Table of Contents
Timothy Snyder, "Tyranny: 20 Lessons from 20th Century History" Summary and Comments - Reading Recommendations from a World-Renowned Historian
We are pleased to introduce "Tyranny: 20 Lessons from 20th Century History," written by Timothy Snyder and translated by Toshiho Ikeda, published in 2017 by Keio University Press.
Let's take a quick look at the book.
Fascists despise the small "truths" of daily life,
Love the "slogan" that echoes like a new religion,
He preferred created "myths" to history and journalism.
Abandoning facts is the same as abandoning freedom.
On the eve of fascism -,
Now is the time to pile up the books. Let's believe that there is "truth.
Let us learn from the lessons of history.Up-and-coming historian Timothy Snyder has written a book on the current rise of the world's
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A guide to the ni0 ways to properly resist oppressive leaders.
The author, Timothy Snyder, has been featured on this blog before.
Timothy Snyder is an award-winning historian best known for his books on the Nazi Holocaust and Stalin's purges, including the Hannah Arendt Prize.
Timothy Snyder is a scholar who has studied and written about the very mechanisms of tyranny. In this book, he explains why totalitarianism is rising, why people cannot resist it, and what each of us can do to prevent it from happening.
It is a compact book, about 140 pages in new book size, but its contents are extremely dense.
As you can see from the table of contents, Timothy Snyder's recommendations are quite specific. And the sense of crisis is quite palpable. In fact, he warns that the world is in great danger and that totalitarianism is just around the corner. The fact that this is coming from a scholar of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism makes it all the more weighty.
In this book, his recommendations are made across 20 sections.
In this issue, I would like to introduce one of the chapters that caught my attention: "Cherish Your Own Words". It talks about the significance of reading, and it was the part that left the biggest impression on me. So let's begin.
Let's take care of our own words.
9. keep your word!
Don't try to use the same phrases as everyone else. Come up with your own narrative, even if it is only to convey what you think everyone else is saying. Stay off the Internet as much as you can. Read.
Keio University Press, Timothy Snyder, translated by Toshiho Ikeda, Tyranny: 20 Lessons from 20th Century History, p. 54
This chapter begins with the title and text above.
It is still difficult to understand what he is talking about at this point, but the true meaning of these words will be revealed later.
The Dangers of TV News
Politicians of our time areclicheto TV more and more, but on TV,Even those who don't want to agree repeat that cliché.This is the reason why the TV is called to challenge the political language by conveying images. Television purports to challenge the political language by conveying images, but the images are sent one after the other, killing even the "sense of resolution" and making it difficult to digest the meaning. Everything happens so fast that nothing seems real. The TV news is all "breaking news," but that is only until the next news bulletin takes its place. In other words, we are swept along by wave after wave, but we do not have the ocean in our sights.
Words and concepts are necessary to define the state and meaning of events, but they slip past us when we are in a trance of visual stimulation. Sometimes watching a TV news program becomes nothing more than watching the newscasters and other people on the screen watching the images they are presenting. We take this collective trance for granted. We are slowly falling into this collective trance.
Keio University Press, Timothy Snyder, translated by Toshiho Ikeda, "Tyranny: 20 Lessons from 20th Century History," p. 55-56.
We often think that we get our information by watching TV news, and that we think and live our lives from that information. In reality, however, we are simply fed information that is repeated on TV, and we are no longer able to see the world from a larger perspective. Snyder even describes the state of watching the news as "collective ecstasy. We are unwittingly conditioned not to think.
This is true not only for TV news, but also for YouTube and Twitter; social networking sites have become a major influence these days, but throughout the book he states that the dangers are there, just as they are on TV.
Of course, not all TV news is false. I am not saying that it is extreme, but rather that it is dangerous to believe everything you read. If TV news is not good enough, social networking sites are also dangerous if you are mistaken about whether they are true. There is also a large amount of fake information mixed in. Some of them are intentionally created to confuse society, and it is extremely difficult for us to distinguish between them. We live in a world where we really do not know what is true or false. We need to suspend judgment on the information we receive as if it were untrue. If we let our emotions get the better of us, we will end up doing what the other side wants us to do.
That's why we need to step away from that and think carefully for ourselves, Snyder said.
The world depicted in "451 Degrees Fahrenheit" and "1984" - A world where "thinking" is no longer done.
More than half a century ago, a classic novel about totalitarianism warned about the dominance of movies and television, the banning of books, the narrowing of vocabulary, and the difficulty of "thinking" in connection with such things. In Ray Bradbury's "451 Degrees Fahrenheit," published in 1953, fire earthmen found and burned books while most citizens watched interactive television. In George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949), books were banned and television was interactive so that the government could constantly monitor its citizens. In 1984, the language used in the visual media was extremely restrained in order to deprive the public of the concepts necessary to think about the present, remember the past, and contemplate the future. Part of the regime's plan was to further restrict the use of phrases by reducing the number of "oldspeak" words (i.e., words derived from the English language) with each revision of the "Newspeak" dictionary.
The habit of staring at the screen may be hard to break, but the two-dimensional world holds little significance unless we are applying the intelligence we have developed elsewhere. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the media every day, we also accept that we cannot have a larger conceptual framework. To have such a conceptual framework, we need to increase the number of concepts, and to increase the number of concepts, we need to read. So clear the room of screens, whether TV or computer, and pile books around you. The characters in Orwell's and Bradbury's novels could not stack books around them, but we still can.
Keio University Press, Timothy Snyder, translated by Toshiho Ikeda, "Tyranny: 20 Lessons from 20th Century History," p. 56-57
451 degrees Fahrenheit.and1984."is something I plan to cover in this blog at some point. What is covered there is not something that can be dismissed as mere fiction, but is, as Snyder says, what actually takes place in the process of moving toward totalitarianism.
And the last sentence in the quote above, "The characters in Orwell's and Bradbury's novels couldn't stack books around them, but we still can." That's a very impressive quote, isn't it? We can still read books at will. But we don't know when that will be lost. In some countries, technology has already advanced to the point of surveillance and censorship. This is not a stranger to us.
Snyder recommends the book
So what should we read? A good novel will activate our ability to think about ambiguous situations and infer the intentions of others. Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (180) or Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) may be appropriate for our time. Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here" (1935) is probably not as good a work of art. By comparison, Philip Roth's "Plot Against America" (2004) is a better work. One novel that a vast number of American youth know is actually an account of tyranny and resistance, J. K. Rowling's one "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (2007), and if you or your friends or children did not read it that way the first time, then read it again! It is worth it.
The following political and historical literature brings to life what is discussed in these nine items. George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946); Viktor Klemperer's "The Language of the Third Reich" (1947); Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951); Albert Camus' "The Rebellious Man" (1951); Czeslaw Miłosz's "Souls in Prison (1953), Václav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), Leszek Kowakowski's "How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist" (1978), Timothy Garton Ash's "Reversing the Odds" (1989), Christopher Browning's Ordinary People - The 101st Police Reserve Battalion and the Final Solution in Poland" (1992), Tony Judt's "Intellectual Responsibility: Arum, Camus, Aron and the French 20th Century" (1998), and Peter Pomerantsev's "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible" (1994).
Christians will always return to the Bible, which is an extremely timely book regardless of the time of year. Jesus taught, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. We must be humble, for "whoever exalts himself will be brought low, and whoever brings himself low will be brought high. And of course we must be careful what is true and what is false. And of course we must be careful what is true and what is false, for "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Keio University Press, Timothy Snyder, translated by Toshiho Ikeda, "Tyranny: 20 Lessons from 20th Century History," p. 57-59.
Snyder's recommended novels include.The Brothers Karamazov.As a Dostoevsky fan, I was happy to see the inclusion of the "The Monk's Tale" in the book, but I think it is true that this work is actually worth it. I was also shocked by this work and it had a great impact on my subsequent life as a monk.
Also later in this blog, Kundera'sThe unbearable lightness of being."and Václav Havel'sThe Power of the Powerless.will be introduced. We would also like to take the time to consider the "Prague Spring" in the future, which was an important phase in the Cold War world.
And it is interesting that Snyder recommends Harry Potter here. Snyder shows us that masterpieces that have touched so many people around the world also play a major role in the way we think about our world.
Also, the last point you mentioned, "The Bible," is also an important one. For Buddhists, including myself, it would be the Buddhist sutras and other books that explain the teachings of Buddhism. There are many books around us that can open our eyes. We should accumulate and read them. We should also protect ourselves by valuing our own words. This is what Snyder is trying to teach us.
Conclusion
This book is very compact, but the content is really dense.
In this corona disaster, the world is in turmoil and war could break out at any moment. In fact, there is turmoil in Afghanistan and civil wars and conflicts in various parts of the world.
It is populists, dictatorships, and totalitarianism that appear during these times of political instability and economic crisis. If we are not really careful, we may find ourselves in an untenable situation before we know it. The current state of Japan is certainly unsettling. What Snyder is saying is quite true.
We must learn from history. This book advises us on where to actually start in order to do so.
It is a highly recommended book. It is a work that allows you to experience what totalitarianism is and what history tells us. It is a work that you should definitely read.
The above is "Timothy Snyder, Tyranny: 20 Lessons from 20th Century History," a reading recommendation from a world-renowned historian.
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