Book review: "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Timothy Snyder

 This book is noteworthy for many reasons but on a personal level it's because this is my first 5 star read of 2020! People use different scales for rating books, but for me, a 5 is pretttty rare. That means I'm very excited to share this book with you!

If the name Timothy Snyder sounds familiar maybe it's because you have seen him on the blog before. Bloodlands (review here) is about the countries that are located between Russia and Germany and how, almost without fail, that's a sucky place to be. Black Earth (review here) is one of the most elegantly written and well researched books about the Holocaust I have ever read. It seems like Tim has taken all of the knowledge gleaned from these two books, and other books that he has written (so many on my TBR) and put them into this slim, pocket sized book.

The book has, as you may have guessed from the title - 20 lessons from the 20th century. Each very short chapter has a short introduction paragraph and then the chapter.  Some chapters include "Be Wary of Paramilitaries" - "When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and carrying torches...the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come". "Believe in Truth" -"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom...If nothing is true than all is spectacle". 

There's also a chapter entitled "Remember professional ethics" which I'm like I don't really know what that means. Turns out, what it means is that no tyrannical regime operates on their own, they need obedient civil servants. Take for example - trains were essential to the Nazi regime to move their people AND victims of their terrible practices throughout their occupied territories. Did you know that no train company was ever persecuted for their collaboration? If a couple of train companies said "absolutely not, you are not using our train tracks or train cars to take these people to these camps throughout Europe" things could have looked VERY DIFFERENT. There's a reason that so many resistance groups blew up train tracks.

This book provoked a really emotional response in me, that was a little surprising to me. When you get familiar with a few different low points in history it's easy to look at the people who were terribly effected by those incidents and go "why didn't they get out while they could? How could they not see how bad it would get?" . This book is kind of a roadmap of things to look for before things get bad, and, instructions on how to prevent it from getting there in the first place. It's also very easy to put a lot of trust in our long standing institutions that "that can't happen here, we have all of these things in place" or "this can't happen, someone will stop it". That person and that institution needs to be you if the time calls for it. "Be as courageous as you can" the last lesson tells us.