“History teaches but has no pupils,” laments Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann in her dejected postwar novel Malina. “History does not repeat, but it does instruct,” Timothy Snyder ripostes, in the pamphlet On Tyranny, penned in anger as Donald Trump prepared for his inauguration a year ago. As a historian, Snyder sees himself especially called upon to both diagnose and dispute Trump’s regime change and the route towards a totalitarian society it presages.
But Snyder isn’t just any historian; he is an expert on Eastern Europe. Well into the US election campaign, most commentators failed to recognize what was about to happen, …read more
Source: Visegrad Insight