Lessons from Nazi Germany and eastern Europe show us how democracy dies, and what we must do to save it
Winston Churchill once famously declared: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Underpinned by the rule of law and the popular will, democracy is the only way we can prevent the arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power: suppression of free speech; curtailment or abolition of civil liberties; laws passed by decree without public debate or popular approval; arrest and imprisonment without trial; torture and murder by unchecked agencies of the government; and theft, extortion and embezzlement by politicians in power, who inevitably turn into kleptocrats when democracy is destroyed.
Yet democracy is a fragile creation. After a period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when constitutional democracy spread to many countries not just in Europe but across the globe, and Francis Fukuyama declared that history had come to an end, the tide seems to have turned. Democracies are now being destroyed in Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Poland, as strongmen such as Putin, Orban, Erdoğan and Kaczyński dismantle civil liberties, silence critical voices and suppress independent institutions. What makes it worse is that such would-be dictators enjoy popular support for what they are doing. A similar process may well be under way with the advent of the Trump regime in the United States.
How we defend our most fundamental freedoms has once again become a matter of great urgency. The historian Timothy Snyder has produced this short book as one response. History, and especially the history of the 20th century, has lessons for us all, he contends. A specialist on east-central Europe, Snyder made his name with a book, Bloodlands, that argued, less than persuasively, for an equivalence of Stalin’s purges with the Nazi Holocaust. More recently, he has declared in Black Earth that the Holocaust was not about the implementation of paranoid antisemitism but an attempt to gain control of more agricultural land as an alternative to using science to improve the natural environment. His argument did not find many supporters. What does he say in his latest tract?
On Tyranny is less an anatomy of tyranny itself than an essay about how we might stop it from happening. “Do not obey in advance,” he says. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected. It was no easy thing to risk your job when over a third of the workforce was unemployed, as it was in 1933. Hundreds of thousands of Nazi stormtroopers were roaming the streets beating up and killing the Social Democrats and Communists who were the regime’s main opponents. Up to 200,000 people, overwhelmingly those on the political left, were thrown into concentration camps and brutally mistreated. The great mass of Germans did not obey in advance: they obeyed when tyranny had already set up its tent.
Please continue this review here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/08/on-tyranny-timothy-snyder-review-trump-twenty-lessons-democracy
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