on tyranny twenty lessons from the twentieth century

Snyder’s beautifully weighted book is the perfect clear-eyed antidote to that deliberate philistinism (“I love the poorly educated”, as Trump chillingly observed). With his Dr Seuss vocabulary, he can present the world as a place of simplistic oppositions, stripped of nuance. In the president’s frame of reference events are only ever bad or sad or mad. He offers a “highly constrained to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the past, present and future”, Snyder argues. Trump’s admission that he never reads a book all the way through is symptomatic of his rhetorical style. This is a presidency being shaped by the techniques and tone of television and Twitter and YouTube, rather than the progression of rational argument through sentence and paragraph. Throughout his march to power, Trump used a narrowing of language in an identical way to that which Klemperer described, and has emphasised his populist project by the subordination of word to image. Snyder does not name America’s 45th president in the course of this book, but the nascent administration is never far from his thoughts. No one else knows what me and Snyder are up to. No algorithm is tracking my scrolling habits no cunning intelligence is hazarding a guess at what I might want to read or be distracted by next (“If you liked On Tyranny, you might also like i) Nineteen Eighty-Four, ii) tear gas canisters…”). The thought runs like this: it is good to be reading these words not on a screen but on a clean white sunlit page not only for the tactile pleasure it gives but also because it is the only way I can be sure that this interaction is just between me and the author of this book.

And while I was doing so I was struck by a thought that maybe creeps into your head as often as it creeps into mine these days. I sat reading Snyder’s own book last week outside in the first spring sunshine. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone else is saying. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. The ninth suggestion of his 20-point “how to” guide for resisting tyranny reads as follows: “Be kind to our language.

H alfway through this crisply produced little book, Timothy Snyder makes the case for the printed word.

On tyranny twenty lessons from the twentieth century