It’s a tiny book as books go, all of 126 pages, fairly big type, small enough to carry in your back pocket or next to your phone in your handbag. But it is full of wisdom, little eye bites, and all of them on the same topic: Tyranny.
In 2017 Professor Timothy Snyder wrote it, oh he of Yale University, a Levin Professor of History and the full title is: On Tyranny—Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. It was sold out when I went first to buy it on the ThriftBooks site, so I sprang for the full price, cheap enough still, on Amazon. Thinking it was maybe seven bucks. Need another copy already; mine is almost in tatters. (Disclosure: I do not know Tim; I wish I did.)
The longest ones of his 20 lessons run to approximately seven or eight pages each, but there is first a less-than one page summation of the particular wisdom lesson that follows it.
Several of them are appropriate for today certainly, when we are being inundated from the very top of our government with wild cries of hoax, hoax, fake news, wild and crazy mobs trying to destroy our heritage, “our” America, “and the beat,” as Sonny and Cher used to sing, “goes on.”
But for today I’ve selected just one, just the summation, this one, Lesson 10, Believe in truth:
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. (On Tyranny,…, Snyder, pp. 65-71)
The kicker in this one? At the end of the seven pages Snyder says, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.” And this is no less than where we’ve been heading for more than three years; and it is why all of us writing, marching, thinking, talking to anyone we can, are all in on this. It is not breathless hyperbole to say our hair is on fire. We’ll vote sure; we’ll support our candidate, and our down-ballot candidates too; but we need to send whatever money we can spare, use our bucks judiciously for the most impact and effect; get involved in phone banking; whatever will work to end this march to fascism and the end of the unfinished story of our democracy. “We the people…” have the power to end this nightmare.
Kurt Vonnegut, who was a prisoner of war, survived the fire bombing of Dresden germany. It was the basis for his book, Slaughterhouse Five. After the war, he became friends with a German writer, who had served in the SS. He asked his friend what he thought about the germans’ tragic flaw. He replied it was obedience.
Exactly. And it is I must say what I see as among the major afflictions of Donald Trump’s base. They are giving allegiance, aka obedience, to his what, by now, +20,000 lies? Another of their afflictions of course is their desperate need to live out and blame the rest of us for their daily distress. A book from some time ago had the perfect title that describes these folks: A Culture of Complaint.
I’ve had this for a while on Kindle and forgotten about it. I just got to number 6. Sheesh.
“Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (p. 42). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (p. 42). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.