Chapter 4

Words, gestures, and symbols matter, so the individual must think critically before using populist expressions. When a symbol or term is intended to discriminate or spread misinformation, people must resist it actively. Snyder’s fourth lesson details how the use of symbols and expressions created a distorted reality in twentieth-century Nazi and Soviet regimes. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, prosperous farmers were often depicted as pigs on propaganda posters, a strategy which helped the government turn peasants against landholding farmers and ultimately seize all land from all farmers, leaving them to starve. Marking shops as “Jewish” and “Aryan” in Nazi Germany led to the alienation and subsequent dehumanization of Jews. According to the political scientist Havel, using loaded symbols sets up a system of rules in place, as if in a game. When the rules are adopted, “appearances become reality.” However, if people refuse to play the game in the first place, its corresponding reality may never materialize.

Chapter 5

Snyder examines the role of maintaining ethical professional conduct in resisting tyranny. He states that when authoritarians demand an obedience that overrides professional ethics, professionals must defend their values. When professionals abandon these values, the march of tyranny accelerates. For instance, Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer, went on to become the governor general of occupied Poland in 1939 and oversaw millions of untried executions, which are against the principles of jurisprudence.

If lawyers like Frank had followed the doctrine of “no execution without trail,” if doctors in Hitler’s Germany had insisted on the rule of “no surgery without consent” instead of agreeing to experiment on minorities, and if businessman had refused to exploit concentration camp labor, the Nazi regime would have found it much more difficult to commit its atrocities. It is especially during the times when authoritarians pressure professionals to abandon their values for an abstract larger good that professionals must staunchly defend their ethics. By losing their objectivity, getting swept up in the dominant emotion of the moment, and “just following orders,” professionals become an instrument of tyranny.

Chapter 6

“Be wary of paramilitaries,” cautions Snyder, referring to armed anti-establishment groups. According to Snyder, in a functioning society, it is only governments who can be legitimized to use force, because they are limited by specific circumstances of use and the checks and balances of law. However, when paramilitary groups become allied with governments and power, they do not submit to any of these checks and balances. In fact, when armed extra-governmental groups gain proximity to power, they act as the violent arm of political outfits, enabling a tyrannical government to establish its dominion. Snyder uses the example of the Nazi SS to illustrate his point. The SS began as a paramilitary group aligned with the Nazi party, and they created a “climate of fear” that helped the Nazis win the elections of 1932 and 1933. Once the Nazis were in power, the SS were responsible for running the concentration camps. As Snyder traces their progression,

The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.

According to Snyder, in 2016, this threat is not a distant lesson from history but already a potential reality in the United States. The American federal government uses mercenaries in war efforts and pays corporations to run prisons. Under Donald Trump, this privatization of arms has worsened. In 2016, Trump used his private security team to clear his rallies of opponents and riled up his supporters to exhibit violence against dissenters. According to Snyder, such violent, exclusionary...