How To Throw Freedom Away
How To Throw Freedom Away
The Power of Cooperation
In his book “On Tyranny,” Timothy Snyder observed that a public can cooperate in advance with dictators, essentially giving away their freedom without a fight. It happened in Nazi Germany, but also in ancient Rome. From a Snyder interview with Democracy Now!
When we look at Hitler in retrospect, we sometimes have a tendency to think of him as a kind of supervillain who can do anything. But in fact, the lesson of 1933 is that consent from below matters a lot, not consent necessarily in the sense of voting or marching or anything active, but consent in the sense of bystanding, going along, making mental adjustments. (emphasis added)
The number one thing that allows a democracy to end is when the people governed consent to it with their actions.
Examples from Snyder’s book, p.19:
People who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement as Jews were forced to scrub streets to remove all signs of an ind…
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