Timothy Snyder: On dissent and “the stories people tell about themselves” | The Book Haven

Timothy Snyder: On dissent and “the stories people tell about themselves” | The Book Haven

Excerpt:

You don’t have to live under a totalitarian government to understand some of the head trips Timothy Snyder of Bloodlands fame describes in his provocative and incisive interview over at the Browser. We run them through our minds daily – at home, in the workplace, in our social circles.

Which hardly undermines the stories of people for whom the stakes were astronomically higher – those who face prison, death, or poverty for risking free expression. But it does make his observations universal.

His responses in the Q&A (with Alec Ash) are heartbreakingly insightful. But then, he is often quoting maestros. He recommends five books: George Orwell‘s Homage to Catalonia, Czeslaw Milosz‘s The Captive Mind, Adam Michnik‘s The Church and the Left, Milan Kundera‘s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless.

“The people whose books I’ve chosen lived in regimes which not only monopolized violence but threatened it in an everyday sense. And some of them suffered as a direct result of what they wrote,” he said.

Tim’s responses, and the books he has chosen, do not just tell us (as the subhead says) “how to challenge the over-mighty”; more importantly, they all demonstrate the way we delude ourselves – regardless of political stripe, personal beliefs, or external circumstances...................................