Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Timothy Snyder on Eastern Europe, Fascism, and Tyranny

Timothy Snyder's several books have attracted the interest and plaudits of not a few Eastern Christians, especially in Ukraine. This interest seems to have begun with his Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and also with his The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. 

More recently he's taken to warning of the rise of "fascism" and tyranny, as in his 2018 book,The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, and in the book published a year before that, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

This latter turn has seemed to me more problematic, as it always is when people take to trying to diagnose the present and predict the future based on their reading of the past. This review, it seems to me, gives a fair overview of the things of value in Snyder, and the things that need to be questioned.

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