On Tyranny Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century

Author: Timothy Snyder

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General Fields

  • : 22.99 AUD
  • : 9781847924889
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : The Bodley Head
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  • : 0.127
  • : January 2017
  • : 198mm X 129mm
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  • : 22.99
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Timothy Snyder
  • : Paperback
  • :
  • : 128
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Barcode 9781847924889
9781847924889

Description

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. Now is a good time to do so.

Reviews

"We are rapidly ripening for fascism. This American writer leaves us with no illusions about ourselves" -- Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature