On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

I'm late to this book - it's been a part of the discourse for a decade or so now. It's strong, punchy, and pithy: a quick guide to the mindsets we need in order to prevent totalitarianism. But its sections on media and the internet feel particularly weak - a call to support print newspapers doesn't feel like the right thing - and I think its claims about communism are not particularly nuanced. Still, we need calls to action, and this is a good one.

Does not properly distinguish power from authority, i.e. "A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy."

Historical details were glossed over in the prologue which might misinform some readers.

The Yale experiment on fascism is presented to imply that by human nature we are naturally quick to harm one another, in some twister Hobbesian assumption - rather than a product of the limited sample size in a small study under specific economic, political, and societal conditions of the USA.

Otherwise, there are many great ways to defend against and confront Tyranny that are applicable primary to the USA, and secondarily to other western democracies.

I was in the middle of reading The Armageddon Protocol, the latest science fiction thriller from Dan Moren. He’s my favorite newish author, with six novels out now, each better than the last (and the first one was excellent). More people should know about his books.

Anyway, I set that aside to begin reading a 2017 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It offers ““twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today” and is the source of many quotes and memes going around the last few days. It’s a quick easy read. If you voted for the guy and think the current panic is hyperbole, I recommend reading this book if only to reassure yourself that it is hyperbole and to see what to watch for to ensure you’re on the right side of history if the bottom ever were to fall out. And for the rest of us, this book offers practical lessons and advice drawn directly from times and places much like ours you can use to defend what you hold dear.

Unfortunately it's also very important with the current political climate.

We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance - and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders.

On Tyranny is a rant, but a well-read one delivered in cold fury upon the rise of populist, anti-democratic demagogues in general and Trump in particular. With a starting point in the various ways that seemingly secure democracies have failed and descended into mob rule, dictatorship, and mass murder throughout the 20th century, Snyder delivers 20 points on how to defend democracy in troubled times. Essentially, condensing Arendt, von Klemperer, Havel and that lot down into a one-hour read.

The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.
But there are no adults. We own this mess.

it's a chilling, useful little guide, and if it's overly focused on Trump's person and tactics that's hardly surprising - Snyder is American, after all. The one thing it truly lacks is sources. If you believe that a "post-fact" society needs more facts, then having actual sources for many of his statements wouldn't have hurt. When politicians like Trump turn their speeches into one long Gish gallop that would tend to turn the entire text into one long row of footnotes, true, but also even harder to dismiss as just another batch of fake news by those who benefit from that.