“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.And the time to do just that is now.”

Authoritarianism promote nationalistic politics across the western world and threaten to tear down the stabile institutions we’ve had in place since WWII. Timothy Snyder, Author and professor of history at Yale University, is an expert in the two world wars and especially the Holocaust and the eastern part of Europe. He shows in this book how easy it is to destroy seemingly solid democracies. 

Based on his knowledge of former democratic countries falling victims to tyranny, Snyder has destilled twenty lessons we should all pay attention to. On tyranny is basically a handbook, or even a manifesto, on how to protect our fragile democracies and even offer resistance to the powers that threaten them. 

This book is a quick and quite frankly a scary read. I think I read it in less than two hours. The book offer good sound advice on what the normal person can do in the big scheme of things. And it turns out we can do quite a lot. 

Snyder uses examples from the Russian revolution, Hungary, Poland, Nazi Germany and Putins way to power in modern Russia. 
Sometimes I got the feeling that Snyder was exaggerating. But at the same time he uses plenty of examples from the Russian revolution, the growth of fascism in Italy and nazism in Germany. And likewise he clearly puts President Trump in the same category of leadership. Not the same as necessarily wanting to go through with genocides and full on war. But a leader that uses the same tactics to scare and control the population. 

 And it turns out that we can do quite alot. 
Each chapter centers starts with one clear advice, and the author then follows with an explanation of why the advice is important illustrated by a historic example.

In the chapter titled “think up your own way of speaking” Snyder discusses the work of the jewish philologist Victor Klemperer. Klemperer notices how Hitler and the Nazi propaganda made use of language to undermine all opposition. “The people’ always meant some people and not others’ encounters were always “struggles” and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was “defamation” of the leader.”

 

“Believe in truth” is chapter 10, and Snyder claims that you submit to tyranny when you no longer wish to distinguish between what you want to believe and what is actually true. Klemperer and others have shown that totalitarian regimes tend to kill the truth in four ways. Firstly they are openly hostile to verifyable truth. (“largest inaugeration crowd ever!”) Secondly they use shamanic incantations, meaning endless repetition to make the lie permanent. The third way is magical thinking or completely contradictory statements, such as promising huge tax cuts while increasing spending on the military
The fourth and last way to kill the truth is raising oneself to a godlike figure, claiming that there is only one man that can fix the problem. 
All these chilling ways of making truth less relevant is something Trump has done and continues to do. 

I love chapter 11 “investigate” because it encourages critical thinking. We should spend more time reading books, paying for investigative journalism, not to mention fact-checking as much as possibly before sharing something online. Every one of us can and will be fooled from time to time. Some more than others. We therefore have to be sceptical of all claims. Again Snyder connects a dictator from the past to President Trump. This time he shows how Trump reacts just like Hitler did when confronted with critisism he doesn’t like. He calls it fake news, and even portrays the media as an enemy of the people. 

Throughout the book I got the feeling that Snyder paints President Trump as much more of a dictatorial candidate than I think he really is. So far the American institutions are holding up pretty good. Not that Trump doesn’t try to tear them down. I hope that Snyder is exaggerating Trumps behavior. But then again.. Millions of people had that thought in the 1930s… Can I get everybody to shout “Peace in our time”. 

Another interesting topic was how very few people realize the moment that they voted for the last time. Several of the oppressive regimes of the 20th century came to power by ordinary elections. The Nazi Party in Germany, communist Hungary after WWII, Iran in 1979, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, Putin in Russia in  2000 etc. Many people had real frustrations and real problems, and they had lost faith in the existing powers. And for many of them with good reason to. Then they fall for the sweet talking of some opposition party who come with some outrageous statements. But hey.. The promise to fix the problems. How bad can they really be? 
And boom… Suddenly the opposition is silenced, media suppressed or under control, and the former stable institutions cease to exist. 

I recommend this book to everyone!
It is simply a must-read. 

477 books left!

P.S. The Swedish general election 2018 in will take place on september 9th. I am truly afraid that the increasing gang violence in swedish suburbs, not to mention the arson of more than 100 cars will turn out to be the Swedish version of the 1933 Reichstag Fire. The Sweden Democrats has roots in swedish fascist and white supremacy neo-nazi movement. It has tried to rid itself of the old reputation. It seems like a hard thing to do, especially when they insist on having former nazis run for office. 

#TimothySnyder #bookreview #OnTyranny #Tyranny #protectingdemocracy #SwedishGeneralElection #Neonazi #SwedenDemocrats 

 

What we think about when we try not to think about Global Warming
By Per Espen Stoknes
322 pages

“The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island is isolated in the Pacific Ocean. Once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won’t be able to get help.” Jared Diamond

We’ve known about the way the climate goes for many decades now. The first time anyone proposed that our dependence on fossil fuels would increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was more than 100 years ago. Charles David Keeling made the first measurements that confirmed this idea in the 1950s. And since the 80s, 90s, and 2000s the data kept coming in. There is now no doubt that the climate on planet Earth is heating up due to increased levels of CO2. There is also no doubt that we are responsible for this. But here comes the conundrum. Why is it so hard for us to accept this, and change our behavior on a personal, local and global level? This exact question is the main focus of this book. It is not so much about the climate science itself, but how to communicate the science in the most effective way.

How does our psychology react when faced with uncomfortable facts? How can we use what we know about about the human nature to overcome the mental barriers that stop us from fully commit us to the big change we have to go through.

Per Espen Stoknes, is a psychologist and economist, and he has done research on environmental strategies and future scenarios. 

In this book he identifies five obstacles in our minds that gets in the way of accepting the conclusions of todays climate science.  Stoknes follows with suggested solutions to the same obstacles. 
A lot of communication about the predicament of climate change focuses on melting polar caps and pictures of polar bears on smaller and smaller pieces of ice. This creates distance to the whole idea and doesn’t really convey why this is important. Why should we care about something happening far far away? focusing on ppm CO2 in the atmosphere it doesn’t really help people understand what the problem is. We don’t have an intuitive understanding of something like that. The problems needs to be identified as local and described in a way that is relevant to people. And the obstacles needs to be framed just like that. Like obstacles that are solvable. Stoknes also mentions that because our minds are more geared towards avoiding bad outcomes than seeking out positive one,  we should always present three positive opportunities for each threat we mention. 
Such as in the way Arnold Schwarzeneggger does here. 

If climate change is framed as the end of the world it will only create apathy and that will prevent proper action. And the longer we wait the more likely a catastrophic scenario is. The solutions needs to be social meaning we need to nudge people in to making better decisions. One suggestion I found really good was to exploit our social need to compete with each other. Why not show the average energy consumption in a given area on the electricity bill? That would create an incentive to save more energy.

Stoknes does have a very valid point that when it comes down to choosing between scientific truth and our tribal identity the science looses every time. You see it in the denial of evolution in religious groups and you can definitely see it on the right-left axis when it comes to climate change. The author has a couple of good suggestions on how to solve this. Convince someone in the “denial tribe” to accept the evidence and to be a role model for the rest. Because internal adjustment is always easier than accepting something an outsider tells you. This is good sound advice. He also has a somewhat interesting suggestion. By “depoliticising” topics we are also less likely to fall into the tribal trap in the first place. This sounds all good, but how the heck do you actually do it in practice?

There are three parts to the book. Thinking, Doing and Being. I found the first two the most interesting and relevant. The last one was a bit too hippie for me. But then again maybe it brushed up against one of my own mental barriers? Who knows.. 

Communicating the science

How we communicate science is extremely important. Especially in an age where people still choose “alternative medicine” and to listen to deranged actors talk about vaccines instead of listening to proper medical advice. The tools in this book should be more utilized when it comes to all kinds of science. People are people and it is too easy to call someone stupid for not making what is considered the right choice. Our evolved minds are less than fully rational and we are limited in all kinds of ways. We are prone to magical thinking, easily scared and we are more concerned with social retributions from “our tribe” than what might be right. But in the long run we can still move society towards a better future. So long as we make sure that we have the proper institutions and networks in place. The scientific method is one of those and the best method we have that can produce relatively reliable information. When reading this book and the psychological barriers in our minds it reminded me of smokers or people that are overweight and how they always seem to be able to defend their situation. 
I think it is important to remember that it is not obvious when we ourselves are stuck in a barrier somewhere. We should therefore be sympathetic to those who are. For my own sake I’ve drastically cut down on meat consumption, I take the train instead of flying when I can,  and I am also about to get rid of the fossil driven car. Might get an electric car in the long run. We’ll see. I’ve also decided to vote in Sweden as a swedish citizen for the last time. Will apply for norwegian citizenship after the swedish election. Because I am tired of not being able to let my vote nudge our society towards a more ecofriendly future.

Conclusion

This is an important book that everyone should read. It is fairly short and it is an easy read. I think I read it in about a week. Even though I (think I)  already know  a lot about the topic I learned alot. It made me even more acutely aware of the predicament we are in. But at the same time humanity has faced huge problems and solved them before. famines, diseases, hole in the ozone layer, acidic rain, etc. I think we will be able to pull our collective heads out of our own asses and deal with this problem too. Lets face it. We have to! I might be clinging to a thin straw here, but I prefer to stay positive. 

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” Carl Sagan

Rating 6/6
478 books left!

If you want a 15 min summary of the book by the author himself you can watch his TED Talk here

#climatechange #perespenstoknes #psychology #cognitivedissonance