Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s important book argues that we must learn from the horrors of the past if we want to protect our democracy, writes Tim Adams, for The Observer.
ON TYRANNY: TWENTY LESSONS
FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Timothy Snyder
Penguin/Random House
Halfway through On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder makes the case for the printed word.
The ninth suggestion of his 20-point ''how-to'' guide for resisting tyranny reads as follows: ''Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone else is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.''
I sat reading Snyder's own book outside in spring sunshine. And while I was doing so I was struck by a thought that runs like this: it is good to be reading these words not on a screen but on a clean white sunlit page not only for the tactile pleasure it gives but also because it is the only way I can be sure that this interaction is just between me and the author of this book. No algorithm is tracking my scrolling habits; no cunning intelligence is hazarding a guess at what I might want to read or be distracted by next (''If you liked On Tyranny, you might also like i) Nineteen Eighty-Four, ii) tear gas canisters ...''). No-one else knows what Snyder and I are up to.
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 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 the US' 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 emphasised 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 appears to have been 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.
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 Vaclav 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 behaviour became normalised on the Trump campaign trail.
How, for example, people 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 behaviour 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 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 ... ''
- Guardian News and Media
Win a copy
The ODT has three copies of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder, to give away courtesy of Penguin/Random House. For your chance to win a copy, email playtime@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ‘‘On Tyranny’’ in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, April 11.
LAST WEEK’S WINNERS
Winners of last week’s giveaway, Breaking Ranks, by James McNeish, courtesy of Harper Collins, were: Liz Angelo, of Dunedin, Wendy Chik, of Dunedin, and Brian Dodds, of Balclutha.
