Combating illiberalism

Book review of On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century

ON TYRANNY

Twenty lessons from the twentieth century

Timothy Snyder

Tim Duggan Books

128 pages; Rs 541

In 1997, political commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote a prescient essay titled “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” in Foreign Affairs magazine. He was writing in the aftermath of the savage Balkan conflict but he pointed to the rising trend “from Peru to the Palestinian Authority, from Sierra Leone to Slovakia, from Pakistan to the Philippines.” Today, with Donald Trump in the US, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Narendra Modi in India, his prediction has come true on a much wider canvas. If Marine Le Pen ascends the Elysee Palace in June, the domino effect of hard-line, right-wing illiberal democracy in Europe is guaranteed.  

Is this descent into elected authoritarianism inevitable? Can seemingly hapless liberal establishments everywhere contest this deliberate erosion of liberal values? Can ordinary citizens do anything to force change? The push-back from American institutions — especially the judiciary and the press — in the first few weeks of the Trump presidency is encouraging. But what of countries where institutions of governance are weak and being suborned? 

With this book-length “how-to” guide, historian Timothy Snyder hopes to chivvy disheartened liberals into actively parrying alt-right xenophobia. The impulse for this book springs from his deep understanding of central and east Europe and the Holocaust — Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin was his searing 2010 study of the systematic decimation of the region under two European dictators who mobilised the resources of industrialisation to strengthen their hold on power.  

“History can familiarize and it can warn,” Professor Snyder writes in the Prologue titled “History and Tyranny”, and he goes on to draw the points of convergence between past and present, principally in the context of globalisation. “Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: the real and perceived inequalities it creates, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them,” he points out. 

This book is more a clarion call to the converted than an attempt to change minds. Although Mr Trump is not mentioned in this introduction, it is clear that Professor Snyder has the 45th president’s dystopian worldview in mind and it is principally to Americans that this didactic essay is addressed. But the message could be relevant for citizens everywhere. 

Democracy alone, Professor Snyder points out, is not an automatic guarantor of civil liberty: “We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us [against tyranny]….This is a misguided reflex…We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

On Tyranny is by no means a flawlessly argued tract, and readers may feel slightly wearied by the comparisons with Hitler and Stalin, the demons of choice in current assessments of 21st century authoritarianism — Messrs Putin, Erdogan, and Modi (who finds mention here in that context) have been relentlessly subject to these parallels. But Professor Snyder’s manifest earnest sincerity and the depths of his scholarship make this brief, if emotional, book worth a read. 

Each historical “lesson” is prefaced by an advisory. Lesson one, for instance, talks about the perils of “anticipatory obedience” — that is, demonstrating compliance to a leader’s perceived ideology that reveals, in the process, how far citizens are willing to compromise. The Austrian Nazis’ mistreatment of Jews after the Anschluss taught the German leadership what was possible. During the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the SS took this lesson above and beyond what Hitler had imagined possible. 

Using similar examples of serial subversions, Professor Snyder urges readers to defend institutions — “a court, newspapers, a law, labor union” — and to be wary of paramilitaries (men in uniforms with torches), the means why which governments “seek to monopolize violence”. He is talking about the SS, SA and Gestapo and the variations of the NKVD/KGB that served as Hitler and Stalin’s henchmen. 

We can see the parallels in India today but what of the US? Professor Snyder points to the highly privatised use of violence in USA — the widespread use of private prisons and mercenaries in warfare as a starting point. “What is new,” he writes, “is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a private security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters.” 

He also urges people to stand out, as Rosa Parks did one day in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks’ courage and the resistance of Polish workers under Solidarity against the Soviet regime are more deserving of high praise than the approbation he lavishes on Winston Churchill. Hitler’s eventual defeat and the post-war discovery of the depredations of the Holocaust may have vindicated Britain’s wartime prime minister’s implacable opposition to him. But few historians acknowledge that Churchill instinctive understanding of the nature of the Nazi leader’s threat: Essentially, one arch-imperialist recognised another on Europe’s doorstep. 

If the descent of liberalism worries you, this book offers a feel-good echo chamber — the kind that an earlier generation derived from reading Noam Chomsky. Following his advice is what corporations like to call “good hygiene” but whether it will alter the course of history is another question altogether. After all, Russia’s long tyranny from the Czars to Mr Putin shows the limits of liberal dissent.