Be kind to our language
As a book-lover, this lesson from the twentieth century in On Tyranny feels a little bit pandering. Snyder gets to talk up his favorite books and disparage the internet. He is at his most schoolmarmish in this lesson. He is acting like a representative of that species that is most hated by our new fascist overlords—an “elitist”.
I’ve never quite understood the word “elite” as it has come to be understood. My understanding was that it referred to a class of people who had wealth and great status within a society. But it has evidently come to mean “educated” or even “literate.”
Half of our fellow citizens are willing to give up democracy because they are mad at snobs who read books. This formulation sounds a little self-congratulatory.
Not every lesson will strike a chord with me. But he does use this lesson to make a reading list of important anti-authoritarian books. Snyder recommends the following political and historical texts:
“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell
The Language of the Third Reich by Werner Klemperer
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt by Albert Camus
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
“The Power of the Powerlessness” by Václav Havel
“How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski
The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garten Ash
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century by Tony Judt
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev
As a person who spends his life surrounded by books, it feels at best self-congratulatory to think that I would be able to fight out new fascist overlords by reading more books. Don’t threaten me with a good time! And yet, here I am writing about a the books mentioned in the pages of yet another book. And far from separating myself from the internet, I am embracing it by writing a blog post.
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The reversal of the concept of elitist shows the heart of ignorance and fear of intellectual superiority. I am constantly shocked at the attitude of the folks in the ultra-red suburban Texas county in which I in who have lived only here all their lives and while never having experienced anyplace different, assume that their knowledge and outlook of the world is supreme. Snyder's call for thinking and speaking in one's own UNIQUE language echoes Orwell's (and many other liberation-minded teachers). The difficult process of constructing of one's own thoughts in precise, non-parroted language consequentially and clearly reveals the contradictions living within those thoughts to oneself and others. Hell of a reading list!
One reading of this is don’t parrot language. Another is don’t self-censor.