Chapter 10

Snyder observes that according to the German Romance language scholar Victor Klemperer, the value of truth in a society is denigrated or killed by four ways or “modes.” The first is “open hostility to verifiable reality,” which is often achieved by presenting “inventions and lies as if they were facts.” According to Snyder, President Trump employs this strategy; indeed, one attempt to track his statements during the 2016 campaign speculated that seventy-eight percent of his claims may be false. 

The second mode is what Snyder terms “shamanistic incantation” and what Klemperer terms “endless repetition.” The idea is that if a lie is repeated often enough, it starts gaining the aura of a truth. For instance, Trump’s repeated assertion of “build that wall” did not describe any specific plan, yet it aggrandized an image of the president for his supporters as a dynamic defender of America. 

Magical thinking, or “the open embrace of contradiction,” is the third mode by which truth is devalued. In this mode, reason is abandoned and people start believing mutually contradicting statements, such as the president’s simultaneous promises of cutting taxes for everyone and increasing spending in various sectors. 

Closely linked with this jettisoning of reason is Klemperer’s final mode of denying truth: misplaced faith. Authoritarian regimes gain legitimacy because people start putting uncritical faith in tyrants, believing their promises of being the only one who can solve a problem. Some Germans held onto this faith even after the end of the Second World War, with one soldier Klemperer met stating that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.” In Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco’s famous absurdist play Rhinoceros, those who start believing in propaganda are transformed into giant, horned creatures. Through the play, Ionesco wanted to show how bizarre propaganda is from an objective standpoint but how normal it seems to its believers. What seems grotesque in retrospective seemed natural to its adherents in the moment. Stating that “post-truth is pre-fascism,” Snyder emphasizes that an insistence on truth is critical to saving modern democracies in the age of social media.

Chapter 11

Investigation is the antidote to the denigration of truth, observes Snyder in his eleventh lesson. To resist the propaganda of tyrants, citizens should ask questions and promote long-form investigative print journalism. Tyrants like Trump dislike intelligent journalism and attempt to silence it by spreading the idea that critical media is “unbelievably dishonest” and eliciting a public hatred for honest journalists. According to Snyder, Nazis’ tendency to call critical coverage lugenpresse, or lying press, is akin to Trump’s tendency to call such coverage “fake news.” The conscious citizen should therefore recognize and defend critical voices. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s argument that the truth will always prevail may have been true in 1971 when it was written, the same is not true in contemporary post-truth times, when the Internet can be used to pass off misinformation as truth. In contemporary times, longform journalism, instead of news bytes on screens, is what can help people separate truth from rumors and misinformation.

Print journalism is different from television because it involves legwork. It demands that reporters go out into the field, meet subjects, and gather and verify facts before presenting them to the public. Unlike the “two-dimensional” world of television reports and digital news, the world of print journalism deals with “three-dimensional” human contact and assembles reflective narratives that put political realities into perspective. On the other hand, the very nature of screens draws politics into the “logic of spectacles,” encouraging viewers to fixate on scandals and explosive headlines...