Inevitability politicians spin facts into a web of well-being. … belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens.’ He then adds that, ‘Inevitability and eternity have specific propaganda styles. … Progress gives way to doom.’ Snyder claims that, ‘eternity politicians manufacture crises and manipulate the resultant emotion. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. The politics of inevitability, Snyder says, is ‘a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives.’ ‘By contrast, the politics of eternity ‘places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Unfortunately, he never defines them very clearly, nor do we get any sense of these ideas come from. These two terms provide the theoretical framework for Snyder’s analysis. Then, or thenabouts, he says, the world began to transition from what he calls the ‘politics of inevitability’ to the ‘politics of eternity’. I must admit that I personally can’t see any such change in the human character, let alone on such a specific date, but Snyder believes it to be true. It’s typical of his style: grand, sweeping generalizations stated as absolute truths without any supporting evidence.
So writes Timothy Snyder on page 6 of The Road to Unfreedom. ‘On or about April 2010, human character changed’. Unfortunately, there’s so much wrong with it that I can’t adequately deal with it in just a few lines. For that reason, The Road to Unfreedom requires a detailed response.
I doubt that many Trump supporters will read his book, but a fair number of middle class, liberal intellectuals will, and no doubt many of them will suck it all up, not realizing that they’re being conned. He’s doing a tour of the country, selling this book, and giving talks and media interviews. Snyder is quite a high profile intellectual in the United States. Snyder explains all this in his new book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. And who is to blame? You know the answer, of course. And he wants us all to know who is to blame for this terrible state of affairs, so that we can defend ourselves against it while there is still time. He fears that under Trump, American (and also European) democracy may collapse into some sort of nasty fascist tyranny. Timothy Snyder doesn’t like Donald Trump.
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