Book Review: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
by Timothy Snyder
[Expanded audiobook edition, which is updated in 2022 with 20 new lessons from Russia’s war on Ukraine]
This audiobook starts with Timothy Snyder narrating his own short book from 2017, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. That previous work served as a pamphlet on resisting the fascism that was—and is—encroaching worldwide. Those 20 lessons essentially boil down to keep your own counsel and have a firm handle on reality, don’t follow the crowd for the crowd’s sake, and ensure that your resistance to authoritarianism is tangible and not just symbolic only.
The bulk of the added material is—as the author states—unscripted. That’s significant, in that there are few if any disfluencies in Snyder’s extemporaneous presentation. The added material is focused on Ukraine in the context of the Russian invasion of 2022. The point of it is that to understand Ukraine is to also understand the US. This is an excellent opportunity to catch up on the European history you probably never heard in school—and it’s relevant to us today outside of Europe. Here you will find what drives authoritarian fascism—and why it’s advancement is very dangerous worldwide today, including in Europe and the United States.
Snyder identifies three types of politics:
1. Inevitability, meaning we’re good in any case
2. Eternity, meaning life is an endless loop of going back to good (e.g. Trump’s and Putin’s fascism)
3. Catastrophe, meaning disaster is upon you and there’s no escape (e.g. rising seas from climate change)
Snyder implies that all three of these types of politics are dangerous. Regarding Inevitability politics, the author takes issue with Francis Fukuyama, challenging the idea that we’re at the end of history [itself a complex argument by Fukuyama that has been inaccurately reduced to an overly simplistic expression]. Liberal democracy is hardly guaranteed to survive the authoritarian pressures closing in on it—instead, we must all resolve to fight for it. The alternative is to regress to the Eternity form of politics, in which authoritarian means are used in attemps to restore a fictional glorious past that never existed.
Nations progress through three forms according to Snyder, which are:
1. Empire, such as France and the UK in the 19th Century
2. Nation State, as in the artificial nation states created after World War I
3. Cooperative Integration, such as the European Union
Snyder suggests that the way to reach the Cooperative Integration state is through the Politics of Responsibility. We get there by being:
1. Calm in the case of the unthinkable (e.g. Snyder suggests the war in Ukraine, and I would add the January 6 insurrection in the US, or something more personal such as an injury by someone important to you or a career damaging mistake)
2. Patriotic to one’s country [not an authoritarian leader]
3. Courageous in standing up to bullies
The extemporaneous narrative by Snyder about Ukraine provides complementary meat on the bones of the original On Tyranny pamphlet. Taking these lessons to heart and living them may be the way we stay out from under authoritarian rule—let’s do so.
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