Yale prof, Timothy Snyder, is probably best known for his book, "On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century." (available free on PDF here) He's considered something of an expert on authoritarianism and despots.
In today's Washington Post, Snyder warns Americans that if they want to salvage what remains of their democracy from the claws of Donald Trump they would do well to study the uprising now underway in Belarus.
The predicament of Belarusans after the rigged presidential election of Aug. 9 is a sharpened preview of what Americans will face this November. The local dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, responded to the outbreak of covid-19 with magical thinking. As the economy crumbled, his opponents realized that they enjoyed a majority. When Lukashenko claimed an improbable victory after the election, Belarusans took to the streets. They were beaten and detained by riot police; Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his congratulations to Lukashenko. It is not hard to imagine that Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr would be satisfied with a similar turn of events here in November.
Americans have had other things on our minds this past week, but this is no excuse for looking the other way as others defend values we claim to hold dear. Yet even if we missed what happened Minsk, people in Minsk had learned from Minneapolis. The rhetoric and tactics in the cities and towns of Belarus carried echoes of Hong Kong; Khabarovsk, Russia; and Portland, Ore. Protesters around the world increasingly learn from one another.
Just as Trump is already preparing to do, Lukashenko was counting on the support of his cronies among local election officials, police and Russia. We cannot know whether his opponents will succeed: Unlike the United States, where the most effective Russian intervention comes through the Internet, in Belarus, Putin and Lukashenko can threaten an invasion.
As Americans think ahead to November, we should learn from people who have taken risks for democracy, in circumstances more challenging than our own. Belarusans teach us what I would call “the six Ps” of defending an electoral victory against authoritarian chaos: preparation, predominance, protest, peace, persistence and pluralism.
Preparation means understanding that your local authoritarian will spoil the election and planning in advance. Predominance means getting out the vote and winning by a wide margin, so everyone will know that the authoritarian is lying. Protest means taking the streets when the authoritarian makes his move. Peace means keeping demonstrations nonviolent as the regime discredits itself with violence. Persistence means coming back anyway the next day, and the day after that. And pluralism is a summons to groups, such as those Belarusan workers, women and doctors, to make their presence and their feelings known.In this and so many other things today, we're being held back by a failure of imagination. It's hard for people to imagine that their country has been taken over by a tyrant. It's hard for many people to imagine that their country, their society is already, now, confronted by the existential threats of the climate emergency. It's hard for us to imagine that our democracy has been watered down, polluted by the neoliberal order. When you cannot imagine such things it leads to denialism which itself is a gesture of forfeiture.
Democracy is a value, so it must be valued, and it is a practice, so it must be practiced. If we want it, we must be open to learning from others, and then be prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.
From what I’ve read of Lukashenko, he’s no paragon of virtue, but he has had some success managing the country through the post-1989 turbulence.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that made me pause and do that reading was the sudden full-court press from the media...anytime all the channels and all the stations want me to believe the same thing, out of the blue, about some leader or country, all with the message that that leader or country is illegitimate or undeserving, my radar goes up. And then sure enough, there’s evidence that the popular story isn’t quite the full story (or even has little resemblance to the real story at all!)
ReplyDeleteJust because few in the West have paid Lukashenko much notice doesn't mean that he's been an unknown quantity. Few knew much about Nicolae Ceausescu either until he and his frau were gunned down on a sidewalk.
This guy strikes me as a prototypical Eastern European thug. A one man band. Rivals and critics sometimes disappear, permanently. He's got a fondness for other authoritarians and Mike Pompeo seems to like the cut of his jib.
There was a time when talk of the Third Reich would lead someone to say, "It can't happen here." There was a naive belief that we are better than the Germans of the '30s and '40s and that our Western democracies were better constructed. It was all nonsense. It can happen here.
ReplyDeleteToby, the transformation of American society to bring rightwing extremism into the mainstream sent me trying to learn how that occurred in Germany in the 30s and if there really were parallels. I tracked down a couple of books, one of them "Defying Hitler." The other "They Thought They Were Free."
ReplyDeleteFrom my teens I wondered what drew the German people to the Nazis. Were they really different than us or might we, in similar circumstances, do the same? Those books revealed how it was an incremental process that transformed ordinary Germans, a gradual migration to the dark side that eventually swept up even the holdouts with the application of both carrot and stick.
https://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2018/09/living-in-interesting-times.html
https://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2018/07/bread-and-circuses.html
https://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2019/08/fascists-dont-kick-in-our-doors-we.html
I think those links will give you the answers you seek