On Tyranny….Timothy Snyder
Editor’s note: this is the eighth in a series of summaries based on author and professor of history, Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny”. The goal is to pass on his insights, wisdom and forecast to those who have not read his works.
“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom”
Snyder feels we submit/permit tyranny when we “renounce” or deny the difference between what we want to hear vs what is actually the case. This loss silences the individual and any political system that depends on individualism.
Scholar Victor Klemperer, studied the language of totalitarianism and stated truth dies in four modes.
First…open hostility to verifiable reality by presenting lies as facts. He tallies Trump’s lies while President from his first year in power (2017) as an average of six per day that increased to 27 per day by 2020.
Second…shamanistic incantation which, by ‘endless repetition’ to make the fictional realistic and the criminal acceptable. Trump’s nicknaming of opponents, “Crooked Hillary…Sleepy Joe”, changed these people into stereotypes his followers could understand and mock.
Third… “magical thinking/the open embrace of contradiction”. The contradiction of the billionaire who can’t pay his taxes/debts, promises Covid will suddenly disappear and, since the vote is “always rigged”, you might as well vote for me. Statements about demographic groups taking votes and rights from other groups – e.g. black voters from white people, were believed despite facts to disprove it. He states “accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason” as horrendous actions by slavish followers of Hitler demonstrated.
Fourth…misplaced faith, asking followers to reject other faith values and believe “I alone can solve it”. Klemperer recalled at the end of World War II a German worker telling him “understanding is useless, you have to have faith…I believe in the Fuhrer.”
Romanian playwright, Eugene Ionesco, watched friends “slip away” into the language and then the philosophy of Nazism. Propaganda seems normal to those who yield to it. Author George Orwell referred to it as “doublethink”.
Snyder warns “…now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.”
“Post-truth is pre-fascism”
Liz Moore, Editor