He points out that, when the Nazi government demanded obedience, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen all made an exception and put their usual ethical obligations aside.
#ON TYRANNY BOOK PROFESSIONAL#
Next, Snyder implores his readers to “Remember professional ethics” when the government starts claiming that they no longer apply. These symbols of obedience-like swastikas and gold stars in Nazi Germany, or pro-government propaganda signs in communist Eastern Europe-allow tyrants to bring their agendas even into people’s private lives. According to Snyder, despite its famous two-party system, the United States is already on the brink of falling into one-party oligarchy because the Republican Party uses techniques like voter suppression and gerrymandering to gain and hold power, even though in reality only a minority of Americans support them and only a very small group of economic elites actually benefits from their policies.įourthly, Snyder asks citizens to “Take responsibility for the face of the world.” Specifically, he means they must refuse to display the signs of hate, exclusion, and loyalty that tyrants and their supporters ask them to put up. On a similar note, Snyder’s third rule is “Beware the one-party state.” An effective multi-party system ensures that no one group will be able to completely turn the state into a machine for advancing their own private interests. Secondly, Snyder implores reader to “Defend institutions.” Institutions are only as strong as the people who make them up, and authoritarians always try to dismantle democratic institutions in order to avoid checks and balances on their power. This is essentially the worst thing people can do, because tyranny functions by winning obedience and then implementing oppressive and antidemocratic policies that harm the same people who are passively obeying. Snyder’s first rule is “Do not obey in advance.” Throughout history, not only have significant portions of the public generally supported tyrants like Adolf Hitler, but most of the rest of the population has simply put their personal disagreements aside and reluctantly obeyed the government. Snyder argues that American democracy now faces the same threat of collapse, and he offers Americans 20 ways to help preserve it. In fact, people throughout history have made this same mistake, wrongly assuming that their democracies will survive, only to watch authoritarian governments destroy them in as little as a few years and set their nations on a path toward ruin and, in extreme cases, horrific campaigns of violence like the Holocaust. And while Americans tend to assume that democracy is inherently stable and their government institutions are strong enough to withstand antidemocratic attacks, this is not true. In his Prologue, Snyder echoes this fear and notes that democratic regimes have always fallen to tyranny ever since the very concepts of democracy and tyranny were invented in ancient Greece. Indeed, this bestselling book began as a Facebook post after Trump’s election, when many Americans were starting to worry that Trump’s political ideology and rhetorical style closely resembled those of 20th-century fascists and contemporary dictators around the world. In On Tyranny, a short guide to 20 different strategies that citizens can use to defend democracy against an authoritarian government, historian Timothy Snyder looks to 20th-century Europe in an effort to help 21st-century Americans cope with Donald Trump’s presidency.
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