Resist Authoritarianism by Refusing to Obey in Advance (2017)
238 comments
·February 12, 2025epistasis
chemeril
Thirded, it fundamentally changed the way I understand government. Would also recommended The Road to Unfreedom for some context around current geopolitics.
ModernMech
Can you expand? What was your understanding before, and how did the book change it?
epistasis
I'm not the person you asked, so I can only answer for myself. Previously, I had viewed Nazism as more of an aberration that overtook one society, and was the sole cause of the brutality of the Holocaust. Learning about the other forms of brutality that played out over the exact same geographic area, from a political direction that claims to be the arch-enemy of Nazism, points out that people's political representations are often quite distinct from the material effects they enact on people's lives. The Holodomor was not widely reported, and in fact covered up by the few Western journalists that witnessed it, and in the informational blackhole caused by Stalinism and the abduction, imprisonment, torture, and frequent death of anybody who stood out, much less spoke of the massive damage caused by Stalin, well, the full nature of what happened was not visible to the world until the fall of the USSR. The eyewitnesses to the starvation were often silent to their own natural death a decade after the fall of the USSR, due to the depth and depravity of the oppression of expression that happened in the USSR.
Basically the book points out the same lessons that Hannah Arendt and others have been pointing out for a long time, that such mass death of innocent people is quite possible even outside the strange ideologies of Nazis. The conditions for evil are quite endemic to the human condition, especially in those that abandon truth in pursuit of political strength.
qntmfred
> When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.
This same phenomenon has hit me like a ton of bricks over the last few years.
I spend half my time learning about humanity's past and the other half trying to keep up with the burgeoning AI explosion. It's a little disorienting tbh.
me_me_me
It really feels like the time is accelerating more and more.
We used to say that law cannot keep up with technology. Now I think the society starts to not keep up with technology.
trilbyglens
Society has been behind the curve for 30 years already. I mean look at what a negative force social media is and how we've done nothing about it
__MatrixMan__
Can you imagine being a technology that was waking up in our time? I wouldn't really blame it if it decided that humans weren't worth keeping around.
throw0101d
> I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it.
Ditto:
> In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis delineates the "bloodlands" as a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia; in this region, Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed beyond what each regime would have inflicted independently.[1]
[…]
> The book was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous".[4][5]
sizzle
What can we do based off what you learned from this book to improve things currently?
epistasis
Bloodlands is more of a history of what happens after unrestrained autocrats implement blood hungry murderous societies. The linked article is an excerpt from the same author's book on his thoughts of what to do to prevent authoritarians taking control and destroying all opposition, and I have not read it except this excerpt.
IMHO it's far easier to report on the history than to get counter factual reasoning correct enough to propose preventative measures. That said it's good to have a plan, but the plan must adapt to reality and our view of reality is never perfect.
suraci
> made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats
always see sayings like this from westerners, or americans, to be specific
everytime when something shit happened in the US:
- what are we becoming? DPRK/africa/china?
- at least we are not like Russia
this makes me wonder, were there similar sayings in 1940 german? "at least we are not in communism" "the worst fascism is still better than communism"
JumpCrisscross
> were there similar sayings in 1940 german?
This is why studying history is important. It makes clear the dividing line between systems that use violence as a legitimate political tool and those that don’t.
suraci
by studying history, i learnt that violence is the fundamental polical tool of the ruling class
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_and_Ideological_Sta...
it's in the history of american too
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Mangione
i think americans should have a deeper understanding abt this now
drewcoo
In the 30s, Communists were the big boogeyman in Germany.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...
Italians called themselves fascist. Germans would not have identified as such.
Fascism is difficult to define, even when it does not mean "my current political enemies." I tend to favor Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism traits. Eco is a historian who grew up under Italy's fascism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
If you take a step back and squint a little, almost all of that could apply to the US, regardless of administration. I would hope that would serve as a dire warning and not as a weapon.
n4r9
> almost all of that could apply to the US, regardless of administration
9 and 14 are the only ones I would interpret as applying more to the Democrats.
SpicyLemonZest
The reason you see these kind of takes from people in liberal democracies is that other countries generally do not permit critical analysis of their governments, even if the conclusion is ultimately that it's better than the alternatives.
mjfl
[flagged]
t0bia_s
[flagged]
johnnyanmac
Do you have an alternative or is this just fatalism talk?
t0bia_s
What is fatalism about what I wrote?
Mentality about having ideal solution is exactly what politics sell to us. Divide and conquer.
Thete is no ideal solution but we should talk about dependence on state, fiat money, increasing debt regardless of right/left politics, rising amount of bureaucracy, giving imaginary solutions by adding more regulations and vanishing freedom of individuals.
If you want more deep in problems connected with current politics and economy, I recommend authors such as Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Popper... They give quite interesting view and arguments.
Solutions could be decentralisation of power, such as subsidiarity.
__MatrixMan__
Just because a bad government is the worst case doesn't mean that a change in government can't improve things.
t0bia_s
Politics is not natural environment for majoroty in society. It certainly improve things for some at the expense of another.
em-bee
government does not influence society as much as society influences government. if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too, and the only way to change the government is to change the society too. simply abolishing government doesn't solve the problem.
t0bia_s
"if the government is bad, then that's a clear sign that society is bad too"
Politics attracts sociopaths, narcissists and egoistic individuals. Individuals that are focused on competency most likely not survive in this predatory environment thus not reflecting common society.
I'm not calling for abolishing government, just for change of thinking about governance and abandoning individual responsibility to the institutionalized electorate.
bearjaws
Kind of amazed this was let on the front page of HN. I've seen so many political posts sunk to the abyss the past few weeks.
NathanKP
HN has always had a certain respect for people and articles that seem particularly prescient. I suspect that the 2017 in the title does a lot to boost the upvotes and reduce the flags.
southernplaces7
Amusingly, the post is now flagged. So much for hacker spirit here.
krapp
Always remember the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" refers to Silicon Valley startups "hacking" capitalism and regulations, rather the anti-establishment hacker culture of the pre-web era. The resistance isn't here, and it's never going to be here.
tbrownaw
It's from eight years ago almost exactly (a couple months off). Saying it references today's current events isn't prescient, it's "second verse, same as the first".
idiotsecant
It's telling that the Overton window has shifted far enough that the very idea of resisting authoritarianism is 'political'...
Panoramix
It's the implication that the current government is authoritarian which is political
DavidPiper
"Left" and "Right" are luxuries of democratic societies.
Pro-democracy and anti-democracy is another axis entirely.
Both are political comparisons, but they are not the same thing.
The implication of the article is that we will only discover whether the current government is authoritarian based on how it handles social resistance.
intended
Everything is political once everyone is a broadcaster.
idiotsecant
Oh? Did someone say that somewhere? Should I start assuming that my feelings about things are what makes them political?
johnnyanmac
Note the (2017) in the title.
heavensteeth
What is authoritarianism but politics?
SpicyLemonZest
How could resisting a political system ever have not been political? I'm endlessly confused by how people use the term "political" these days. Is there some new definition I'm not familiar with?
insane_dreamer
Well, that didn't last long.
Now flagged and nowhere near the front page.
tomrod
Dang has been a remarkable example of what free speech moderation looks like.
intended
I was a mod, and by the definition used to pillory content moderation, there is no free speech compatible moderation anywhere.
This is the same thing done by everyone from radio jockeys dealing with callers, to TV shows.
The fundamental tool is the ban, because the only real power for site owners is silence.
Any principled stand will be riddled with exceptions in under a few days of operation. I’ve seen this repeated in multiple free speech communities, like clockwork.
Id very much like to see a principled stand which isn’t reducible to “free speech = speech exceptions I can tolerate.”
Most people can’t and don’t want to live in 4chan (8chan ?)
bloomingkales
Long as you censor it appropriately then it won't get flagged. It's 2025 y'all.
visekr
i was gonna say the same - as my post got sunk into oblivion after hitting second page
steele
pg might be busy on the hub; when he finds this he will make sure to suppress opinions that aren't double plus good
jayd16
The article is about Nazis. It says a lot about the state of things that this would be considered political and not historical.
insane_dreamer
maybe if a certain government wasn't implementing Nazi-like loyalty purges (and making Nazi-like salutes) no one would be drawing comparisons with Nazi-like behavior, would they?
tbrownaw
That's a hazard of apocalyptic rhetoric.
If you're constantly comparing people to some group, you can't talk about that group without being suspected of dogwhistles. Which forecloses discussions that otherwise could have been interesting.
ModernMech
It's also the insidiousness of Nazis. People always look at the holocaust and wonder how it could ever happen, and the answer as far as I can tell is Nazis weaponize the benefit of the doubt.
When you look back at how the world received Hitler before he became the Hitler we know, you see publications like the NYT musing that Hitler really doesn't mean anything he's saying about the Jews, and when he comes to power he will temper himself [1]:
So violent are Hitler’s fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew’s night.
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
intended
Sometimes the other group is neo nazis and are the dominant power.
Sometimes they are close enough but different that the similarities strike normal people. Except when they bring it up, the defense is “no actually the Nazis we’re specifically doing XYZ. This isn’t the same. Which shuts down conversation about both - the actions being similar or identical.
But this is the value of rhetoric.
jayd16
Ok I'll bite. What's another example? I don't think a post about Soviet Russia or really any other similar thing would get the same treatment.
I think you could invoke Godwin's law but it was seen as childish, not political.
tomrod
It's the only way to resist. That, and vocally and vociferously insisting on the rule of law. Timely post.
penguin_booze
> vociferously insisting on the rule of law
Don't forget that laws are (hu)man-made. Laws reflect the kind of people that make the law. Certain kind of people can make certain kind of laws. At that point, rule of law would appear indistinguishable from lack thereof.
tomrod
Rule of law in the United States refers to the separation of powers, and the courts are not to be ignored. For a broader definition:
> The rule of law is a political and legal ideal that all people and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws, including lawmakers, government officials, and judges. It is sometimes stated simply as "no one is above the law" or "all are equal before the law". According to Encyclopædia Britannica, it is defined as "the mechanism, process, institution, practice, or norm that supports the equality of all citizens before the law, secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally prevents the arbitrary use of power."[0]
Regardless what the laws enacted are, ensuring no one is above them (a president or an entire branch of the US Federal government, say) is a cornerstone of US civil life.
suraci
"As all the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must pass through his brain, and transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action, so also all the needs of civil society — no matter which class happens to be the ruling one — must pass through the will of the state in order to secure general validity in the form of laws. " - Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
ncr100
E.g. One could civilly request the local Republican City attorney to affirm some law, and immediately, in a protest fashion, compare that powerful directive to laws and orders being broken in Washington DC by those in power in the Federal government, defying recent federal judge orders to desist with the data theft/funding impounding.
tehjoker
Well, if they are going against the legitimating power of the people, isn't it bloodless and unworkable to insist on "rules" against people who can break them at will (and have the loyalty of the army and police)?
You have to insist on a more fundamental source of legitimacy, economic power, and wield a threat that cannot be easily defeated.
Remember: these presidents are elected by about a quarter of the country if that, and the most recent election had a fall in turnout. Even if you base your entire theory of legitimacy in election results, the legitimacy of U.S. elections is looking worse and worse every season. The opposition didn't even have a primary lol
kouru225
I mean… it’s quite clearly not the only way to resist…
Never once have I heard that WW2 was won by vocally and vociferously insisting on the rule of law
tdeck
Mussolini was famously turned upside down by one such tirade.
tomrod
Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine, you rightfully pointed out my linguistic imprecision :). Mea culpa. Another attempt, likely no better than before:outside of calling on the militia, prosecuting alleged fascists, or never voting them into power in the first place by enshrining education, media transparency, and banning dark money, it's a great option.
chasing
From a certain perspective Allied warfare was simply a extremely vociferous insistence on the rule of law.
That aside, an argument could be made that if the rule of law had been more forcefully adhered to in their early days, Hitler and the Nazi Party could have been stopped before the gears of war had started to turn.
tomrod
I love this. Great perspective.
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gotoeleven
[flagged]
tomrod
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gotoeleven
These articles are a great list of things that we also shouldn't be spending our money on.
Dalewyn
[flagged]
ChadNauseam
There are procedural issues that make that difficult currently. For example, undocumented immigrants can claim asylum and then legally can’t be deported until their claim has been processed and rejected. And this takes a very long time due to a shortage of immigration judges. There actually was a bill introduced under biden that would have limited the circumstances in which asylum can be claimed, and added funding for more immigration judges. But Trump called republican congresspeople to encourage them to vote against the bill because he didn’t want anyone else to get the credit for improving border security.
throw0101d
> Like preventing illegal entry and crossing of borders and deporting illegal aliens? Or is that not rule of law?
And in the process of enforcing this law ripping children from their parents and losing track of them so that reconnecting them with families was not possible?
* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archi...
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-trump-era-policy-tha...
Besides enforcing the law, is cruelty one of Trump's stated policy goals?
* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/...
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tomrod
As I am not left wing, simply not Republican, I've never understood why Fox News and political provocatours needed to lie about the magnitude of the problems on the border during Biden's presidency, except and unless they wanted to create fear via propaganda. The economy was a much better angle. I value intellectual honesty.
Edit: and to add, one thing that Fascists in Germany did was to turn their political rivals into boogeyman. Simultaneously weak and strong. Lacking morality.
I guarantee you folks on the left have strong morals and standards. As do folks on the right. Assuming they don't or concluding they don't because they don't align to your preferences means that you, not them, are polarized. I use 'you' here in the royal sense, I don't know you from Peter or Paul. I only know what you said in your comment.
Having lived in places where I was a stranger, I've found people generally want similar things, usually found on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Dalewyn
>Assuming they don't or concluding they don't because they don't align to your preferences means that you, not them, are polarized.
Many people here including parent commenter argue for rule of law, which includes controlling and protecting the border and deporting illegal aliens as written in the law. However, those same people (not necessarily parent commenter, but probably the case also) argue for an uncontrolled anarchistic border and presence of foreign nationals in the same breath.
This is why I am of the mind that the only standard the Left has is the lack of standards. Rule of law, except not those laws.
vhguru
Let the whataboutism begin in 3..2..1…
bigdict
Why is it timely?
nickthegreek
Google and Apple just updated the name of an international body of water based on the demand of a single person throwing his weight around. No one asked for this change. It has no backing by locals. It wasn’t even a thing. This wasn’t a culture war issue, it’s a flexing of power by an old delusional man. AP has been the only corporate organization to stand up to this nonsense that I’ve seen.
Not to mention the cdc scrubbing and such that judges are now overturning and demanding information returned to the public.
tomrod
A great example of the many system abuses over the past several weeks.
People did not vote for the Dark Enlightenment nor the Butterfly Revolution. Want to gut USAID? Work with Congress and pass a law. Want to strip Social Security? Samesies.
That is the rule of law. If you are a representative of the people, you follow the law.
insane_dreamer
Of all the wrong things Trump/Musk are doing , renaming the Gulf was arguably the most benign. But it does send a powerful signal of “I can do whatever the f I want”
__MatrixMan__
What better place than here, what better time than now?
fknorangesite
Don't feign ignorance.
UncleOxidant
I mean, I guess it's possible they've been really busy with other stuff and are just now looking at the internet after some kind of six-month death march at work. (but probably not likely)
tbrownaw
Please state explicitly for the record why it's timely, in order that anyone who cares can compare that reason against the posting guidelines to decide how seriously to take it.
.
A bit wordier, but hopefully harder to denounce on the pretext that it's playing dumb.
onetokeoverthe
because this is the time
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weaksauce
[flagged]
readthenotes1
Milgrim found that, but that's because it's what he wanted to find.
Other people have found different things from that experiment, E.G., https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-yo...
And https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-shocking-truth-of-...
And
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/famous-milgram-el...
kmoser
The conclusion I draw from these analyses of Milgram is that fewer people obeyed to the degree originally stated. But the fact that even one of them was willing to obey at all speaks volumes.
Also consider that these were studies in which the the participants volunteered, and had nothing to lose by refusing orders or simply walking away. In the real world, these people would be agents of the state, or employees of a company, whose jobs, physical safety, and even lives (not to mention that of their family members) would be dependent on following orders. It's reasonable to assume in those situations, there would be a much higher rate of obedience than in the relatively safe environment of an experiment.
Conclusion: people are easily manipulable by authority.
readthenotes1
Rather, the study shows that people are easily manipulated by a belief in Science with a capital S.
To quote one of the articles, "he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent…
...Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram's participants continued with the study after hearing this order."
I don't recall in the study whether the shockers knew the shockeys or volunteers but I bet they thought they were and thus they thought they were trying to help advance science. Since so many people dropped out after hearing pain in the shockees, I'm guessing that if we were to try to replicate the study scientifically and without looking for confirmation bias, we would find entirely different results.
throwaway519
Thank you for links that add critical analysis, depth, and academic follow up.
These types of comment are what keep me coming back to HN.
grg0
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psb
Impressive that this made it to number 1 on hacker news. The politics of the readers here is pretty interesting
762236
[flagged]
insane_dreamer
What blows me away is that some people can't see the signs of authoritarianism when it's staring them in the face pretty much every day for the past weeks.
throwaways01342
Somehow we have managed to make words themselves political. If a word is used by "the other side", it's convenient to assume that what is happening are "aggressive measures" to make US more free.
762236
"signs of authoritarianism" is a smear. Either you have evidence of it, or not. A good example of authoritarianism is restricting freedom of speech, such as when Biden's administration worked with the social media companies to censor, as revealed in the Twitter Files, and then which they continued to do with USAID in collaboration with other countries where our tech companies operate. Another example is requiring DEI statements to obtain favors from the government, such as grants, since DEI statements are declarations of fealty to an ideology, rather than anything based on evidence (e.g., you failed the test if you said that you would follow evidence-based approaches to improving inclusion).
tomrod
Ignoring everything that shows they are authoritarian up to now.
If they ignore court orders, they are ignoring the rule of law and therefore are authoritarian.
762236
Trump confirmed he would follow the court orders: "yeah, the answer is, I always abide by the courts, always abide by them, and will appeal"
moobsen
This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
If that surprises you, I recommend reading the hacker howto.
"Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers."
There is a difference between a hacker and a cracker, which might these days be called "tech-bro". Even if it might not be obvious to everyone.
southernplaces7
>This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
Some of the people on this site maintain a strong anti-authoritarian, instinctive and philosophical hacker instinct, sure..
Many others however are just about as fully establishment, self-serving techno-elitists as you could want. One this site there's no shortage of such authoritarian types who happily defend all kinds of social control notions by default, while embracing a supposed need to monitor and herd "average" people for their own good.
The "Hacker" in Hacker News is more a cute marketing phrase than a real description of any such dominant ethos here.
Edit: And the post for this thread just got flagged. Amusing indeed.
unsui
> This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
disagree. While hackers traditionally do lean anti-authoritarian, I am consistently disappointed by how many folks here generally side with CEOs and tech leadership that do, in fact, display authoritarian tendencies.
It is no coincidence that the "tech bros" are sinking democracy full steam ahead, given how Thiel and fiends find democracy incompatible with their vision for the world.
So, no, I wouldn't say that HN tends to lean anti-authoritarian. From my experience on this site, I would say the opposite.
intended
Give people a minute. It takes a while for the old OS to boot up and finish its systems check.
I found this to be a great video that has acted as a reminder of what it used to be. https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-bioterrorism-will-save-your-life...
People need exemplars, stories, ideas move their changes along.
grg0
[dead]
ekianjo
> Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
Except in (certain) cases where they find it very easy to accept if it is in line with their beliefs.
The true defenders are the ones who stand for the freedoms of those who have different opinions. This is a very small minority, everywhere.
NathanKP
100%. Hacking is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, and starting your own business and becoming an entrepreneur instead of a wage slave is also fundamentally anti-authoritarian.
However, I wouldn't go so far to disparage messing with the political system as "cracking". Hackers often try to break systems that are stagnant, and get those systems changed so that they come out stronger on the other side. And there's nothing more stagnant than modern politics. Ultimately it's a question of whether the people "hacking" the political system are "black hat" or "white hat".
I know what color hat Musk has chosen to represent himself, though.
Trasmatta
> This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
Counterpoint: I've seen many posters here that are highly supportive of Trump and Elon. Not to mention all of the "hackers" enlisted in the DOGE army.
jazzyjackson
When people bandied about "hacking the planet" I have to wonder what they were picturing if not subverting bureaucracies to accelerate technocratic progress
tbrownaw
> Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
The BOFH was plenty authoritarian, and was celebrated for it.
cogman10
HN, IMO, tends to lean libertarian which if strictly followed is anti-authoritarian. Fascism and authoritarianism are things that anyone who believes in "freedom" should oppose right or left of the political spectrum.
I may not have the power to change things directly, I'm definitely watching what politicians and companies are lining up to lick boots. The boot lickers have not just been Republicans unfortunately.
Fnoord
Libertarianism leads to lack of checks and balances regarding Popper's paradox. It is a key component for authoritarianism to breed, via accelerationism.
insane_dreamer
> Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
that was true of "hackers" (who in "old times" might be more likely to associate with anarchism), but not true of "tech bros" (who seem much more concerned with how much money they have than how much they're hacking), and I think HN reflects more of the latter than the former, though of course a wide spectrum with lots of people that fit neither category
intended
Yeah, money was a great second love. But being reminded of the OG is part of everyone’s personal journey. What people remember and choose is theirs in the end.
throw0101d
More information on the author, Timothy Snyder:
> Timothy David Snyder (born 1969)[2] is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.[3][4]
> He has written several books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), The Road to Unfreedom (2018), and Our Malady (2020). Several of them have been described as best-sellers.[5][6]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder
"Do Not Obey In Advance" is the first chapter to his book On Tyranny:
pabs3
Interesting, this post now appears to be shadow banned? For me it shows up mid-way through the front page, but for logged-out it doesn't show up at all.
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anal_reactor
People are highly hierarchical, and the idea of a democracy where everyone is equal before the law is inherently incompatible with that.
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zfg
Twenty lessons on tyranny from Timothy Snyder:
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I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. It's an absolutely brutal book that made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats, even in our current world. Even if they don't quite match the suffering of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine under the power of autocrats.
When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.