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From Democracy Now!:
Is the United States sliding toward tyranny? That
is the question posed by Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder in
his new book that draws on his decades of experience writing about war and
genocide in European history in order to find 20 key lessons that can help the
United States avoid descending into authoritarianism. "I was trying to get
out front and give people very practical day-to-day things that they could
do," Snyder says. "What stood behind all of that was a lifetime of
working on the worst chapters of European history, a sense of how things can go
very wrong."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We
spend the rest of the hour with award-winning author and Yale University
history professor Timothy Snyder, whose new book draws on his decades of
experience writing about war and genocide in European history in order to find
lessons that can help the United States avoid descending into fascist
authoritarianism. It is titled On
Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Snyder writes, quote, "The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the
threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our
political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the
twentieth century. We 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." That’s from On
Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of
History at Yale University, where he joins us now. Professor Synder is also the
author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and
Stalin, as well as Black
Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.
Welcome to Democracy
Now!, Timothy Snyder. Can you talk about, well, just what we quoted
you saying there? Do you think that the United States is—is headed towards
tyranny?
TIMOTHY SNYDER: So,
I guess the place to start would be with the quotation. Like the framers of the
Constitution, I’m not an American exceptionalist. I’m a skeptic. My tendency is
to look at examples from other places and to ask what we could learn. The point
of using the historical examples is to remind ourselves that democracies and
republics usually fail. The expectation should be failure rather than success.
The framers, looking at classical examples from Greece and Rome, gave us the
institutions that we have. I think our mistake at present is to imagine that
the institutions will automatically continue to protect us. My sense is that
we’ve seen institutions like our own fail. We’ve—20th century authoritarians
have learned that the way to dismantle systems like ours is to go after one
institution and then the next, which means that we have to have an active
relationship, both to history, so that we can see how failure arises and learn
from people who tried to protect institutions, but also an active relationship
to our own institutions, that our institutions are only as good as the people
who try to serve them.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well,
Professor Snyder, in terms of the rise of tyranny in the 20th century, clearly,
the rise of fascism came in the period after World War I. The masses of people
in the world had been exposed to these imperialist wars, and there was
tremendous insecurity. Do you see—what parallels do you see between that period
in the ’30s and our situation today?
TIMOTHY SNYDER: That’s
a wonderful question, because it helps us see how history can brace us, can
give us a kind of grounding. When we think about globalization today, we
imagine that it’s the first globalization, that everything about it is new. And
that’s just not the case. The globalization we’re in now is the second one. The
first globalization was the late 19th century and the early 20th century, when
there was a similar expansion of world trade, export-led growth. And
interestingly, there was also a similar rhetoric of optimism, the idea that
trade would lead to enlightenment, would lead to liberalism, would lead to
peace. That pattern of the late 19th century, we saw it break. We saw the First
World War, as you say, the Great Depression, the Second World War. One way to
understand all of that is the long failure of the first globalization. Once we
have that in mind, we shouldn’t be surprised that our own globalization has
contradictions, has opponents, that it generates—that it generates opposition,
that it generates ideas of the far right, sometimes the far left, that are
against it.
So, history instructs us that there’s nothing new or nothing automatic
about globalization, but it also instructs us that there are people who lived
through the end of that first globalization, the kind of people I cite in the
book—Hannah Arendt, Victor Klemperer—who observed these effects and then gave
us very practical advice about how we can react. So, part of our own
misunderstanding of globalization, that it’s all new, is that history doesn’t
matter, precisely because it’s all new. What I’m trying to say in the book is,
no, the opposite. We’ve seen globalization fail before. We’ve seen fascism
rise. We’ve seen other threats to liberalism, democracy, republics. What we
should be doing is learning from the 20th century, rather than forgetting it.
AMY GOODMAN: You
wrote a Facebook post in November. Tell us what you wrote about when Donald
Trump was elected.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah,
so, I mean, the thing about the Facebook post, I wrote it right after the
election. And it was the first thing that I did. And it was—it was these 20
lessons. It was an attempt to compress everything that I thought I understood
about the 20th century into very brief points that would help Americans react,
because I had the strong feeling—I think it turned out to be correct—that there
would be tens of millions of Americans who would be surprised and disoriented
and shocked by the election of Mr. Trump and would be seeking some way to
react.
And I did it as quickly as I could, because it’s very important in
these kinds of historical moments to get out front. The tendency to or the
temptation to normalize is very strong. The temptation to wait and to say,
"Well, let’s see what he does after the inauguration. Let’s see who his
advisers are. Let’s see what the policies are," that temptation generates
normalization, which is already happening in the United States. And so, I was
trying to get out front and give people very practical day-to-day things that
they could do.
But what stood behind all of that was a lifetime of working on the
worst chapters of European history, a sense of how things can go very wrong.
What also stood behind it is my friendships with my teachers and also my
students from Eastern Europe, people who have their own biographical connection
either to the authoritarianisms of the 20th century or, sadly, the new
authoritarianisms of the 21st. It’s that, a little bit, which helps me to see
that these kinds of things can happen to people like us, but also that there
are practical ways that people like us can respond.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I
wanted to ask you about the first lesson you talk about in your book, especially
in light of the realities that, in our day and age, clearly, authoritarianism
has enormous more power of surveillance and social control of populations. You
write in your first lesson, "Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of
authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead
about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves
without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it
can do." I think about that in terms of the enormous gravitation of the
population toward social media and then the ability of states and corporations
to actually monitor and control what people say and do and shop and everything
they’re thinking about.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah,
so, I agree with that completely. The historical basis of that first lesson,
"Don’t obey in advance," is what historians think we understand about
authoritarian regime changes, and in particular the Nazi regime change of 1933.
Historians of Nazi Germany disagree about a lot of things, but one of the few
things we agree about is the significance of adaptation from below in 1933.
When we look at Hitler in retrospect, we sometimes have a tendency to think of
him as a kind of supervillain who can do anything. But in fact, the lesson of
1933 is that consent from below matters a lot, not consent necessarily in the
sense of voting or marching or anything active, but consent in the sense of
bystanding, going along, making mental adjustments.
So the point of "Don’t obey in advance" is not to give your
consent in that way, which is very important, because if you do just drift at
the beginning, then psychologically you’re lost, or, to put it a different way,
if you don’t follow lesson one, "Don’t obey in advance," then you
can’t follow lessons two to 20, either. Politically, it’s also really
important, because the time which matters the most is the beginning, where we
are now. Right now we actually have much more power than we think we do. Our
actions are magnified outwards now. When protest becomes illegal or dangerous,
this is going to change. But right now Americans actually have more power than
they think they do.
Please go here for the full transcript or
to watch the video of this program: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/30/on_tyranny_yale_historian_timothy_snyder
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