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
People must stand out and reject the status quo in order to encourage others to follow. In the 1930s and 1940s, European and American governments and popular culture supported the Nazis. Nobody resisted Germany’s earliest invasions, and the war only started when Poland insisted on fighting back. Germany started winning, but under Winston Churchill’s leadership, Britain successfully defended itself and made Hitler change course and attack the Soviet Union, its ally at the time, which then switched sides and joined Great Britain. This was a crucial turning point in the war, but Churchill’s resistance was unpopular and unusual at the time, as was Poland’s insistence on fighting back.
Poland and Great Britain’s insistence on fighting back is significant because at first, the odds were overwhelmingly against them. But they chose to “stand out” to build momentum, not necessarily because they expected to win. This shows how resistance is never futile, because even when it fails in the short term, it can set a precedent in the long term. This applies to individuals as much as nations.
Themes
During Germany’s occupation of Poland, Teresa Prekerowa was a high schooler in the capital city of Warsaw, and she watched the Nazis force the city’s Jewish residents to move into a ghetto, or designated neighborhood. While most people simply stopped associating with Jewish people, Prekerowa instead took medicine and food to the ghetto, and she even convinced a friend’s family to escape the ghetto only months before the Nazis started exterminating its residents. In adulthood, Prekerowa became a historian and studied the Holocaust. She always insisted that she acted rationally and normally, even though contemporary people would see her behavior as “exceptional.”
The human tendency to conformity multiplies the already dangerous human tendency to obey authority (which Snyder described in his first chapter). Through Prekerowa’s case, Snyder suggests that individual acts of resistance are important not only because of the direct impact they make but also because of the example they set for others: they show people that conformity is not the only option, and that not everyone accepts all of the government’s orders as legitimate. Of course, history can set the same kind of moral example for present-day people. Indeed, Prekerowa’s insistence on calling her actions normal rather than “exceptional” shows that she simply refused to buy into the new morality that the Nazis wanted to push on her and her society—rather, she acted on the ordinary, normal moral principle of helping one’s neighbor.
Themes
