This passage comes from Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017):
The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czech and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance*. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in the country's history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person making the vote.
Timothy Snyder is History Professor at Yale University who has written several books on the Eastern Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union. In this short, compact book On Tyranny, Snyder provides terse lessons on how to combat tyranny in our daily lives and what tactics fascist regimes employ to undermine democracies. For example, in Lesson 6, Be Wary of Paramilitaries, Snyder describes how the Nazi Party in Germany rose to power during the elections of 1932 and 1933 with help from the Schutzstaffel (SS), which began as a paramilitary organization. These groups "first challenge the police and military, then penetrate the police and military and finally transform the police and military," writes Snyder.
Although he has been around a while, I only heard about Snyder recently through my longtime friend and blog subscriber Bruce who recommended that I watch a YouTube interview with Snyder while Snyder was promoting his latest book Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020) . In the Politics and Prose interview, Snyder also talks about the upcoming election in a scary yet calming manner.
*For more about the The Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism photograph visit last year's posting "European Book Experiences."
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