A week after the election, Snyder penned a Facebook essay that began: “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”
His post, which reached more than a million viewers, is the basis for his new book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. With clarity and urgency, Snyder offers 20 ways to recognize and fight tyranny, ranging from “Do not obey in advance” to “Listen for dangerous words.”
Saturday at 7 p.m., Snyder will speak at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County’s Main Library. In a telephone conversation with CityBeat, he discussed what he sees as a need for genuine alarm in the U.S.
CityBeat: Why are you talking about tyranny now?
Timothy Snyder: I’m trying to persuade people that things really can go awry. History teaches us that democracies usually fail and they can fail in pretty spectacular ways.
But what we can learn from history is that failure needs our consent. Authoritarians need our consent to win; they need us to go along in one way or another. That’s why the first lesson in my book talks about how you don’t go along.
The other thing is that time is crucial. You need to recognize that you are in a critical situation and do little things that will radiate outward and matter.
The bad news is that the possibilities are much darker than we like to think. The good news is that individual actions matter. For most Americans, their actions matter more now than they ever did. That’s the good part. There’s actually a chance to make a difference.
CB: On the Bill Maher show Real Time, you said that people who are against the truth are taking a direct line toward killing democracy. What did you mean?
TS: All major attempts to undermine democratic systems like ours — whether a century ago or now — depend, first, upon getting us to not believe the truth. The Trump campaign ran on this idea. Pretty much daily, (he) said the real media are fake so we’d lose the notion that people who are working to find facts are any different than people who just sit around and make things up. The history of this is really profound. When you don’t know the difference between the truth and what you want to hear, you start being ready for authoritarianism.
To be a citizen, you have to be able to get facts and be skeptical of your leaders. You can’t drop the facts, but you also can’t drop the skepticism. It takes work to be a citizen. But that’s what democracy demands, precisely.
CB: You use the Reichstag fire — when Hitler seized an opportunity after the German parliament building was attacked — to show how quickly terrorism can cause a nation to suspend basic civil rights. Why is this important now?
TS: If we think of terrorism as just an exceptional moment, we will not be prepared. Terrorism is part of a cycle. It’s the warp and woof of how you create a modern tyranny. The Reichstag fire was the template to come to power through legal means. Through an exceptional event like that, you can take away the civil liberties of the population.
If there’s another event like 9/11, we have to do better this time. If we are hit by that pool of fear and grief, we can’t let that blur into vulnerability. Thinking about this in advance is the only chance to resist it.
TIMOTHY SNYDER will give a free talk 7 p.m. Saturday at the Main Library, 800 Vine St., Downtown. More info: cincinnatilibrary.org/news.
