It does not happen with the frequency which it used to that I impulse-buy a book in a bookstore, even one at a national airport that often carries both a surprising variety of classics and contemporary fiction and non-fiction. It is a very small book with a very BIG title: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a well-known and acclaimed cultural historian. Two of his many other titles are Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning and Ukrainian History, Russian Policy and European Futures.
“Tyranny” is a big word with many barbs spinning off of it. The word feels as big as the Titanic, so lumbering and unmanageable, so I wanted to see what Snyder had to say about its meaning and its presence in the world today; I bought it and read it on my flight home and subsequently. Each of the twenty lessons appears on its own page with a paragraph in bold beneath: some samples: 1. Do not obey in advance; 5. Remember professional ethics; 9. Be kind to our language; 12. Make eye contact and small talk; 15. Contribute to good causes. But # 10 caught and held my eye: Believe in truth. His first observation followed: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so.”
From there he highlights four elements that hook into the death of truth, according to Victor Klemperer, a scholar and historian who wrote diaries during the powerful rise of the Third Reich; his many works are considered reliable eye witnesses of that regime and others in Germany: “Open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.” Confusion arises when the facts of events are continually hijacked by fabrications which in turn breeds confusion as to what to believe. The truth begins to bleed out.
“Shamanistic incantation.” “Endless repetition,” according to Klemperer, “is designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.” Nicknames, stereotyping individuals, referring to them as “lyin” or “crooked” or “slimy” and repeated endlessly can give many non reflective people the sense that these illusions are the reality to embrace.
“Magical Thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. Such occurs when people listen to and accept two realities that cannot exist at the same time, as with the presidential promise of “cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating national debt and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense.” These promises undercut one another and cannot be made into a defensible reality. George Orwell coined a term for this kind of dizzying version of reality: “doublespeak” became the strategy in Ninety Eighty Four to create alternate forms of existence by assaulting any form of shared reality that was not constructed by those moving into or who had attained power.
“Misplaced faith.” Here one attempts to self-deify, to make one seem a god who can perform the impossible, alone. “I alone can solve it,” or “I am your voice,” or “I am the committee.” What is attacked on this level of truth-killing are “the small truths of our individual discernment and experience.” We are no longer encouraged to believe in our own validity or those that our experiences teach us. We give them up to the authorities.
While the entirety of Snyder’s book reveals how history shows us that this same game plan has been used repeatedly in the past, seeing it within the historical context he outlines I found very helpful. And like a slow-moving ocean liner, sometimes its motion is hardly detectable. History shows us NOW what was THEN.