On Tyranny
This book is a required reading for what’s coming.
The book restricts itself to Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which is even better. For power hungry dictators have been there throughout human history, and the book may well turn out to be a treatise of its own, if not time-capped. Recent events are usefully analyzed from a technological and sociological view. After all, many of the fascists of the past century found themselves propped up through a democratic process, even if they refused to give up power democratically later on.
One of the first topics in the book, On Tyranny – By Timothy Snyder Illustrated by Nora Krug caught my attention.
It talks about compliance without being asked to.
“Do not obey in advance”
“A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
- On Tyranny – By Timothy Snyder
I found myself nodding along several times during the examples given from the Hitler regime, or sociological experiments conducted since, and was quite shocked to see it all play out again in recent times.
For instance, the past week itself gave us examples of ‘Do not obey in advance’. It was in the flurry of news items about Meta – the mega social network bending over and showing what it is capable of doing for Donald Trump’s regime. The company removed the fact checking team, and essentially stopped DEI efforts.
Quote from article on removing the fact-checking intiative:
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan memorably wrote four decades ago.
As far as DEI efforts go, to get to a point where a DEI team was necessary took many decades of work, mindset changes and progressive ideas. To remove it all in one stroke sets us back by at least two decades, does it not?
Now slowly think of all the programs and places in which progress has been painstakingly achieved through education, forward thinking initiatives etc, and the mind boggles on what lies ahead of us.
In the past few weeks, there were several discussions in which we wondered:
- How do we know when a leader is likely to become a fascist ruler?
- How do we know whether our systems designed to survive democracy will do so?
- Which of the very institutions that help towards justice will be disbanded or at least thwarted in their efforts to do so?
- And many more.
The questions will answer themselves soon, shall they not?
Nourish-n-Cherish 