On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

 

…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.”

Snyder does not name America’s 45th president in the course of this book, but the nascent administration is never far from his thoughts. Throughout his march to power, Trump used a narrowing of language in an identical way to that which Klemperer described, and has emphasized his populist project by the subordination of word to image.

This is a presidency being shaped by the techniques and tone of television and Twitter and YouTube, rather than the progression of rational argument through sentence and paragraph. Trump’s admission that he never reads a book all the way through is symptomatic of his rhetorical style. He offers a “highly constrained [language] to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the past, present and future”,

Snyder argues. In the president’s frame of reference events are only ever bad or sad or mad. With his Dr Seuss vocabulary, he can present the world as a place of simplistic oppositions, stripped of nuance.

Snyder’s beautifully weighted book is the perfect clear-eyed antidote to that deliberate philistinism (“I love the poorly educated”, as Trump chillingly observed). Always measured in their observation, these 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten.

Snyder is ideally placed to distil those urgent lessons. His landmark 2010 book, Bloodlands, examined the lasting effects of the totalitarian regimes of the Third Reich and of Stalin’s Russia on the places in which they clashed most devastatingly: Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states. When he suggests “do not obey in advance” or “be calm when the unthinkable arrives” or “be wary of paramilitaries” or “make eye contact and small talk”, he deftly brings to bear all that he knows about the trajectory of tyranny and the mechanisms of resistance.

Bloodlands won Snyder the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought, and this book makes Arendt’s analysis of fascism a touchstone. Snyder reminds you, for example, that the definition of totalitarianism that Arendt offered was not the creation of an all-powerful state, but “the erasure of the difference between public and private life”. We are free, Snyder notes, “only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us and how they come to know it”.

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.”

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.

To prove this point, Snyder offers reminders, if reminders are needed, of just how quickly wave after wave of unacceptable behavior became normalized on the Trump campaign trail. How, for example, we got used to the fact that “a protester would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of ‘USA’ and then be forced to leave the rally” not by federal police but by the candidate’s private security detail. “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally?” Trump asked, pushing the idea of political violence. “To me, it’s fun.”

It is salutary to be reminded that the eastern European media, and journalists from Ukraine, called the election much more accurately than the Washington press corps. They had seen this behavior up close before, and they knew where it led.

There will no doubt be those who dismiss as hysterical the parallels that Snyder draws between the path to power of the Trump administration and that of the Third Reich. He himself expresses sincere hope that the lessons in resistance he offers will either not all be needed, or that they will collectively have the desired effect of check and balance.

He gives his fellow Americans the following warning, however: “We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the last century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience…” You will read no more relevant field guide to that wisdom than this book.

Book Review by Tim Adams

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder is published by Bodley Head (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99