Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The historian Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History and Public Affairs at Yale University, is an expert on eastern Europe and on the Second World War. He is a faculty advisor of the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Video Testimonies and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His best-selling book On Tyranny draws on his research into the bloodiest chapters of twentieth-century political history to give modern readers twenty lessons on how to recognise and resist authoritarianism.

Writer/artist Nora Krug has published two books concerned with the social and political histories of nations at war, with Heimat: A German Family Album uncovering some unpleasant truths about how ordinary Germans navigated World War II. Diaries Of War: Two Visual Accounts From Ukraine And Russia supplied the stories of two people on opposite sides of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here she applies her collaged, scrapbook style of pieced-together imagery to her adaptation of Timothy Snyder’s text into visual form.

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct,” says Synder in his prologue. “History can familiarise, and it can warn … The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracy can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.” Krug uses a variety of techniques to illustrate this guidebook to resistance, combining watercolour, pencil and folded paper illustrations with treated photographs unearthed at flea markets and antique shops (‘depositories of our collective consciousness’). The twenty chapters are these:

1. Do not obey in advance.

2. Defend institutions.

3. Beware the one-party state.

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world.

5. Remember professional ethics.

6. Be wary of paramilitaries.

7. Be reflective if you must be armed.

8. Stand out.

9. Be kind to our language.

10. Believe in truth.

11. Investigate.

12. Make eye contact and small talk.

13. Practice corporeal politics.

14. Establish a private life.

15. Contribute to good causes.

16. Learn from peers in other countries.

17. Listen for dangerous words.

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

19. Be a patriot.

20. Be as courageous as you can.

Each one is relatively short, from four to ten pages in length, and they start with a single paragraph to present the topic before it is elaborated on. The combination of Snyder’s carefully straightforward prose and Krug’s symbolic, retro imagery make each ‘lesson’ powerfully direct. This book is a very effective analysis of the alarming abuses of power distorting the political environment in the United States in particular. However, it also applies pretty much everywhere that governments and corporate-owned media have shifted the Overton window so far to the right that politicians can express near-fascistic sentiments that would have been unthinkable forty years ago. It was named a ‘Best Graphic Novel of 2021’ by the New York Times.