1/10. Tyrants monopolize innocence for themselves and their supporters. But history challenges stories that equate power with virtue. So tyrants refer to history as "revisionist."
2/10. By "revisionism," tyrants mean what actually happened at critical moments in the past. In Russia, for example, the Soviet alliance with Hitler to invade Poland in 1939 is sensitive.
3/10. Tyrants today oppose history by enforcing an official myth in law. Memory laws were originally meant to protect facts about minorities. Increasingly, however, they flatter the emotions of majorities.
4/10. In the United States, the sensitive issue is race. Some American politicians call the history of African Americans "revisionism." They propose memory laws to protect people from feeling shame about shameful topics.
5/10. Memory laws are now an American reality. Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas have mandated guilt-free history in the classroom. Florida requires teachers to say that racism is a personal prejudice unrelated to society or law.
6/10. Memory laws censor speech. State governments are telling teachers what they can say in the classroom. Because the laws protect emotions, teachers self-censor.
7/10. Memory laws undermine democracy. They divide citizens into those who accept the official version and those who contest it, those who can be allowed to participate in politics and those who cannot.
8/10. Voter suppression is on the rise, and history helps us to see it for what it is. More than a century of American experience teaches that "fraud" is the cover story for laws meant to stop black people from voting.
9/10. Falsifying the past legitimates oppression in the present.
10/10. Censoring the past to deny that racism is systemic makes it more so. snyder.substack.com/p/juneteenth-c…

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More from @TimothyDSnyder

19 Jun
1/10. Tyrants monopolize innocence for themselves and their supporters. But history challenges stories that equate power with virtue. So tyrants refer to history as "revisionist."
2/10. By "revisionism," tyrants mean what actually happened at critical moments in the past. In Russia, for example, the Soviet alliance with Hitler to invade Poland in 1939 is sensitive.
3/10. Tyrants today oppose history by enforcing an official myth in law. Memory laws were originally meant to protect facts about minorities. Increasingly, however, they flatter the emotions of majorities.
Read 10 tweets
23 May
1/5. Belarus would not have hijacked an EU plane without Russian approval.
2/5. Possibly the hijacking was even a Russian initiative. Worth asking before acting.
3/5. The Russian play would be: foreseeable EU sanctions on Belarus drive Minsk closer to Moscow.
Read 5 tweets
22 May
A series of five essays on Belarus, part 1/5: The Worst War. "Memory tends to shroud history, and those with the weaker voices are forgotten. Sometimes the lands that suffer most are least able to gather the attention of others." snyder.substack.com/p/belarus-15-t…
A series of five essays on Belarus, part 2/5: Nation Next. "Tell me what you remember, and I will tell you who you are. Tell me what you are allowed to remember, and I will tell you who rules you." snyder.substack.com/p/belarus-25-n…
A series of five essays on Belarus, part 3/5: Two fake coups. "If we can understand the evolution of the fiction, we can see the direction the country is going, and prepare ourselves for the dramatic events likely to follow this summer." snyder.substack.com/p/belarus-35-t…
Read 5 tweets
11 Apr
1/5. Universal access to health care would make us freer citizens and people.
2/5. If people cannot start businesses because they cannot afford the health care costs, then they are far less free than they might be.
3/5. If people are in bad jobs because they need the health care, then they are stuck, not really free.
Read 5 tweets
27 Mar
1/6. Voter suppression is crowding out policy. #VoterSupression
2/6. In a democratic system, a party campaigns on policy, and it sometimes wins, and it sometimes loses. It adjusts when it loses by changing its platform, rather than by changing the rules. The Republican Party is no longer doing that.
3/6. When Republicans lose national elections, other Republicans use control of statehouses to make the country less democratic.
Read 6 tweets
21 Mar
1/7. The United States can restore its global influence by vaccinating the world. snyder.substack.com/p/vaccinate-th…
2/7. After a disastrous four years of diplomacy, the U.S. can emerge stronger than before by doing the right thing: vaccinating.
3/7. Stunned by our own suffering, we do not yet grasp that American state planning and industrial capacity have given us a chance not just to vaccinate ourselves, but billions of others.
Read 7 tweets

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