they commandeered everything else. Klemperer noted how Hitler’s language explicitly undermined all and any opposition. “‘The people’ always meant some people and not others… encounters were always ‘struggles’ and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was ‘defamation’ of the leader.”
In a time when authority seeks to destroy the legitimacy of facts he invokes at various points Václav Havel’s philosophy of “living in truth”, of keeping a sacred space for what you can prove to be true and for truth-tellers. Self-deception becomes first a seductive habit and then a state of mind. That progression is how tyrannies spread.
The manner in which western populations have broadly accepted the fact of surveillance, and willingly surrendered their identities to social media, has already gone a long way to removing that dividing line between public and private. Snyder counsels extreme caution in rubbing out that distinction further. He calls for a “corporeal politics”, voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; face-to-face interaction rather than email, marching not online petitioning: “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”