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Timothy D. Snyder

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Ukraine is not Russia. Too many Ukrainians have tasted too much freedom for too long.
Ukraine is not a theater for the historical propaganda of others or a puzzle from which pieces can be removed. It is a major European country whose citizens have important cultural and economic ties with both the European Union and Russia.

Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American author and historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Quotes

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  • The Belarusian failure therefore provides a useful test. Here we have an “ethnic group” which is the largest by far in the area in question. According to the Russian imperial census of 1897, more people spoke Belarusian in Vil’na province than all other languages combined. In Vil’na, Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev, and Vitebsk provinces, contiguous territories of historic Lithuania, speakers of Belarusian were three quarters of the population. In the twentieth century, this “ethnic group” did not become a modern nation. In combination with Lithuanian and Polish successes, this Belarusian failure helps us to perceive what national movements actually need.
    • The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003)
  • The way out of the crisis is a return to Ukrainian democracy. Mr. Yanukovych was elected, but has since illegally changed the system in ways that undermine its legitimacy. With a fresh start and new elections, Ukrainians could decide for themselves whether they prefer Europe or Eurasia.
  • What does it mean when the wolf cries wolf? Most obviously, propagandists in Moscow and Kiev take us for fools—which by many indications is quite justified.
  • Ukraine is not a theater for the historical propaganda of others or a puzzle from which pieces can be removed. It is a major European country whose citizens have important cultural and economic ties with both the European Union and Russia.
  • The current Russian attempt to manipulate the memory of the Holocaust is so blatant and cynical that those who are so foolish to fall for it will one day have to ask themselves just how, and in the service of what, they have been taken in. If fascists take over the mantle of antifascism, the memory of the Holocaust will itself be altered.
  • The point of Bloodlands was that we hadn’t noticed a major event in European history: the fact 13 million civilians – civilians and prisoners of war, not soldiers on active duty! – were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time... We have some history of Soviet terror, of the Holocaust, of the Ukrainian famine, of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span, so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative.
  • If we don't have access to facts, we can't trust each other. Without trust, there's no law. Without law, there's no democracy. So, if you want to rip the heart out of a democracy directly -- if you wanna go right at it and kill it -- what you do is, you go after facts. And that's what modern authoritarians do. Step one: You lie yourself, all the time. Step two: You say it's your opponents and the journalists who lie. Step three: Everyone looks around and says "What is truth? There is no truth." And then resistance is impossible and the game's over.

On Tyranny (2017)

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: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
  • As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny.
    • Prologue: History and Tyranny
  • Since the American colonies declared their independence... [m]any... democracies... failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own.
    • Prologue: History and Tyranny
  • European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. ...[S]ocieties can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits...
    • Prologue: History and Tyranny
  • Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.
    • Prologue: History and Tyranny
  • Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.
    • Prologue: History and Tyranny
  • The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions...
    • 2 Defend Institutions
  • "[E]ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,"...We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.
    • 3 Beware of the one-party state

The Road to Unfreedom (2018)

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: Russia, Europe, America
  • [A] turning point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance... In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland... In April 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 21,892 Polish prisoners of war... shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest... Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify... the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. ...On February 3, 2010... the Russian prime minister made a surprising proposal: a joint commemoration... on the seventieth anniversary of the crime. On the seventh of April a Polish government delegation... arrived in Russia.
    Two days after that, a second Polish delegation set out... One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta... April 10... Tomek boarded an airplane. It crashed... short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield at Smolensk. There were no survivors.
  • Our Vienna maternity ward, where inexpensive insurance covered everything, was a reminder of the success of the European project. It exemplified services that were taken for granted in much of Europe, unattainable in the United States. The same might be said of the quick and reliable subway that brought me to the hospital...
  • By 2015, Russia had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare beyond Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans. In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had long advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump... an outcome the Russians had worked to achieve. Among other shortcomings, the new U.S. president could not reflect upon history: he was unable to commemorate the Holocuast... nor condemn Nazis in his own country.
  • The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time.
  • Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raise a millennial generation without history.
  • The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of the voters.

Is the U.S. Headed Towards Tyranny? (February 18, 2020)

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Timothy Snyder Discusses. Amanpour and Company. A source.
  • The whole idea of the Declaration of Independence is that no man is above the law. ...King George was breaking established rules, established contracts. ...Mr. Trump's defense in the impeachment trial was precisely that he is above the law; that whatever he says is the law; that we should wait and see what he says, and then adapt the law to that. That is precisely what tyrants over the centuries, and authoritarians in the last century have always said.
  • Our second basic founding document, the Constitution, is basically a design how to prevent someone becoming a tyrant. It assumes that if we have three parts of the government they will balance each other, but what we saw unfold in the impeachment trial was the opposite. The Congress gave way, and then Justice Roberts also gave way. So that at the end... we have a much, much stronger executive claiming nearly absolute power, which is something that the Founders were precisely trying to prevent.
  • [A]ccording to the Constitution the Chief Justice presides, that is to say, he's in charge. The Senators are meant to be jurors. What Chief Justice Roberts allowed to happen, was that the jurors decided that they could do things like, say how they were going to vote in advance; that the jurors could decide to do things like, not listen to evidence; that the jurors could decide, basically, the shape of the trial. ...[I]f you're in any kind of court in the United States, those kind of principles where the judge just gives up, would be unthinkable. So basically what we saw was a trial that wasn't a trial, and so both in the form and in the outcome the Supreme Court ends up being marginalized, and not just the Congress.
  • Personally about Mr. Trump, it tells me that his desire to protect himself, his ego, his appearance, his sense of being right, is bottomless, because if there's anything that you should hold back from doing, it's from punishing someone like Lt. Colonel Vindman. ...[I]t calls up to me... a memory of what purges are like, because that... is what is happening. People who refuse to tow the line, a line of fiction. A line which said that Ukraine plotted against the United States, and not Russia. A line that said a server was in Ukraine, which has never been the case. A line which said that Ukraine was corrupting us, when were trying to corrupt Ukraine, in fact, in the Trump administration. A line which was false. A set of statements which were clearly false and which Republican senators also know to be false. That you don't follow a line like that, and then get purged. That's what happens in... totalitarian systems.

About the Russian invasion of Ukraine

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  • Russian spokespersons claiming that Ukraine did something (in this case, blow a dam) is not part of a story of an actual event in the real world. It is part of different story: one about all the outrageous claims Russia has made about Ukraine since the first invasion, in 2014. If Russian claims about Ukrainian actions are to be mentioned, it has to be in that context.
  • Citing Russian claims next to Ukrainian claims is unfair to the Ukrainians. In this war, what Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests an equality that makes it impossible for the reader to understand that important difference.
  • If a Russian spokesman (e.g. Dmitri Peskov) must be cited, it must be mentioned that this specific figure has lied about every aspect of this war since it began. This is context. Readers picking up the story in the middle need to know such background.
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