[REVIEW] On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder

(Buy this book here.)

This book has been everywhere since last year’s election in the US–indie shops, TikTok diatribes, little free libraries and coffee shop share shelves with snarky messages inked on the cover.

Something about the idea of a little book of twenty short lessons on how to stem the tide of tyranny, based on historical precedent, seemed necessary but also somehow smug. Nice white people wave this at each other triumphantly while complaining about other white people. That’s usually a red flag.

But I read it anyway, and it’s not bad–simple, forceful, eminently quotable and much more hopeful about the average citizen’s ability to enact positive change than I’ve come to expect from pop-politics.

But Snyder’s only reference points for historical tyranny throughout the book seem to be Naziism and Sovietization, which is…narrow, to say the least. His academic specialty is European history, so that’s understandable, albeit disappointing. The brief anti-tyranny booklist in chapter 9, however, contains a long list of white Europeans and Americans of varying relevance–from J.K. Rowling and Philip Roth to Hannah Arendt and Vaclav Havel. No-one from the global south. No colonial tyranny. Way too much George Orwell. Understandable but also…no thanks.

So I went to Threads and asked the hive mind there to help me create a more global anti-tyranny booklist. A host of kind souls took me by the hand and led me down a rabbit hole, at the bottom of which was Snyder himself, being a blowhard crackpot at best and a white supremacist hypocrite at worst.

This is one of those times when I both wish I hadn’t looked up the author and am glad I did. Snyder’s super weird, y’all. He’s written that the Holocaust was somehow Hitler’s response to climate change. His takes on racism have an overcompensatory hysteria to them (like how that one overly sincere white person you know sounds just before saying something highly racist. Precise, heartfelt, and just around the corner from some ol’ BS.) To top it off, after writing a list of lessons on how to stop tyranny from happening in the US, Snyder and his family relocated to Canada. How do you write a book telling us all how to calmly, steadily, do the work and then leave?

In a vacuum this is a good starter text. The info seems good, if noticeably narrow. There’s nuggets of hope and clear calls to action. But there’s also a lack of depth, many missing perspectives, and the author seems to be having a day in the sun more for reactionary reasons than for what he’s actually about.

A giant grain of salt and a little global perspective to On Tyranny.

One more thing: here the list of anti-tyranny recommendations from myself and the good folks on Threads:

Human Acts, Han Kang

Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, Alaa Abd El-Fattah

How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Paradise of the Blind, Duong Thu Huong

The Prince of Mount Tahan, Islam Hani Muhammad

Babel, R.F. Kuang

Glory, NoViolet Buluwayo

Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire

Chain Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

All of these books can be found in a handy-dandy booklist here.

(Fellow readers! This is a good example of a book I didn’t like that still managed to teach me a lot. I’d still recommend it, but not as much as the books on the list that my Thriends helped me put together. Speaking of—I’m on Threads and Tiktok much more than any of the other socials these days, so if for some reason you have a burning desire for random snotty book thoughts from your favorite neighborhood diverse book reviewer, that’s where they are. In the meanwhile, I have to remind you for legal reasons that if you purchase anything from a link you find on this page or from the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, we’ll earn a small commission. Thanks for visiting! Now go read something good! Peace!)