#totalitarians

Joost A.M. Meerloo

Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, at The Guardian.

History is not a science as the communists contend. It is a narrative of human events with no predetermined outcome. We, through our everyday actions, determine which direction history will take.

However the past does offer a guide on possible outcomes based on the past behaviors of peoples and countries. Ignoring history can lead to undesirable and even tragic consequences.

Cultures and technologies may change but human psychology and behavior are stubbornly persistent. History may not exactly repeat itself, but the mindsets of our contemporaries are much more similar than different to those of our ancestors. Racism, opportunism, scare tactics, and misinformation are not exactly new. If you don’t know how they were used previously, you may fail to recognize how they’re being used today.

Being ignorant of history doesn’t excuse us from the results of that ignorance. Teaching a highly sanitized view of history to make us feel good about ourselves does us a disservice by keeping us in the dark. So does excessive worry about triggering the oversensitive when really nasty bits of history come up. People who never learn, for example, how both Hitler and Stalin used mass starvation as an instrument of genocide might be too slow to react to contemporary totalitarians who use food as a weapon.

EDIT: There’s now a graphic version of Timothy Snyder’s excellent book On Tyranny. The art for this new edition of the book was done by illustrator Nora Krug.

On Tyranny Graphic Edition Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century