Timothy Snyder

From “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder In 2016, American journalists seemed to misunderstand a presidential campaign. As a longshot candidate surmounted barrier after barrier and accumulated victory after victory, our commentariat blithely assured us that at the next stage he would be stopped by one fine American institution or […]

From “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder Tyrannical regimes arose at different times and places in the Europe of the twentieth century, but memoirs of their victims all share a single tender moment. Whether the recollection is of fascist Italy in the 1920s, of Nazi Germany of the 1930s, of

From “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder Journalists are not perfect, any more than people in other vocations are perfect. But the work of people who adhere to journalistic ethics is of a different quality than the work of those who do not. We find it natural that we pay

From “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. In 2017, the American president

From “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder When we think of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, we imagine Auschwitz and mechanized impersonal death. This was a convenient way for Germans to remember the Holocaust, since they could claim that few of them had known exactly what had happened behind

From “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After