AMY GOODMAN: Here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Our guest is professor Timothy Snyder.
His book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Since taking office, President Trump has continued to escalate his attack on the media, what
he calls the fake news.
On Sunday, he once again took to Twitter, after there was a few days of not tweeting,
lambasted the, quote, "fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media."
Trump tweeted, "Whenever you see the words 'sources say' in the fake news media, and
they don’t mention names ... it is very possible that those sources don’t exist
but are made up by fake news writers.
#FakeNews is the enemy!"
Meanwhile, The New York Times recently revealed, in a February Oval Office meeting, President
Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey to consider imprisoning journalists who report
on leaks of classified information.
And this is Trump speaking earlier this year in Melbourne, Florida.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and many
of our greatest presidents fought with the media and called them out oftentimes on their
lies.
When the media lies to people, I will never, ever let them get away with it.
I will do whatever I can that they don’t get away with it.
They have their own agenda.
And their agenda is not your agenda.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, while President Jefferson often lambasted the press, he also believed
it was fundamental to the functioning of a democratic society, famously writing, "The
only security of all is in a free press."
Timothy Snyder, historian, talk about the attack on the press and how it fits into your
thoughts about On Tyranny.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: Well, at the deepest level, I think we should be aware that this is about
getting rid of a common sense of truth.
Truth is an awkward concept for us these days and should probably be less awkward concept.
If we’re going to resist all of this, I think we have to take a stand, even if it
feels a little bit naïve, in favor of the facts, because what we know about 20th century
regime changes are that they involve, at their base, an assault on everyday factuality.
Whether it’s the extreme-right fascist idea that facts aren’t important, only a sense
of collectivity, of belonging to the nation, this organic group, is important, or whether
it’s the extreme-left Bolshevik idea that the facts of today have to be sacrificed in
the name of a vision tomorrow, we know that these forms of radical politics have to begin
with undermining a sense of everyday factuality.
In the 21st century, when ideologies no longer propose a future, what you have is a much
more direct attack on factuality, where the first step is to say—well, the first step
is just to lie all the time, as Mr. Trump did in 2016.
The second step, as we’ve seen since late 2016 and into the presidency, is to say, "It’s
not me who lies.
It’s the press.
It’s the journalists."
And the final goal is that everyone is so confused that we say, "We don’t really have
truth.
We just have our own private, clan-like sets of beliefs."
And at that point, democracy is not really possible anymore.
Opposition is no longer possible, because we don’t know where to begin.
We don’t know—we don’t know whom to trust.
So, of course, it’s an atrocity, and it’s a violation of basic American traditions,
to attack journalists like that.
But I think something—if possible, something deeper is at stake.
I think that this is a direct and well-understood attempt to transform the regime, the easiest
and cheapest way possible, which is to make us all distrust one another.
Oh, and what I also wanted to say, there is something we can do about this.
I mean, there are simple things we can do, like we can support reporters who actually
travel and investigate.
We can, all of us, subscribe to newspapers and other sources of reliable information.
Those seem like easy things to do, but if we all do them, it actually makes a huge difference,
morally for the reporters, financially for the sources of good information.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, interestingly, in your book, you never mentioned Donald Trump.
I’m wondering, was that deliberate on your part?
And also, what responsibility you feel previous administrations, whether it’s the Obama
administration or the Bush administration, have for the slide or the move toward tyranny
and authoritarianism in this country?
TIMOTHY SNYDER: Mm-hmm, so let me—let me take that in reverse order.
There is an underlying problem, at least one, in this country, and it goes back to our earlier
discussion of globalization.
And that is inequality, especially fractal inequality.
That is, in particular parts of the country, there’s just—there are unspeakable levels
of inequality.
And that sets up the possibility for someone like Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump won by promising all kinds of things he can’t deliver.
He won by being a good speaker.
He won because he had cyberhelp from foreign powers.
There are lots of reasons why he won.
But one of the reasons why he could win is that he could say to people, "Look, it’s
an oligarchy out there.
I’m an oligarch, but I’m your oligarch."
Of course, that’s not really true.
He doesn’t care about Americans.
And there were plenty of other oligarchs behind him; they just weren’t Americans.
But you can only tell that story in a situation of radical inequality.
And that radical inequality has its roots, I think, in the false story that we’ve told
ourselves since 1989, that history came to an end, that human nature is capitalism, capitalism
brings democracy, and so on and so forth.
History never comes to an end.
We had a moment in 1989 where we needed to reshape things.
And I think we’ve missed that moment and, in that way, betrayed younger generations.
Now, why don’t I mention Mr. Trump?
I mean, it’s largely because I think he’s not going to change.
What can change is the system.
So, Mr. Trump is not a young man.
He has very firm sets of ideas.
He has a certain kind of personality.
And he is going to push against the walls of the system.
And some of those walls are already weak.
He’s going to push and push and push and push, because that’s what people do.
You don’t have to have a plan to be an authoritarian.
You just have to have a set of instincts, a set of inclinations, and a certain amount
of energy.
He has all of that.
So, I’m not trying to change Mr. Trump.
What I’m trying to do is alert us, change us, because if those—if that system is going
to be preserved, it’s going to be because we hold up the various parts of the structure.
So, I was trying to get away from what I knew was coming, which is all the personal stuff.
You know, is he crazy?
You know, can he read?
Right?
He has—there are certain talents he doesn’t have, but there are also certain talents he
does.
The real question is what we can do.
And so the book is meant to be about us, much more than about him.
AMY GOODMAN: Number six in your Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is "Be wary of
paramilitaries."
Talk about this in the current context.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah.
I mean, it’s just such a—it’s such a wonderful example, Amy, of things that we
used to know about, for example, National Socialism in Germany, which have obvious application.
We just need to make those applications.
So, one of the ways that not just Hitler but other ideological authoritarians break republics
is that they break the monopoly of violence.
That is, they—you’re in a—what we think of as a normal system is when there’s law,
and then there are certain organs whose job it is to enforce the law, and those are state
organs.
What you do if you’re Hitler—and other authoritarians have done this, too—is you
have your own militia, a paramilitary, which is an organ of violence which is beyond the
state.
And you use it to change the atmosphere of politics.
You use it to intimidate opponents.
And then, after you win, you keep it going.
That’s the story of the SA and the SA in—the SS and the SA in Nazi Germany.
So, in the current situation, you know, where our society is flooded with guns like none
has ever been before and where there are lots of paramilitaries, it’s very important to
watch out for the connection of those paramilitaries to politics.
So, for example, if an elected representative or an important politician in, let’s say,
Oregon says, "We ought to bring in paramilitaries rather than the police, when we have our own
demonstrations," that’s something to really watch out for.
Likewise, in the firing of Mr. Comey, of which there are so many desperately bad things that
it’s easy to overlook some of them, one of the things which was striking in the firing
of Mr. Comey by Mr. Trump is that he sent Keith Schiller to do it.
Right?
So, here you had a confrontation of the man who was the head of Mr. Trump’s security
detail—right?—his own paramilitary, going to fire the head of a law enforcement agency.
That’s a sign of the way Mr. Trump thinks, and it’s obviously not a very good sign.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you—there was another one of your lessons, lesson 12,
"Make eye contact and small talk."
That would seem like not a strong way to battle authoritarianism.
But your thoughts about that?
TIMOTHY SNYDER: I love that question, because it’s really important for us to see that
we have power in all kinds of ways that we don’t have.
So, some of the lessons look easy, but are in fact hard, like number one, "Don’t obey
in advance."
That’s actually really hard.
Or number 19, "Be a patriot," also really hard.
Some of the ones actually are not that difficult, but they magnify outwards, like number four,
which is "Take care of the face of the world," which basically means just paint over swastikas
when you see them.
That’s not that hard when you get to do it, if you can get yourself to do it, but
it does make a difference.
So, small talk is a little bit like that.
Small talk and eye contact are important for a number of reasons.
One is that, I mean, going back to the news story above all this, you have to be—you
don’t know who feels left out, who feels threatened.
But if you are more pleasant or more affirming to everybody in your daily life, you are going
to make a difference.
And the reason why this is so close to my heart is that in all the memoirs, Jewish memoirs,
say, of Nazi Germany, but also memoirs of the terror in Stalinist Soviet Union, there’s
that moment when people start crossing the street rather than talking to you.
And that’s the moment we have to avoid, both for the sake of the political atmosphere,
but also for the sake of what kind of people we want to be.
But the small talk is also really important because one of the deep problems where we
are, in our own sort of postmodern authoritarianism, is that we spend too much time on the internet,
we spend too much time in front of screens.
We forget to—we forget how to talk to one another.
And that human contact can be very important.
I mean, one thing, you know, personally, which suggests to me this is right, is the difference
between last fall and this spring.
Last fall I talked to a lot of people in other parts of the country, in the Midwest, for
example, about what I thought was going on, and I got basically zero resonance.
But the fact that I talked to people, as opposed to just posting something online—which can
be important, too—means that now sometimes people come back to me and say, "Oh, yes."
So, you never convince anybody with small talk, but you do sometimes demonstrate that
you’re a human being and that you’re not the enemy and that maybe at some future point
there could be some better conversation.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Professor Snyder, about President Trump in Brussels
and Sicily, the NATO meeting, the G7 meeting.
Trump sparked outrage in Montenegro after he shoved the prime minister of Montenegro
out of his way while barreling to the front of the pack at this weekend’s G7 summit.
This came after French President—the new president—Emmanuel Macron clenched Trump’s
hand until his knuckle turned white, when the two met in Brussels during the NATO summit.
Even when Trump attempted to pull away, Macron continued to grip Trump’s hand.
He since said the handshake was a moment of truth designed to send a message to Trump,
saying, quote, "We must show that we will not make small concessions, even symbolic
ones."
Can you comment on this and then on your number 18, which is "Be calm when the unthinkable
arrives"?
TIMOTHY SNYDER: OK.
So, Europe—so, Europe is so important for us.
Whether you care about trade and American jobs, it’s the biggest market in the history
of the world.
Whether you’re more—you know, whether you think more about security, it’s—these
are America’s long-term partners.
It’s the only reliable set of democracies—or the main reliable set of democracies we have.
In many ways, Europe is a positive example for us.
So, it is tragic that we are cutting ourselves off from that, from that market, from that
security, from those sets of values, for no particular reason.
It fits many things.
It fits Mr. Trump’s desire for an America which is more isolated and, frankly, poorer.
it fits Mr. Bannon’s ideas about the European Union.
What it doesn’t fit is, I think, anybody’s—anybody’s interests.
The Europeans are seeing us—you know, as one of my political scientist friends puts
it, we’re no longer in column A, we’re in column B. You know, we are now—you know,
we are now one of the powers which is undermining them, perhaps weakening them, setting a bad
example.
And the heartening thing is that people like Angela Merkel or Macron notice this and seem
to be taking it as a reason to try to recreate Europe, rather than just being distressed
about all of this.
That’s a positive thing.
Now, there’s no good segue to your next question, which is about—which is about
terrorism and talk about terrorism.
So, the last four lessons of the book, which are about beware—beware certain kinds of
language, be calm when the unthinkable arrives, be a patriot, be courageous—they have to
do with a particular mechanism where regimes change.
The template is the Reichstag fire of 1933.
Pretty much, I think it’s fair to say, all modern tyrants know that they need—
AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen seconds.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: OK—that they need a moment of fear of terrorism to make a regime change.
So, in the atmosphere we have now with Mr. Trump, we have to be aware that when something
unthinkable happens, despite our fear and grief, what we have to be protesting for is
our own rights.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Timothy Snyder, thanks so much for being with us, Yale historian,
author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
And that does it for our show.
Welcome to the world, Muriel Lau-Burke, the daughter of our news director Mike Burke and
his wife Michelle Lau-Burke.