On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.”
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. After communism in eastern Europe
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The move to separate from the EU is not a step backward onto firm ground, but a leap into the unknown.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
We need to remove private funding from what should be public campaigns for office. We will have to take seriously our own Constitution, which forbids oath-breaking insurrectionists from running for office.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. During the campaign of 2016, Americans
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.