From the On Tyranny series by Timothy Snyder, Lesson #17 of twenty. Check here for a lesson every Monday or you can find them on YouTube.  They are all short videos, no ads.

“Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”

I’m thinking of moments where a state of exception or the idea of an exception was used to shift from one kind of political system to another.”

“Something like this can happen to us because something like this did just happen to us.”

“A fake emergency is the cover under which a real coup d’etat can take place and of course a real coup d’etat was attempted.”