Recognizing the signs of fascism today | Historian Timothy Snyder

Well, those are two different questions. I mean, I came to Toronto because I think you should never waste a midlife crisis. You know, like when you reach a certain age and you're facing existential questions, you should try to resolve them in a way which is good for your family ideally. So, I was trying to live in a way which, you know, was unlike the way people live in novels. So, I came to Toronto because I was ready for a change. I came to Toronto because it was a certain stage in life for my family. I came to Toronto because I was excited by the city itself. I came to Toronto because I've always wanted to teach in what we would think of in the US as a big state school, a public university, a place where I could reach lots of students. I didn't come here to teach authoritarianism. I think it's important to teach authoritarianism though because we are now in the situation which I didn't expect honestly where it's a lot easier to do certain kinds of public things and probably unfortunately it'll be a lot easier to teach certain subjects here than in the US. So like in the US classes are literally, to use a word which is overused, but classes are literally being cancelled because they are about race or because they're about gender or they're about the wrong kind of history.

Not me and not at Yale. No, I would get away with whatever I wanted to at Yale indefinitely. I think I'm not claiming that I personally would have been under any kind of direct curricular prohibitions. I do think though that U of T and Canadian universities in general are not subject and hopefully never will be subject to the same kinds of pressures which lead to self-censorship. So Yale is in a bubble. Yale is doing very well protecting itself from the Trump administration. But in general, especially state schools around the country are looking very carefully to make sure that they're not teaching things which could be judged as being, to use our terminology, DEI or CRT or woke or whatever it might be. And this is not a joke. This is very serious because with those terms you can reach all the way into the humanities and basically make history and the humanities impossible to teach.

Oh absolutely. I mean whole departments have been renamed and consolidated. Whole courses have been renamed or people have been instructed by their chairs or their deans not to teach them. Colleagues react to this in different ways. Sometimes they teach the same class under a different name. Sometimes they teach the same material in a different way. You know, sometimes they decide to teach things that they wouldn't have taught otherwise. Right? Colleagues react creatively to this and it is a kind of jumbling of mostly anticipatory obedience and then professors deciding how they're going to deal with the schools because the schools are generally more conservative than professors. In one sense it's self-protective and then the colleagues think okay how do I react to this situation. But to go back to your earlier question, I think it's very important to teach authoritarianism now. I'm teaching this class at U of T called Hitler, Stalin and the Present. I think they made me call it that, and there is a solid reason for that. I drew up that class or a version of it way back when Trump won the first time because I think the paradoxical result of being in a crunch all the time is that people forget the historical references that they need. So when you're under the pressure of authoritarianism, it's coming at you in the sort of 21st century postmodern way where you're overwhelmed and the overwhelming character of it is part of the process and because there's nothing in the everyday you can actually get hold of that can help you. Whereas if you have a sense of what happened in the 20th century, especially from the point of view of people who chronicled it patiently, created conceptual categories, found ways to resist, that's actually helpful, right? So that's the reason why I would be teaching this class wherever I was, but that's the reason why I'm teaching it in Toronto.

That's a great question. I mean on the one hand obviously yes, you know, the little political pamphlet I wrote called On Tyranny has been the number one bestseller in the New York Times for several weeks running and that's because that book is based entirely on the premise that you can draw precedents from the 20th century so clearly there is a hunger for this. On the other hand, in the United States at least, we face the tremendous problem that we are both provincial and exceptionalist and so we tend to think well whatever is happening to us has never happened to anyone else before ever and also whatever is happening to us is so incredibly interesting that we must sit and discuss it among ourselves indefinitely as opposed to thinking okay other people in the present are facing tougher situations and other people in the past have faced tougher situations and from these patterns we could learn something. So yeah there is an interest in history but it's not serious enough which is exactly why one has to be pedagogical about it, right? One has to make it possible for people to say, because it's natural, right? That's just the way Americans are and not only Americans. It's natural that people are going to feel overwhelmed. It's natural. They're going to feel like, okay, this is something new because it is for them. And so, you have to lay it out, right? Like you have to and that is, I think, our job now. That's our job now is to lay it out, like to take the things that we think we understand and make them accessible.

I mean, you're not going to go with this video clip, but what is happening now which doesn't ring alarm bells? I mean, like what in the United States is happening now, which is normal? Say, you're saying it's all-encompassing. Like, there's a lot. That's the thing. Like, I will give you examples, but the overall atmosphere is very important, right? The atmosphere of untruth, which you can't really reduce to a particular example because it's not just like the guy lies. It's that he is deliberately generating an atmosphere of fiction all the time. And likewise with fear, like we can give examples of people being afraid, examples of policies, and you already mentioned the most dramatic one which is seizing people without habeas corpus and incarcerating them in random places and then sending them off to random countries. And I'm trying very hard not to use the words like deportation because those are euphemisms. I mean if somebody arrests you off the street for no cause and sends you to South Sudan, that's not a deportation, right? That's a forced rendition without any kind of judicial process. And obviously criminal, or I would say it's an act, I mean I think the right way to talk about it is it's an act of terror. So those things generate an overall atmosphere, right? An atmosphere of fear, an atmosphere of conformism which then layers into this atmosphere of fiction because the way that these guys run things is as a television program, which makes it sound, sorry in this context, a little bit too light, but what they mean is that everything's a matter of good and evil, right? And like they're the forces of good and every day they vanquish the forces of evil. And the particular bell that that rings is fascism. Of course, because what fascism is about is about constructing a reality by way of spectacle, by way of whatever technology of presentation is present, which back then was radio and which today is the internet and television, but scripting, creating, having the scenography, the dramaturgy of a struggle of good and evil, right and wrong, us and them, and pushing normal politics and policy aside and just doing that. That's what they're doing. And that may be the center of what's most troubling about this.

You know what? How does that make me feel? It's like it's life. It's normal, right? So I mean, to put this in context, there are a lot of other terrible things going on in the world. The Russian state is unambiguously fascist in all the ways I talked about. And in addition, there's a total mobilization of society to carry out a genocidal war. Since 2022, I've been in Ukraine five times, including to the front multiple times. I'm running lots of projects inside Ukraine, including big projects in the humanities. Because this thing that we're calling fascism, it isn't a national problem. So when you ask me how I feel as an American, I actually think that question is improper because the problem that we're facing is present everywhere, including in Canada, this global move towards authoritarianism. Yeah. No, but it's not just that it's global in some kind of general analytical sense. It's that Trump matters to Putin and Trump also matters to Canadian politicians and the far-right international is much more active than a kind of left-wing international. They learn from one another. But also the overall trends that are bringing this about, like the environment of social media, like wealth inequality, those are also global. And the fears that people have are almost never just about their own country. They're in some way about demographics or immigration. They're about global things, right? So, I don't feel any way at all about it as an American, as a human being. I see this as a way of doing politics which is rising for reasons which I think at least to some extent I could understand and which can be stopped at the level of the nation but can also be stopped at the level of international cooperation. So like one question which I think is very important is how people learn to cooperate across nations about this. If you look at the anti-fascist resistance of the 20s and 30s, it was definitely not people sitting in Italy or Germany or Romania or Spain or Portugal and saying, 'Oh, there's this thing which is happening only in my country.' Right? There was an awful lot of immigration and there was an awful lot of journalism and cross communication and people going to other people's countries and literally fighting in other people's countries as in Spain, right? And that's something which I think is very much worth remembering because you ask me how I feel as an American. Of course, as an American, I feel, you know, I feel disgusted and I feel like I have to do things and I'm doing what I can. But that's not the main thing that's going on. The main thing which is going on is actually global. And it's really, really important not to be in Canada and say, 'Okay, like we just had a nice election and now we're going to look down on the Americans because of course like we've got everything sorted out and our healthcare is great.' You know, that is just exactly the wrong position to take because that position of provincialism and exceptionalism is an invitation for things to go wrong here.

Totally. I agree 100% and that's exactly the right way to look at it, to say okay we have this for example wonderful university system in Canada, we have this incredible university in Toronto, actually there are several great universities in Toronto. But we have, you know, we have a platform and you have to lean forward, right? You have to think okay how do we become exceptional in this particular moment, right? How do we become like what New York was after the second world war or, you know, how do we become what Paris was in the interwar period for a while or how do we become what Prague was, you know, in the late 1930s before it was swallowed up. How do we become a place which attracts the good people, which means the talented people but also the people who have something to offer, and then how do we recognize as you say that this is international, right? So, you know, in my ideal version of this you would have Americans and Brazilians and, you know, Filipinos and others who are coming to Toronto for shorter or longer periods and are interacting with Canadians but also with local democracy activists, right? People in Ontario and in Toronto who are already doing this work.

I don't, I mean I've only, I've lived in this country for about five minutes but my sense would be that if you're Toronto the thing that you would want to do has to do with the level of the province or the country, which is that you would want to create a situation where folks could come and live without insuperable difficulties, for example in buying real estate. Like you would want to have visas which involve some recognition of a political or some kind of exceptional situation which isn't exactly asylum necessarily, but something, that's what you would want to have. You don't have a category which says okay we can take that person from Sudan or Rwanda or, you know, or from the United States because there's some interesting combination of political and intellectual things going on here rather than saying okay it's going to be a work permit and then it's going to be permanent residence and by the way you can't buy a house in Toronto, you know, because there's a 35% tax, right? Like not that this stuff is so horrible but just to answer your question positively, if you are serious about making Toronto or any city in Canada, right, a place, an international hub for this, you would want to have some kind of track where that person who's in Missouri or wherever can say, 'Aha, okay, I see how I can make this work.'