He clearly is impulsive, ignorant about foreign policy and inconsistent in many of his statements – unlike Hitler, who arrived with clear purposes at home and abroad, and prepared everything he said carefully beforehand. It is not at all clear, though, that people actually have underestimated Trump. We do not need the example of Nazi Germany to demonstrate the fallacy of these beliefs: Trump has already shown how mistaken they are in the first few weeks of his presidency. The example he gives, however, illustrates a different point: he shows German Jews underestimating the Nazis and assuming Hitler would be controlled by his conservative coalition partners, calm down and become more moderate once he got into power. Snyder’s second lesson is to “defend institutions”, by which he means the courts, the constitution, the press, the trade unions, the parliament and so on. It’s not always easy to refuse to obey in such circumstances, and what we really need is to work out how to resist the imposition of a dictatorship when it’s not backed by massive violence against its opponents but claims to be establishing itself with popular consent and the validation of the law. Here too, however, the driving force was the occupying Red Army, and even in other east-central European states such as Romania, Poland or East Germany, where support for communism was far weaker, the same thing happened: Stalinism came to power at the end of a Red Army bayonet. In Czechoslovakia in 1946, to take another example offered by Snyder, free elections resulted in 38% of the vote going to the Communists (by an interesting coincidence, roughly the same as the popular vote for the Nazis in 1932) within the next three years, democratic institutions were annihilated as people followed their drive to monopolise power. ![]() In Germany in 1933, most oppositional parties were suppressed by force or the threat of force The great mass of Germans did not obey in advance: they obeyed when tyranny had already set up its tent. Up to 200,000 people, overwhelmingly those on the political left, were thrown into concentration camps and brutally mistreated. Hundreds of thousands of Nazi stormtroopers were roaming the streets beating up and killing the Social Democrats and Communists who were the regime’s main opponents. It was no easy thing to risk your job when over a third of the workforce was unemployed, as it was in 1933. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome. And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. On Tyranny is less an anatomy of tyranny itself than an essay about how we might stop it from happening. Photograph: EPA/Alexey Druzhinin/Ria Novosti/Kremlin Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, lays flowers to commemorate the 73th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. A similar process may well be under way with the advent of the Trump regime in the United States. What makes it worse is that such would-be dictators enjoy popular support for what they are doing. Democracies are now being destroyed in Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Poland, as strongmen such as Putin, Orban, Erdoğan and Kaczyński dismantle civil liberties, silence critical voices and suppress independent institutions. After a period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when constitutional democracy spread to many countries not just in Europe but across the globe, and Francis Fukuyama declared that history had come to an end, the tide seems to have turned. W inston Churchill once famously declared: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Underpinned by the rule of law and the popular will, democracy is the only way we can prevent the arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power: suppression of free speech curtailment or abolition of civil liberties laws passed by decree without public debate or popular approval arrest and imprisonment without trial torture and murder by unchecked agencies of the government and theft, extortion and embezzlement by politicians in power, who inevitably turn into kleptocrats when democracy is destroyed.
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