How obedience empowers authoritarianism

Historians analyse important periods and events that shape and impact the world in myriad ways. With analytical sweep and the ability to critically evaluate historical events and different periods, intellectual historians also make stimulating predictions for humankind’s collective future. We often get to hear that what has happened in the past may happen again. History may or may not repeat itself but it warns and compels us to draw lessons and informed conclusions—for good or bad.

Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a sort of guide and primer on what lessons the events of the last century carry for us. Snyder argues that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given”. In authoritarian settings, a submissive citizen helps the powerful gain more control because of what the author describes as “anticipatory obedience”. The first lesson, he writes, is: “Do not obey in advance.”

At a time when the world is increasingly becoming both violent and intolerant, Snyder’s wonderfully woven narrative helps us make sense of 20th century events. Majoritarianism, right-wing nationalism, communal polarisation, crony capitalism, and white supremacist ideas are thriving in the 21st century. Nation states are enjoying monopoly over violence. The ongoing horrors of violence in Palestine and Ukraine are fresh in memory.

Worryingly, mobs are having a field day. Not civil society coalitions but violent crowds seem to be acting as pressure groups in glorified “democracies”. Dissent is seldom allowed and never tolerated. Instead, it is crushed. Compliance at any cost is being normalised. Censorship appears to be the order of the day. Globally, the cost of free expression has increased in unimaginable ways.

Snyder’s fundamental contention in the book is why learning from the past is a must to safeguard democracy and democratic institutions. While the author advocates that one should be “as courageous as you can”, he also talks about the value of calmness when the unthinkable arrives. In short, when there is an avalanche, do not try to be a hero.

Also Read | Neoliberalism creates conditions for neo-fascism: Prabhat Patnaik

Importantly, the professor of history underscores the need to defend institutions. Snyder cautions against assumptions that institutions will somehow survive and “automatically maintain themselves against the most direct attacks,” reminding everyone that some German Jews did commit the same mistake about Adolf Hitler and his dreaded Nazi troops.

Additionally, Snyder warns: “Beware the one-party state”. Favouring a multi-party governance model with multiple checks and balances, he writes that a powerful political party “emboldened by a favourable election result or motivated by ideology, or both, might change the system from within”. That is how structural changes are made from within to render opposition political groups redundant. The author cites the example of fascists and Nazis who mastered the art of repression and “salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one”.

“The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents,” he notes. There are multiple lessons that can be drawn from history to understand how to navigate extremely difficult challenges in today’s rapidly changing world, how disasters happen as part of the process, and how to recognise the signals and patterns.

The situation in India

Currently, the world’s oldest and largest democracies are facing a crisis.

American President Donald Trump, in one of his recent executive orders, cut off funding to the Voice of America (VoA) and other liberal and pro-democracy media outlets. In effect, Trump’s executive order dismantled the U.S. Agency for Global Media. All of VoA’s 1,300 journalists and staff were put on administrative leave. This is how strong leaders, riding high on a favourable election result or motivated by ideology, damage institutions, sometimes beyond repair. Trump’s other recent controversial orders and policies, including immigration and tariff, have come under sharp criticism.

In the case of India, the Gothenburg-based V-Dem Institute (that tracks democratic freedoms globally) downgraded its status to “electoral autocracy” first in 2018, and then in its Democracy Report 2024 described it as “one of the worst autocratisers”. Similarly, the US-based Freedom House in its scathing report on India observed: “The (Indian) constitution guarantees civil liberties including freedom of expression and freedom of religion, but harassment of journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other government critics has increased significantly under Modi. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) has increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents. Muslims, scheduled castes (Dalits), and scheduled tribes (Adivasis) remain economically and socially marginalized.” Freedom House ranked India as “partly free” for a third year in a row in its report.

Broader message

Although Snyder’s book is written in the American political context, it carries a broader message. As global citizens, the current happenings in America, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, India, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Palestine, and other parts of the world should concern all those who care for freedom of speech and freedom after speech, and civil liberties.

Although On Tyranny is written in the American political context, it carries a broader message. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Snyder makes a strong case for language and the written word. One of the suggestions (the ninth) in his 20-point quick guide for resisting totalitarianism and tyranny is to value traditional book-reading rather than spend or waste too much time on the Internet. “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.”

He mentions how the epic novels of totalitarianism warned of the “domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought”. Snyder suggests minimising screen time and surrounding yourself with books. He names several books such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, among others.

Some of the other important lessons in Snyder’s book include believing in truth (not fake news), standing out from the rest, establishing a private life (not sharing everything on social media spaces), listening for dangerous words (recognising the signals), learning from peers in other countries, and being kind to our language.

When authoritarian regimes render free expression impossible, all that people share in common is fear. Thoughts about possible repercussions and reprisals pave the way for “anticipatory obedience” and self-censorship. That is exactly what encourages authoritarian regimes to further choke spaces for dissent.

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, books are proscribed and government surveillance is at its peak. Remember Pegasus, the controversial spyware developed by the Israeli cyber intelligence, and how it has allegedly been used in the 21^st century to secretly watch top opposition politicians, investigative journalists, and human rights defenders!

Lessons from the past

What to do in such situations? There are no easy answers. But there are experiences and lessons from the past. Holocaust literature teaches us that survival in extreme situations is possible by embracing hope and not surrendering it. Books, memoirs, dairies, and graphic novels by Viktor E. Frankl, Raul Hilberg, Art Spiegelman, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Eddie Jaku, Heather Morris, and Anne Frank, among others, document the ordeal as a moral responsibility and preserve the memory for posterity.

Romanian-born Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel attends a symposium of Jewish-Hungarian solidarity in Budapest’s parliament on December 9, 2009. | Photo Credit: Laszlo Balogh/ Reuters

Bearing witness to how European fascism destroyed the lives of the Jews in Germany and eastern Europe, Elie Wiesel, in the preface to his award-winning book Night (1956) wrote: “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive: to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

Interpreting historical events is a challenge. Eric Hobsbawm, the noted British historian who passed away in London in 2012, argued, “We need and use history even if we don’t know why”. He noted in the third chapter, “What Can History Tell Us about Contemporary Society?” of his book, On History: “Historians are the memory bank of experience. In theory the past—all the past, anything and everything that has happened to date—constitutes history.” 

In the first (The Age of Capital) of his four exhaustive volumes of modern history, the Marxist historian analysed the “dual revolutions”—the French Revolution and Britain’s Industrial Revolution—that instigated “the greatest transformation in human history”. In The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, the fourth book in the series, he examined important periods and events including the eruption of the First World War in 1914, the Russian Revolution (1917), the Great Depression (1929-30), the rise of authoritarianism, dictatorship and fascism across Europe, and the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union in 1991.

There is never a dull moment when it comes to reading Hobsbawm. In his final analysis, Hobsbawm deduced that “Capitalist Democracy” is facing a serious crisis and it will not be in a position to resolve many problems. Critics have argued that Hobsbawm hasn’t paid much attention to some of the benefits of capitalism; raising living standards or cementing democratic political systems, for instance.

At times, some naively assume that democracies won’t collapse. A little over a century ago, European democracies witnessed unprecedented chaos, political uncertainty and social disorder. All of this paved the way for Nazism, fascism, and authoritarianism, which flourished and become the new normal.

Myth of the strong leader

How did things go so wrong?

At the time, various movements projected one leader or one “strong” individual as the panacea. This meant normalising ambitions of gaining unbridled powers as control freaks, expansionism, occupying territories, controlling perceived hostile populations and their narratives, demonising the perceived “other” through sustained propaganda and fake news, dismantling institutions, creating an industry of fear and ensuring complete obedience, silence, surrender, and self-censorship.

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler gives the Nazi salute during the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics in Berlin on August 1, 1936. | Photo Credit: HO/AFP

So, what lessons can be drawn from the 20th century to understand the existing state of affairs in various parts of the world in the 21th century?

At the outset, it is important to remember that destruction does not happen overnight. Wars don’t happen overnight either. It is a process, not an event. Often, there are periods of deceptive calm and desolation packaged as peace before the proverbial storm hits and causes widespread devastation. The First World War was no exception. Neither was the Second World War.

When, in 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm II took the throne in Deutschland (Germany), the emperor enjoyed mass support of the German people. He was hero-worshipped for his overt display of power and arrogance, impulsive nature and uncontrolled ambitions. Born with a paralysed arm, he would claim that Germany, not Great Britain, would soon rule the sea. Like all tyrants, he too wanted to build a powerful colonial empire.

Georgio Agamben, a renowned Italian philosopher, has extensively written about the Nazi state as the “state of exception” as “a paradigm of contemporary government”. After his ascendance to power on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler immediately suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution dealing with personal liberties. Hitler’s “state of exception” lasted for over a decade before his death and defeat in 1945.

Also Read | From Adolf Hitler to Indira Gandhi: leaders who succumbed to evils of power

About 50 years after Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s then elected Chancellor Adolf Hitler nursed similar ambitions of land grab in the neighbourhood and worked on strengthening two key areas: defence and economy. He identified Jews, a minority in Germany at the time, as the enemies and held them partly responsible for the horrors of violence during the First World War. Hitler issued anti-Jewish decrees which included mandatory wearing of the yellow star (Cross) for the Jews and allowed them to go shopping during specific hours of the day. The socio-economic boycott was an intrinsic part of Hitler’s divisive campaign. Hitler also threatened to annex neighbouring Austria which eventually sealed the fate of Austrian Jews. Later, his troops chased Jews in the Netherlands and parts of Poland and elsewhere. German troops even reached the erstwhile Soviet Republic.

The “Final Solution” arrived as part of the continued process. It was not one isolated event. Hitler’s paramilitary (Nazi troops) in November 1938 organised the anti-Jewish national pogrom known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass). We all know what happened in the dreaded concentration camps such as Auschwitz.

India since 2014

What is happening in America, India, Turkey, and elsewhere, is deeply concerning for those who value freedom and free speech. Raphael Satter, a US journalist, has taken the Indian government to court after his Indian overseas citizenship (OIC) was revoked soon after the publication of a critical story by him on a well-known business tycoon. According to a report in The Guardian, Satter covers cybersecurity for the UK-based news agency in the US. In December 2023, Satter received a letter from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs accusing him of producing work that “maliciously” damaged India’s global reputation. He was informed that his OIC card stood withdrawn.

A mosque covered in tarpaulin in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, on March 12, 2025. | Photo Credit: PTI

This is how OIC cards have been weaponised. The documentary named “India’s Daughter” by Leslee Udwin was banned while renowned painter M.F. Husain was forced into self-exile in 2006.  

In March 2025, ahead of Holi, a Hindu festival of colours, the administration in Uttar Pradesh covered 189 mosques in four districts with tarpaulin sheets as a “security measure” while hundreds of people were taken into preventive custody. Members of the minority community were “advised” to offer the mandatory Friday prayers inside their homes to avoid “untoward incidents”. Media reports said that clerics in some sensitive areas of the region revised the timings of Friday prayers, postponing them to after 2 pm.

In the past, violent incidents of mob-lynching in the name of cow protection (gau raksha), and socio-economic boycott of vendors, fruit-sellers and traders belonging to the minority community in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Jharkhand, and Rajasthan have destroyed lives and weaponised livelihoods. In 2015, Mohammed Akhlaq and his son were dragged from their home in Uttar Pradesh on suspicion of eating or storing beef in the refrigerator. The mob beat Akhlaq to death. His son survived with grievous injury. In 2017, a 55-year-old dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan, from Haryana was lynched to death by cow vigilantes while he was returning home from Rajasthan. Similarly, a 16-year-old boy, Junaid Khan, was stabbed to death inside a train after a mob accused him of carrying beef in his bag. Tabrez Ansari and Mohammed Ishaq were killed in a similar fashion on one pretext or the other.

Also Read | True democracy defeats majoritarianism

According to the research project, Regional Research Center “Transformation of Political Violence”, “beef lynching” in India has become “an instrument of political mobilization for the right wing government” since 2014. The research project demonstrates that from 2014 to 2018, at least 120 incidents of cow-related violence were reported in India in which 46 persons were lynched to death while there were over 200 serious incidents involving assaults and deaths.

Syed Umar Khalid, a PhD scholar and activist, has been in jail for 5 years. Many other human rights defenders, scholars, intellectuals and activists are rotting in jails. For them, the prolonged judicial processes are the punishment. Ajaz Ashraf’s book Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste is a poignant account that reminds us that all-powerful states possess the power to silence dissenters, normalise fear in society, criminalise opinions of free-thinking individuals and dreamers of equality, and rely on institutional memory to settle scores with dissenters at the time of its choosing. The author establishes how the harmless desire to smash class and caste hierarchies comes at a huge cost and how every expression of justice and equality is not only disallowed but also crushed in India, especially since 2014.

Going back to Snyder, he argues, “The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall. Ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

Gowhar Geelani is a senior journalist and author of Kashmir: Rage and Reason.