On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Timothy Snyder — Yale historian and one of the foremost scholars of twentieth-century European totalitarianism — distilled a lifetime of research into twenty short lessons, each drawn from the history of fascism and Soviet communism, each directly applicable to the present. The book was written in the weeks following the 2016 US election and published in early 2017; it became an immediate international bestseller, translated into dozens of languages, and has since become one of the most widely read guides to democratic resilience available.

The twenty lessons are deceptively simple: do not obey in advance; defend institutions; beware the one-party state; be wary of paramilitaries; be reflective if you must be armed; stand out; be kind to our language; believe in truth. Each is illustrated with historical examples drawn from the collapse of Weimar Germany, the Soviet terror, and the totalitarian movements of interwar Europe. For practitioners in the information environment, the lesson on language is particularly relevant: Snyder argues that the first casualty of authoritarianism is not freedom but meaning — the corruption of language to make truth indistinguishable from falsehood. Short enough to read in an afternoon; important enough to return to repeatedly.