Op-Ed: Words to fight the many faces of tyranny (via latimesopinion)
It was one of those uncanny nights when everything blurs and then clarifies. It was July 20, 2017, and my family had just arrived in Warsaw. A protest march was underway in defense of an independent judiciary, so we joined it.
I had a dreamy sense that the words were familiar: a protester, I realized, was reading aloud from a Polish translation of my book “On Tyranny: Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” which had been published a few months earlierIt was a long, strange journey for those words. I am a historian of Eastern Europe who has written about Nazism and Stalinism and who was educated by people who experienced and were repressed by communism.
In the late 2010s, people around the world were looking for ways to articulate threats to democracy that had no clear name and to find words that would describe their own action. In this the book played a modest part. It found its way onto posters in Brazil, into Parliament in India, into peacekeeping missions in Syria, into protests everywhere. In Hong Kong, defenders of human rights affixed stickers with the lessons around the city. On the sticker of lesson No.
All of us who believe in rule by the people can see how the attack on freedom is happening as societal and political structures weaken. In China and Russia the regimes deliberately undermine political values. Globalization is exploited by tyrants to put an enemy’s face on unpredictability. Ecological catastrophes are used by tyrants to divide societies and to blame the victims. Social media platforms are used to organize and energize the backlash to democratic movements.