Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Tyranny, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Collapse of American Democracy
Tyranny and the Consolidation of Power
Political Action and Civic Responsibility
History and Memory
Summary
Analysis
Tyrants almost always force armed public servants, like police officers, to support the criminal actions of their secret police forces. For instance, the Soviet secret police executed 682,691 so-called “enemies of the state” with the help of numerous lawyers, police, and bureaucrats. Similarly, while contemporary Germans like think of the Holocaust as an anonymous and murder machine, in reality thousands of police officers also executed Jews. More regular officers participated in these executions than members of the specialized Einsatzgruppen death squads. Although it was not their job, these everyday policemen chose to conform, even though those who refused faced no punishment.
For Snyder, joining the armed forces means making a commitment to serve the nation rather than to merely serve one’s superiors. Accordingly, soldiers and police officers have a moral obligation to refuse orders to commit atrocities. When authoritarian governments exploit people’s obedience and use concepts like “enemies of the state” to dehumanize the people they want killed, their goal is to make the people carrying out atrocities give up their sense of individual moral responsibility, either by putting a sense of duty to the government first, or by teaching people that their individual choices are morally irrelevant (because they are just following orders). But in reality, soldiers’ true duty is the same as their moral responsibility: to protect society as a whole, including from the state itself. They must not let the state deceive them into putting morality aside. Indeed, this recalls the book’s epigraph, from Leszek Kołakowski: “In politics, being deceived is no excuse.”
Themes
