Marcia Chambers Photo
Historian Timothy Snyder
It is a Friday night in the upscale seaside town of Guilford; it is a warm evening, the kind of evening when the audience gathered to hear the speaker might be on their boats or going out to dinner or fixing a barbeque at the start of the weekend.
Instead some 150 people are at the Guilford Community Center where they await a talk by Timothy Snyder, the author of “On Tyranny,” a book he wrote after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Snyder teaches history at Yale University.
The house is packed.
Snyder’s talk was sponsored by Connecticut Shoreline Indivisible, the First Congregational Church, and Breakwater Book Store in Guilford. Shoreline Indivisible is a grassroots network that, since the 2016 presidential election, has become deeply engaged in local, state, and federal politics and policies. Their purpose is to resist President Trump’s agenda.
Snyder, the author of “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” and “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin,” said “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” tells readers how fascism could come to America and how to fight back against what may be an emerging authoritarian regime.
Marcia Chambers Photo
Snyder told the audience he decided to write “On Tyranny” after “Russia intervened in our election. I began to follow it in April 2016. It was clear the Russian media was lining up for Mr. Trump…. And in the United States? Nobody cared. We have to react faster than we did it. I constantly go to Ohio. And there nobody cared. Nobody cared. It was resonating in Moscow and in New Haven. But there was no resonance in Ohio, which struck me.”
Over the course of his recent 90-minute talk, Snyder described how not to obey in advance, how to protest, how to march, and how to change how you think in a world you have never experienced.
He discussed the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
“When you are firing the person who is investigating you, you are confessing. Next day you say the FBI director is a nut job and then you meet with the Russian ambassador. From his perspective, Trump sees “the rule of law as essentially crazy.”
It Can Happen Here
He asked the audience to question their assumptions.
“You say things like this can’t happen here. I have been traveling to Europe for a long time. No one in the world now looks at us as an exemplar of democracy. If you are thinking it can’t happen, here that is a reflex action. If you are saying it can’t happen here, you are making it happen.”
He told the audience that the Founders were deeply aware of tyranny. “The Founders talked about tyranny all the time. They wanted to set up institutions that were less likely to fail.
“Be skeptical about what you are told. The advantage we have over the framers is a couple of hundred more years of history to think through. History can be helpful because it broadens the imagination.
“History helps us to recognize patterns as in the Trump firing of Comey. What we learned is that loyalty is a rival to the law.”
Looking for Answers
The audience was looking for answers. They asked questions about what they could do and how they could act. They sought answers to what history teaches about the rise of fascism and why democracies collapse. They wanted concrete advice.
Snyder gave them a “small talk” lesson.
“Make small talk,” he said. “Make eye contact. Keep everyone in view. If you make eye contact and small talk, it means that you are helping people to see you as a human. I knock on a lot of doors. I canvass in a neighborhood where I grew up. If you keep talking, it plants seeds. Showing up matters.”
At the same time Snyder said action was necessary now.
From his study of totalitarian governments and how they come into being he said it won’t take long before democracy dies.
Maybe one year, the Yale historian said.
The audience seemed stunned.
How to React in Everyday Life
The book tells readers how best to react in everyday life. It provides 20 lessons from Twentieth Century history. Its first lesson is “Do Not Obey in Advance” and its last lesson is “Be as Courageous as You Can.”
No. 10 is truth. Believe in Truth, he said. “I believe there is truth. I believe there are facts. I believe it is not all grey.”
Before he ended his talk, Snyder read No. 19, which tells the reader to be a patriot.
Without using Rex Tillerson’s name, Snyder writes that it is not patriotic “to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests, who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the Order of Friendship from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country.”
Snyder told the audience to support institutions, constitutional institutions. He urged people to run for office, to get involved in elections. Freedom means freedom by association. “If you are alone it is very hard to be free.”
In its book review, the Washington Post wrote, “Historian Timothy Snyder does not offer a corrective to the pessimism of this genre — he is a scholar of the Holocaust, after all — but begins to illuminate a path forward from it. “On Tyranny” is a slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital. Steeped in the history of interwar Germany and the horrors that followed, Snyder still writes with bracing immediacy, providing 20 plain and mostly actionable lessons on preventing, or at least forestalling, the repression of lives and minds.”
“On Tyranny” is now a #1 best seller on Amazon and on the N.Y.Times Book Review lists. After his talk, folks lined up to buy the book. Some said they were buying more than one in order to have an extra copy for a friend.
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"Snyder told the audience he decided to write "On Tyranny" after "Russia intervened in our election"
Almost a year long investigation and not ONE shred of evidence has appeared. And, if they did, what about 1,200+ democrats that lost their state & federal seats in the last election? Let me guess...Russia?