Summary
Chapter 7: Be reflective if you must be armed.
Authoritarian regimes usually have special riot police forces and secret state police, but they need the support of regular police and regular soldiers. Snyder provides examples of this in the Soviet Union and Germany, noting how “regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen” (50). They did so for different reasons, but without these conformists those tragedies at the scale would not have happened.
Chapter 8: Stand out.
If you break the status quo and stand out, people will notice and will follow. Snyder’s example is Great Britain under Winston Churchill, which, even though it was not winning battles and had no real allies, was standing up against authoritarianism in Europe. Even though Hitler was not prepared to challenge Britain, Britain refused to make peace with Germany after the Fall of France and remained an enemy. Churchill’s behavior caused Hitler to change his plans, fighting a two-front war. What he did now seems normal and right, but at the time it was brave and frightening.
Britain was involved, though, because Poland had chosen to fight when the Germans invaded in 1939. Even though official Polish Resistance was overcome, there were still examples of boldness and succor. Snyder tells the story of Teresa Prekerowa, a young Polish woman who helped Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. She later became a historian of the Holocaust, and when someone asked her about how exceptional she was, she simply said what she had done was normal.
Chapter 9: Be kind to our language.
There are historical examples of how language can mobilize: a leader says “my people” to exclude others; encounters are “struggles”; any critique of the leader is “defamation” or “treason.” Most of these words and phrases that support and further authoritarianism now come to us via screens—television, phones, laptops and tablets. When we hear this flattening of language, this divorce of major concepts and context, we get away from truth and nuance. Sndyer warns us that we need to step away from our screens, to read more.
Chapter 10: Believe in truth.
Snyder states succinctly that to “abandon truth is to abandon freedom” (65) and that if nothing is true, then there’s no point in criticizing power, and everything is mere spectacle.
He uses Victor Klemperer’s four modes of how truth dies to inform this section. First, it is “open hostility to verifiable reality” (66), which President Trump has done too many times to count. Second, it is “shamanistic incantation” (66), which is an endless repetition of phrases and lies that create their own new world. Third is “magical thinking, or the embrace of contradiction” (67), which asserts things with no basis in fact. Finally, there is “misplaced faith” which involves “self-deifying claims” (68) and gives no space for “the small truths of our individual discernment and experience” (68).
We are now in a “post-truth” world, but the fact is that fascists did the same thing, and “Post-truth is pre-fascism” (71).
Analysis
In lesson seven, Snyder says that if someone has to be armed, then they ought to be conscientious about it. What he means is that people like policemen, who have to carry a weapon because of the nature of their job, should be very circumspect about what they are asked to do with that weapon. He provides astonishing information about how regular police killed more Jews than the SS did during the Holocaust, which shows that they are easily co-opted to do the work of tyrants. Snyder provides a few reasons as to why they might have done this—they did not want to appear weak, they did not want to stand out, they may have actually had a murderous conviction. Whatever their reason, though, they carried out what was asked of them.
In lesson eight, Snyder asks us to stand out. This is easier said than done, of course, as it may necessitate a bold action and one that might get us interrogated, arrested, attacked, or worse. He gives an example of a powerful person standing out—Winston Churchill—but also a regular person—Teresa Prekorowa—in order to let us see that we too have an ability to make a difference, even if it is a small one.
In lesson nine, Snyder says that we must be kind to our language. He provides several examples of how tyrants use generic terms to destroy nuance, to sway people, to exclude people who aren’t part of their own mainstream.
In lesson ten, Snyder writes about the importance of truth, a seemingly less important thing to many people in Trump’s universe. This “post-truth” world isn’t something just in our modern era, but something that has parallels in Europe in the 20th century; thus, we can learn lessons from the way tyrants there wielded lies and fake news and deception, and the ways in which people did or did not fall prey to such prevarications. In an interview with Business Insider, Snyder offered further commentary on this topic: “Democracy depends upon facts. Democracy depends upon knowing what's going on, operating in the shadow of a big lie, as a lot of us are doing — and even those of us who don't believe in the lie have to deal with it all the time — is incompatible with democracy. Myths and personality cults, and massive doses of self-deception, are incompatible with democracy.”
Michael Gove writes in The Times that lessons nine and ten and some of the upcoming ones (see the next section of this study guide) are quite valuable: “many of the recommendations he makes on how to maintain the health of a political culture are well-judged. The importance of scrupulosity in the use of language, bravery in standing out against the crowd, energetic participation in civil society and support for a free media all need restating,” and that “If more people follow Snyder’s injunctions to read newspapers, avoid falling for contrived online ‘scandals,' make friends across national boundaries and remember professional ethics then the world will indeed be a better place.”
