Review: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I must start with the disclaimer that I went into this book with unfair assumptions and not a clear idea of how long or detailed it was going to be, and as a result was personally disappointed at the lack of depth and the absence of detail.

It’s a decent list, if a little haphazard, of important ideas when it comes to democracy, tyranny and power, very specifically when it comes to the seizure of power by despots and leaders. The book used Communist Europe, Nazi Germany and the Trump-years of America as examples. (Maybe, in a sense, it would’ve been more relevant and powerful while he was President. To me, the examples felt a bit forced and unnecessary to the core message, almost misleading in some places when suggesting similarities between Trump and Hitler. They’re there, just not as strong as it sometimes feels in the book. Russia felt a much more apt comparison.)

The ideas are briefly and breezily touched upon. I flipped through the thing in a very short period of time, coming out having learned slightly more and with a small list of people and things to look up. That was it.

If you want a strong basic understanding of politics and totalitarianism, read Orwell, read Hannah Arendt and read about political thought and theory. That will be significantly more meaningful and powerful. They’ll be more explicit, more detailed, more interesting because of how deeply they consider ideas and force you to think.

However, if you want to find the basics in the briefest time possible with relatively decent examples and references that you can follow to find good books, this isn’t too bad. I was definitely not the target market for this, but it was a good reminder of the ideas that are easy to let slip into complacency.

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