'Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy,' the author writes. Snyder recalls how, when Hitler threatened to invade Austria, regular Austrian citizens looked on, or joined in, as local Nazis detained Austrian Jews or stole their property. Much of the initial power granted to nondemocratic leaders is given freely, via 'heedless acts of conformity,' long before popular docility is requested or required. The author dwells on 'the politics of the everyday' to show the small ways people succumb to or fend off the encroachment of tyranny. political system, he notes, was designed 'to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.' 'Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.' The U.S. 'Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century,' he writes.

Steeped in the history of interwar Germany and the horrors that followed, Snyder still writes with bracing immediacy, providing 20 plain and mostly actionable lessons on preventing, or at least forestalling, the repression of lives and minds.ĭon't count Snyder among the American-exceptionalism crowd, at least not as the concept is usually understood. 'On Tyranny' is a slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital. Historian Timothy Snyder does not offer a corrective to the pessimism of this genre - he is a scholar of the Holocaust, after all - but begins to illuminate a path forward from it.

On tyranny by timothy snyder