(19) "Be a patriot" (pages 111-114).
(20) "Be as courageous as you can" (page 115).
Followed by the "Epilogue: History and Liberty" (pages 117-126) and "About the Author" (page 127). But the book does not contain an index. However, among the most frequently recurring terms are democracy (and democratic), fascism (and Hitler and Nazi[s]), communism (and Stalin), and tyranny (and the president, meaning now former President Tweety Trump). Among the most frequently recurring names are Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, and George Orwell, among others.
Each chapter begins with a paragraph in boldface print, followed by a succinct explanation based on relevant historical information about the tyrannical twentieth-century totalitarian regimes of fascism and communism, both of which were opposed to democracy - in favor of tyranny, as Snyder operationally defines and explains this term in his "Prologue: History and Tyranny," mentioned above.
For example, Chapter 10: "Believe in truth" begins with the following paragraph in boldface print:
"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights" (page 65).
Amen, I say to that.
Now, Ong's most relevant article about what Snyder refers to as the lesson "Believe in truth" is his 1958 essay "Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self" that is reprinted in the 600-page 2002 anthology An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, pages 259-275).
But also see my article about the philosophy of science and epistemology, "Rehg admirably takes the science wars to a new level" in the online and print journal On the Horizon, volume 18, number 4 (2010): pages 337-345 (Emerald Group Publishing Limited).
In Snyder's Chapter 11: "Investigate," he notes that "in the age of the internet, we are all publishers, [so] each of us bears some private responsibility for the public's sense of truth" (page 79).
In Snyder's Chapter 18: "Be calm when the unthinkable arrives" - as the unthinkable arrived on January 6, 2021, when President Tweet Trump incited domestic terrorists to storm the Capitol. In Snyder's first paragraph, he says, among other things, "When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such event in order to consolidate power" (page 103). However, thus far, now former President Tweety Trump has not been able to exploit the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol in order to consolidate his power.
In Snyder's "Epilogue: History and Liberty," he says, "National populists [e.g., President Tweety Trump] are eternity politicians" (page 122). "In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures" (page 123).
In the politics of eternity, "We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth . . . you think time moves in repeating cycles" (pages 124 and 125).
As the antidote to a mythicized past, Snyder advocates studying history. "History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. . . . History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something" (page 125).
The classic study of cyclical myth is Mircea Eliade's book The Myth of Eternal Return, translated from the French by Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954; orig. French ed., 1949).
Ong's most relevant publication is his 1960 essay "Evolution and Cyclicism in Our Time" that he reprinted in his 1967 book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (New York: Macmillan, pages 61-82).
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