Reflection Essay for My International Human Rights Seminar

In general, the Book On Tyranny is a collection of slogan-like and down-to-earth advice to modern liberal citizens on how to avoid tyranny, which is also subtly criticizing Trump with a metaphoric comparison of him to Fascism and Soviet-Communism. Although Fascism seems ancient to us, the way it echoes with humanity is somewhat close in time.

The book points out in the prologue the importance of reviewing history (the author himself is a historian) and the development of politics, through which we could understand the source and formation of tyranny and the responsibility of citizens.

Rule 2 is about defending institutions. People shouldn’t take it for granted that the man being voted out of an institution would be loyal to the same institution, which point he explained in a parallelism of questions about what is patriotism in Rule 19. Instead, reasonable people should stand by the institution itself, not the person coming out of it.

Rule 3 warns people to beware of the one-party state. I especially love the quote that “when you make love for the last time, you are making love for the last time.” Compared with reality now, it means vote whenever it is possible because otherwise, as when you think you get another chance, you actually don’t (just think about Nazis).

Rule 4 is about how the “world reacts to what you do” by giving the example of how the Soviet Union turned poor peasants against rich peasants and Nazis divided people into Jews and Aryan. By artificially creating classifications and adding certain features to them, the government gets to utilize the power of the rest against the group that is singled out. This reminds me of the early stage of race discrimination in America that how landowners “created” the classification of “African American” so that they can be enslaved.

Rule 10 has a strong punchline -- “post-truth is pre-fascism,” which takes up a new form in the age of new media, where everyone (not necessarily human beings) can sound convincing and make up stories. It is not ironic to find out that Timothy Snyder himself is a public intellectual and user of Twitter. According to him, we shouldn’t take things as presented or trust people for who he is. Therefore the advice left is simply “to investigate” as explained in Rule 11, but I find it impractical for people to start questioning everything they see in daily life (although in later rules, the advice’s somewhat too practical). The most you can do is to see a world on both sides, and doable advice from me is to at least follow accounts and read news from different political stands (and when it is international, read bi-lingual).

The highlight of the book lies in Rule 18, which says, “modern tyranny is terror management.” By comparing how similar the way Putin and Hitler seized almost unlimited power to the way American president talked about fighting against terrorism alongside Russia, what the author is implying is a potential era of consolidated power. Same rationale can be found in other countries, where politics is a cycle of “dynamic equilibrium” -- power gets consolidated in the face of “terror” and “incidents” and loosen up along with time and change of regime.

One thing I don’t like about this book is that he puts too much emphasis on the tyrant himself, but ignores the importance of the whole bureaucracy system, especially in a Communism society. Moreover, the book per se and the collection of twitter-like sayings can only be remedial by educating people in the face of an upcoming tyranny. The controversial part of such function is that it is more useful to people who simply wouldn’t buy this book. And even if we ignore that, the reason why we prefer a democratic system rather than elite politics is that we don’t trust people. So how can you expect future president’s power to be limited by citizens voluntarily developing their political caliber, let alone the fact that it is a much larger crowd than politicians?