40 pages • 1 hour read
Timothy SnyderOn Tyranny
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Remember professional ethics.”
Lawyers helped carry out the expulsion and execution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Doctors performed medical experiments on the victims. Business leaders used Jewish slave labor. Each group abandons its code of conduct to do so:
Snyder writes that “[p]rofessional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as ‘just following orders’” (41). Otherwise, professionals “can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable” (41).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Be wary of paramilitaries.”
Democratic institutions are possible only when the central government holds a monopoly on violence. If, however, paramilitary groups form around a politician, and the central government is too weak to oppose them, these groups can take power. In Germany, “Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies. As paramilitaries known as the SA and the SS, they created a climate of fear that helped the Nazi Party in the parliamentary elections of 1932 and 1933” (44).
In the US, during and after the 2016 campaign, the candidate who later becomes president uses a private security force to remove dissenters from his political rallies. He “also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions” (45).
Snyder writes that “[f]or violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards,” who “finally transform the police and military” (45).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Be reflective if you must be armed.”
Riot police and secret police are two major tools of authoritarian regimes. These are deeply involved in the Soviet Great Terror of 1937 and the Nazi holocaust. However, “[w]ithout the assistance of regular police forces, and sometimes regular soldiers, they could not have killed on such a large scale” (48).
Snyder adds that “[i]n fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe” (49), where German police commit more killings than the Einsatzgruppen force tasked with managing the executions.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Stand out.”
By 1940, Europe is mostly controlled by Nazis and Communists. Only England remains free. Hitler expects Britain’s leader Churchill to capitulate, but he stands out, fighting back in a war all but lost. Had he not, “there would have been no such war to fight” (56). Instead, the US and Russia join Britain and defeat Germany and Japan.
In wartime Poland, a few people stand out against the Nazi conquerors. A young woman, Teresa Prekerowa, “chose to enter the Warsaw ghetto a dozen times in late 1940, bringing food and medicine to Jews she knew and Jews she did not” (57) and soon is able to help some ghetto residents escape. After the war, when “asked to speak about her own life, she called her actions normal. From our perspective, her actions seem exceptional. She stood out” (58).
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Where the first four chapters remind ordinary citizens to be alert to signs of authoritarianism, Chapters 5 through 7 focus in on people in positions of power: professionals, like lawyers and doctors, and people in uniform. These groups wield disproportionate power in society and thus are prime targets for dictators.
Much as a tyrant must demolish institutions that uphold freedom and democracy—political parties, elections, courts of law, and the like—he also must dismantle the ethical traditions of powerful professionals. Their codes of conduct stand in his way; he appeals instead to a greater loyalty, to the state that protects everyone from dangers. It helps if the dictator can arrange for an emergency that he can point to; a war will do nicely.
Police tend to focus on their local communities, but a clever tyrant can use the same “national emergency” argument to appeal to them as well. The military is the most powerful card to hold, and a demagogue won’t go against them directly, but instead will use his private forces in actions too small to raise the notice of the authorities. These actions slowly grow in intensity as the tyrant habituates the government and the people to his offenses, until his shock troops, now wearing uniforms themselves, begin to assume the control formerly held by the police and military.
This points up another of the book’s recurring concepts, that the tyrant wins control through continuous small actions that, taken singly, may seem annoying but not so much as to arouse mass indignation. Taken together, however, these actions acclimate the public to the dictator’s ways until he can do what he wants and no one stands up to him.
Chapter 8 recognizes that it will take great courage to stand up and protest. The sooner this step is taken, then, the better.
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By Timothy Snyder
