Timothy Snyder
Washington Post
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Past articles by Timothy:
You can’t understand the war in Ukraine without knowing history
If we deprive ourselves of history, everything is a surprise. → Read More
On the first anniversary of the Ukraine war, what have we learned?
Ukrainians, by their deeds and their words, have given us all a lesson in freedom. Americans clearly had something to learn. → Read More
We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.
If Vladimir Putin prevails in Ukraine, fascists around the world will take comfort. → Read More
By denying a Ukrainian culture, Putin flattens his own
What is ‘Russia,’ with all creativity and dissent crushed and only conformity remaining? → Read More
Putin has long fantasized about a world without Ukrainians. Now we see what that means.
Ukrainians understand what Putin wants. That's why they keep fighting. → Read More
Putin’s rationale for Ukraine invasion gets the history wrong
Vladimir Putin bases his claims of Russian-Ukrainian unity on the story of Vladimir the Great. But he misinterprets the history and its lessons. → Read More
Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths
The Russian leader doesn’t want to believe Ukraine exists. But that’s not how modern nations work. → Read More
Is the Human Impulse to Tell Stories Dangerous?
In “The Story Paradox,” Jonathan Gottschall explores how narrative shapes reality and our own actions. → Read More
Authoritarians like Trump need elections to hold power. They just don’t need votes.
American democracy, for much of its history, has counted on keeping most people away from the ballot box. → Read More
Don’t Underestimate Where Trump's Election Lies Could Take the United States
When you lose, it is good and healthy to know why. In the First World War, the conflict that defined our modern world, the Germans lost because of the overwhelming force assembled by their enemies on the Western Front. After the Americans entered the war, German defeat was a matter of time. Yet German commanders found it convenient instead to speak of a “stab in the back” by → Read More
Don’t Underestimate Where Trump's Election Lies Could Take the United States
When you lose, it is good and healthy to know why. In the First World War, the conflict that defined our modern world, the Germans lost because of the overwhelming force assembled by their enemies on the Western Front. After the Americans entered the war, German defeat was a matter of time. Yet German commanders found it convenient instead to speak of a “stab in the back” by → Read More
Don’t Underestimate Where Trump's Election Lies Could Take the United States
Clinging to power by claiming you are the victim of internal enemies is a very dangerous tactic. → Read More
Trump’s big election lie pushes America toward autocracy
Clinging to power by claiming you are the victim of internal enemies is a very dangerous tactic. Don’t underestimate where this can go. → Read More
Trump thinks he’ll be better off as things get worse
The president keeps betting on chaos and strife. → Read More
What Ails America
Our system of commercial medicine, dominated by private insurance, regional groups of private hospitals, and other powerful interests, looks more and more like a numbers racket. We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care. In America today, malady is physical… → Read More
What Americans should learn from Belarus
Belarus may seem distant, but its experience is more relevant than many realize. → Read More
Remembering Poland’s Doomed Fight Against the Nazis
Roger Moorhouse’s “Poland 1939” looks back at the very beginning of World War II to understand what happened and what might have happened. → Read More
Trump’s ‘Delay the Election’ tweet checks all 8 rules for fascist propaganda
In 40 words, the president contradicts himself, lies, designates enemies, makes an appeal to pride and manufactures a crisis, for a start. → Read More
An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events… → Read More
Democracy and Its Discontents
For the American right, Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States was a moment of political rebirth. Elements of American conservatism had long fostered a reactionary counterculture, which defined the push for civil rights as oppression, resisted the equality of women and the transgression of conventional heterosexual norms, pilloried the hegemony … → Read More