“You should read this.”
Those simple words ran across my mind as I finished page 126 of this wonderful book. I am no political scientist though I follow current events tightly. This book, written in 2017 in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, reminds us how fragile history can be. By looking at the challenges of the present, it looks at how democracy was subverted by tyranny in the twentieth century.
Snyder provides twenty lessons to readers based upon global failures of the 1900s – for example, the rise of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the rise of Putin’s Russia. Make no mistake, this book, despite its title evoking the twentieth century, is thoroughly grounded in twenty-first-century events. It uses those current events as a prism to recall prior history.
This book is readable and accessible to the masses. Much as The Federalist Papers did for the US Constitution, this book attempts to do for 2016-2020. It seeks to remind us of the choices we face in the voting booth and in our lives and encourages us to make those choices with confidence. Snyder, by trade a professor of history at Yale, seeks to imprint upon us the fragility of history. As with the twentieth century, only a few wrong decisions can get us far off course.
Snyder concludes by discussing the “politics of inevitability” that seemed to envelop American discourse in the early twenty-first century. “Democracy will inevitably triumph,” these false words told us. The rise of authoritarianism in America laid bare this false creed. To remind us of our duty, the author – in a sort of jeremiad – calls us to return to the study of history in an attempt to make more history. Citing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Snyder calls the now-informed reader to embrace the challenges of the present. Will we listen?
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
By Timothy Snyder
Copyright (c) 2017
Tim Duggan Books
ISBN13 9780804190114
Page Count: 126
Genre: Political Science
www.amazon.com