12/31/19, 4:12 PM On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder review – how to defend democracy in the age of Trump | Books | The GuardianPage 1 of 4On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder review 3 how to defend democracy in the age of Trump Lessons from Nazi Germany and eastern Europe show us how democracy dies, and what we must do to Richard J Evans Wed 8 Mar 201707.30 GMT 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. Yet democracy is a fragile creation. 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. Democracies are now being destroyed in Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Poland, as strongmen such asPutin,Orban,Erdoğan andKaczyński dismantle civil liberties, silence critical voices and suppress independent institutions. What makes it worse is that such would-be dictators enjoy popular support for what they are doing. A similar processmay well be under way with the advent of the Trump regime in the United States. How we defend our most fundamental freedoms has once again become a matter of great urgency. The historian Timothy Snyder has produced this short book as one response. History, and especially the history of the 20th century, has lessons for us all, he contends. A specialist on east-central Europe, Snyder made his name with a book,Bloodlands, that argued, less than persuasively, for an equivalence of Stalin’s purges with the Nazi Holocaust. More recently, he has declared inBlack Earththat the Holocaust was not about the implementation of paranoid antisemitism but an attempt to gain control of more agricultural land as an alternative to using science to improve the natural environment. His argument did not find many supporters. What does he say in his latest tract?
