Akiva Reads

by Timothy Snyder

(Waffling between 1 and 2 stars; I'm not feeling very charitable right now.)

We've located the storied Radical Centrist, and as we always suspected, he’s a gray-haired white man. On Tyranny’s spare design and short chapters give the book an air of weight, timelessness, and wisdom that is not borne out by the muddled and milquetoast contents. This book is a quick read, but Snyder's arguments are weak and wandering, and I'm not sure who the target audience is supposed to be.

1. Do not obey in advance.

The examples do not support Snyder's thesis. Who is obeying in advance in these stories? - The Austrian Nazis who brutalized Jews - The Austrians who “watched them with amusement” - The Austrian Jews who committed suicide before they could be killed - The Nazis who invented new ways to kill people on a mass scale - The Milgram experimental subjects who would electrocute people on demand

The Nazis in the first and fourth examples weren't "obeying" Hitler; they had a set of beliefs that led them to the conclusion that they should commit mass murder. (As if Hitler was the sole source of the hatred, and everyone else was just guilty of going along with it?)

You could make an argument that the gentiles in the second example and Milgram's experiment were "obeying" social norms that prevented them from interfering, but it's strange to call it "obeying in advance." It'd be more relevant to say "don't obey unjust orders," but that's covered more thoroughly in points #5 and #7.

I'm honestly uncertain whether Snyder meant to imply that Jews who killed themselves were "obeying in advance," which is a major failure of writing. I'm torn, because it could be an interesting discussion, but not without a serious acknowledgment of the ways in which it's victim blaming. Either way, you can't just toss that assertion on the page without comment, as Snyder does.

5. Remember professional ethics

Glaring, inexcusable failure to note that the very direct modern equivalent of I.G. Farben taking advantage of slave labor from people imprisoned in ghettos and work camps is Whole Foods, WalMart, BP, AT&T, and other large corporations profiting from mass incarceration, which itself stems from social inequality and the racist prosecution of the War on Drugs.[1][2]

This is especially egregious because he mentions private prisons in #6.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718897-idaho-prisoners-roast-potatoes-kentucky-they-sell-cattle-prison-labour [2] https://www.careeraddict.com/prison-labour-companies

8. Stand out.

This I do agree with, to a point. I recently confronted the ED of the NPI (US white supremacist think tank) at my college's networking event. He tried to shake my hand and pretend everything was normal, and I refused to shake his hand, told him off, pointedly excluded him in conversation, and made sure to tell everyone else at the event that he was a neonazi. About half the attendees didn't know who he was, but the other half responded "I know! I can't believe they let him come!" and had apparently not wanted to confront him or discuss it. Others tried to dissuade me from “making a scene” and spirited away the flyers I brought summarizing his beliefs.

The invocation of Rosa Parks without the context of the enormous and carefully organized Montgomery bus boycott[1] is eyerollingly typical, and the canonization of Churchill is straight up bizarre.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott

9. Be kind to our language.

It takes an old white man to make a reading list for resistance that is 87.5% male and 100% white, and half of which was published before 1980.

10. Believe in truth.

The story behind [b:Rhinocéros|27736|Rhinocéros|Eugène Ionesco|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1366248012s/27736.jpg|6499581] is a fabulous argument against the kind of moderation the author espouses. If one good thing came of this book, it's that I'm adding the play to my reading list.

University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards, one after the other. At the beginning, certainly they were not Nazis. About fifteen of us would get together to talk and to try 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, he accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Towards the end, only three or four of us were still resisting.

12. Make eye contact and small talk.

One of the more original points in the book; it could probably use more than a page of discussion.

14. Establish a private life.

When I got to this passage on p. 90 I kind of lost it:

“(It is striking that news media are much worse at this than, say, fashion or sports reporters. Fashion reporters know that models are taking off their clothes in the changing rooms, and sports reporters know that athletes shower in the locker room, but neither allow private matters to supplant the public story they are supposed to be covering.)”

This is an outrageous false equivalence in a world where the sports pages didn’t regularly hold the NFL accountable in the CTE story [1] or cover the abuse that Larry Nasser inflicted on at least 150 gymnasts [2], and fashion magazines don’t cover the abuse of garment workers in third-world countries. By this logic, we are supposed to interrogate everything, but also take politics at face value and not investigate deeper into the issues that representatives would rather we don’t hear about.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/sports/nfl-concussions-cte-football-jeff-miller.html [2] https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/1/19/16897722/sexual-abuse-usa-gymnastics-larry-nassar-explained

19. Be a patriot.

This one is a great illustration of why leftists need to stop trying to reclaim patriotism. For one, if you’re going to try, you need to do more work on the definition than “patriotism is not nationalism because nationalism is evil and patriotism is apple pie.”

For another, you might find yourself starting an essay with the assertion “It is not patriotic to dodge the draft,” which I’m sure Snyder would think is a ridiculous statement in any context except “attack Trump without actually naming him.”

Epilogue

This was one of the more interesting sections, and had some decent points. Which still could have used much more explication and analysis.