Learn from peers in other countries
This is lesson 16 from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. As we watch events in Tblisi and Seoul, freedom-loving people here must be encouraged by those fighting their own would-be authoritarians. And while reading the news about these events is important, I think there are three levels of engagement with peers in other countries, of which reading the news is the easiest and perhaps the most important.
About the same level of engagement as reading the news is engaging with what foreign intellectuals are thinking. Snyder’s lesson 8, “Be kind to our language” addresses this to a certain extent. I’ve just started Open Letters, Selected writings, 1965-1990 by Václav Havel based on Snyder’s recommendations. But Havel died 13 years ago, and his battle was over long ago. Nonetheless, that is the kind of more-or-less contemporary foreign thinker I want to engage with.
Another level of engagement is to have personal contact with those involved in civil society organizations in other countries. This seems like the most difficult and with the most uncertain benefit. I would have no idea where to start.
The last type of engagement, which I assume is pretty common in the US (but so many of us are completely untraveled, so who knows), is knowing people in other countries—friends, relatives, etc.
As for the passport issue, I’m covered. I have two passports. One from the USA and one from Australia. I was born in Australia and moved here when I was three. Both my parents were American citizens, so I was given a birth certificate by the State Department declaring that I was an American. But I also had my Australian short form birth certificate.
My accidental birth in Australia remained for most of my life a curious fact to discuss at parties, but not particularly relevant to my day-to-day existence. At some point I started researching Australian citizenship out of curiosity, and found out that Australia had birthright citizenship until 1986 (I don’t know what internal politics caused Australia to change it). Interesting! I was a dual citizen, but I didn’t really have an Australian citizenship document, so that status was more of a legal curiosity than a reality that I was going to act on.
Then came 2016. I was alarmed by Trump’s victory (although less alarmed than I am now). So I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have an Australian passport, just in case? The process for an Australian citizen who has never lived in Australia to get a passport (without returning to Australia) is quite complicated. Australia has very stringent rules about proving who you are—I assume this is true of most countries. In took several months to fill out all the steps, including writing to the city government of Melbourne, where I was born, and getting my official “long form” Australian birth certificate from them.
If things get bad, Australia is my life raft. But being born in a foreign country seems like an excuse to send anyone they don’t like to their new Gulags and prison camps. At least I have my papers to present to the Christian Nationalist Sgt. Schultz who demands them.
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