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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then
... See moreTimothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we
... See moreTimothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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
Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.
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
Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought
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