Believe in truth

Lesson 10 in On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder will seem blindingly obvious. In a way, I think it should have been worded slightly differently: be on the lookout for falsehoods. As in the other chapters, Snyder goes back to the worst parts of the 20th century for guidance. He relies on two witnesses: Victor Klemperer, the German Jewish intellectual who managed to avoid being murdered during the war and wrote Language of the Third Reich in 1957, and Eugène Ionesco, the playwright of Romanian origin. Klemperer’s analysis of Nazi language divided it into four modes: a hostility to verifiable facts (“They’re eating the dogs!”); shamanistic incantation (the example Snyder gives is the endless repetition of the phrase “sleepy Joe”); magical thinking (for example, the “trickle down” theory of economics); and finally misplaced faith (the leader alone can fix the problem). Ionescu is less of an analyst, more literary. Snyder quotes him thus:

University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards¹, one after the other, At the beginning, certainly they were not Nazis. About fifteen of us would get together to talk and to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy . . . . From time to time, one of our friends said, “I don’t agree with them, to be sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I must admit, for example, the Jews. . . .,” etc. And this was a symptom. Three weeks later, this person would become a Nazi. He was caught in the mechanism, accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Towards the end, only three or four of us were still remaining.

Ionescu’s absurdist play Rhinocéros has a group of people who gradually turn into rhinoceroses, just as his friends gradually turned into fascists. Snyder closes this lesson with these words, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”

1. The Iron Guard was a fascist movement active in Romania from 1927 to 1941.