By Timothy Snyder

Tim Duggan Books 2017

128 pp.

Democracy is facing a performance crisis. In many democracies across the world, living standards have flattened, the supremacy of ethnic groups is being challenged and the rise of social media has empowered fringe movements. Winston Churchill once declared: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Western democracies are now safer, wealthier and freer than human beings have ever been. However, democracy is fragile, and people increasingly feel that democracies are unresponsive, run by selfish elites, and failing to deliver. It is too easy to assume that democracy is immutable. History can warn and we have much to learn from the Europeans who conceded to fascism, Nazism, and communism in a not-so-distant portion of the twentieth century.

This is where Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny enters. In his previous books Bloodlands and Black Earth, Snyder analysed Hitler and Stalin and their policies. In On Tyranny, almost more pamphlet than book, he draws from the worst moments of the twentieth century to provide twenty measures to resist authoritarianism. Snyder opens with the statement: “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” He advocates defending against tyranny by: making eye contact and talking with strangers, remembering professional ethics, subsidising investigative journalism, scrubbing your computer of malware on a regular basis, picking some charities and setting up autopay, keeping up friendships abroad, reading books instead of screens, and being alert to the use of words like “extremism” and “terrorism”.

The manipulation of language is a central theme and Snyder draws parallels between the oratory of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump:

“Hitler’s language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning) and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel).”

Historian Richard Evans finds fault with a couple Snyder’s points, arguing Snyder overlooks the role of violence and coercion in supressing opposition, and that what we really need to work out is how to resist the imposition of dictatorship when it claims to be establishing itself with poplar consent and the validation of the law.

Despite Evans’ protestations that the book could do with greater depth of historical illustration, you should read On Tyranny as a cry to activism and resistance. No government can defend itself from deteriorating or being commandeered by big business unless the enfranchised are informed and engaged. Democracy requires active work. Every generation has to reclaim it. On Tyranny is grounded in history yet infused with the urgency of today