If the past few years have proved anything, it’s that people are wrong to think they’ll know tyranny when they see it. Those who fancy themselves especially well attuned to recognizing and resisting tyranny tend to get so excited at the idea of playing dress up in heroic costumes that they lose the plot. Think of the New York Times billboard ad reading “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.” It is? More than ever? More than during the McCarthy hearings in 1954? More than during the Vietnam War? During Hitler’s rise to power? Is Trump really Hitler? Or is Hillary Hitler? Does democracy die in darkness, or does it die equally well in daylight? You see what I mean.
Enter two books that aren’t just winging it when they look at authoritarianism: Waller R. Newell’s Tyrants, out now in an updated paperback, and Frank Dikötter’s How to Be a Dictator. Here are two books that actually try to situate panic about tyranny in the context of history, rather than dissolving our sense of history in panic about tyranny. Among other important reminders they provide is a catalog of intellectuals and saints who fail miserably at repudiating authoritarianism in the Marxist-Leninist or fascist flesh. Here is George Bernard Shaw, singing Stalin’s praises and setting up a shrine in his home to the strongman. There is Gandhi, praising Mussolini as “one of the great statesmen of the time.” These anecdotes abound, and they remind us that our betters often got these things wrong.
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