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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
This should give us pause. History, which for a time seemed to be running from west to east, now seems to be moving from east to west. Everything that happens here seems to happen there first.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
A president described a regime change in the style of the 1930s as desirable: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster.” What we need, he thought, were “riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.” He couldn’t quite pull off this scenario in January 2021,
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Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The man Hitler chose to oversee the annexation of Austria, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was a lawyer who later ran the occupation of the Netherlands. Lawyers were vastly overrepresented among the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces who carried out the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, Polish elites, communists, the handicapped, and
... See moreTimothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them.