His lessons set out in big, bold font are practical and for the most part they are actionable: read books develop your own vocabulary and do not be an echo chamber for what you hear if you see a racist or a demeaning sign toward a minority group, set an example for others by taking it down.
Some chapters are more insightful than others, leading me to wonder how certain examples are relevant to the lesson that he stated at the beginning of a chapter, an indication of the haste in which the book was written. Each one is followed by a brief analysis, with examples in large part derived from the totalitarian experience of Europeans in the twentieth century, along with the manipulative machinations of Vladimir Putin in more recent times – then he relates that insight or repressive episode to the current American political environment. When Trump was elected, Snyder’s response was to write a primer, On Tyranny, of twenty lessons on how Americans might resist the incipient authoritarianism that was occurring in their country. In the fall of 2016, Snyder virtually finished The Road to Unfreedom (to be published in April 2018), a chronicle about the rise of authoritarianism in Russia, Europe and America. It turned out that his presentation was more an expansion of the epilogue in On Tyranny that explores two paradigms leading to worldviews that founder on an insufficient knowledge of history, while the interview with Ormiston directly related to the lessons Snyder posits in that slim (a mere 126 pages) but substantive volume. His talk was followed by a Q&A with CBC correspondent Susan Ormiston. Recently, I was fortunate to hear in Toronto a stimulating talk by distinguished Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of the acclaimed monographs Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning and his latest, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017). If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. "Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.
Historian Timothy Snyder speaking in 2016.
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