Timothy Snyder

Donald Trump ex-wife Ivana Trump once said that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. He already uses the Nazi trope “fake news” — Hitler called it “the lying press” — and has created an office to track crimes committed by immigrants, like the one Hitler created to track crimes committed by Jews.

His top aide Steve Bannon is a genuine fascist who has made no secret of his admiration for Nazi ideologues. Those are just a few of the worrying signs of the slide toward authoritarianism in the US.

Timothy Snyder’s succinct and pithy book On Tyranny tells us what we must know about resisting that slide. The book is a kind of vaccine to inoculate us against acquiescing to authoritarianism and to strengthen the American political immune system to fight it.

Snyder uses his deep knowledge of European dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia to extract twenty vital lessons from history. Lessons like: Do Not Obey In Advance, Listen For Dangerous Words and Be As Courageous As You Can. Snyder says the threat posed by President Donald Trump means “we have at most a year to defend the Republic.”