ON TYRANNY, the perfect inexpensive gift for your favorite high-school grad or college student

ON TYRANNY: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
TIMOTHY SNYDER
Tim Duggan Books
$9.99 trade paper or ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism.

On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.

Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

My Review: Not for its perfection of style but for its perfection of wisdom and its amazing timeliness. As I write this today, 24 March 2018, I saw the face of our future president in Emma Gonzalez as she stood silent, focused, determined, at a march made by young people to demand their lives be protected from ammosexual assholes. She spoke for six minutes and twenty seconds in total, the same amount of time that it took one piece of shit human being to slaughter seventeen of her classmates.

I believe that her speech...the few words, the long silence...will be the spark of the youth revolution our country so very badly needs. I am hopeful that Emma Gonzalez will be, by her very adamantine sense of self and her charismatic gravitas, the voice that alerts her compatriots to Author Snyder's clarion call to clarity:

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.

The most unbelievably high stakes are at risk in the November 2018 elections. Buy this book not for yourself but for your hopes of a reasonably happy future for the United States of America, buy it in quantity and give it to everyone you know and/or can find who is under 25, and talk to them about why you're giving them this short, clear, concise, and urgently necessary book.

Your life, my life, the life of a truly great nation, depends on them showing up at the ballot box on 6 November 2018. This is neither hyperbole nor alarmism. It is simply the truth. Looking away from the horrors of the current kakistocracy's rise to any position of power higher than hall monitor at the local middle school will only ensure the brutal and vicious agenda of these lowlife scumbags and their horrifying cadres of disgustingly venal and/or stupid supporters will succeed.