World-renowned historian Timothy Snyder says there's an urgent need to understand the conditions that led to today's rise of authoritarianism around the world - and that often starts with reckoning with the past.
This winter, his course - Hitler and Stalin Today - will challenge first-year University of Toronto students to explore the Nazi and Stalinist regimes to place them in a global historical context and consider their relevance to addressing contemporary challenges.
Snyder - who joined U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy as a professor and inaugural Chair in Modern European History (supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies) earlier this year after more than two decades at Yale University - hopes the course will help students understand why authoritarian regimes come to power and equip them to become informed stewards of democratic institutions.
He recently spoke to U of T News about the course, the importance of understanding history and tips for navigating undergraduate studies.
Why is the past so important when it comes to understanding contemporary challenges?
Knowing about the past is the beginning of a whole intellectual framework against which you can judge current events.
If people have an idea about what happened in Munich in 1938 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 - just to take examples from my neck of the woods - they have some chance of orienting themselves in the present.
If we don't have any facts about the past, it's all just a very slippery surface and that enables the people who would take power in the present to say whatever they want about the future.
I would go so far as to say that the notion that history is dry, or boring, or it's just a bunch of facts that you're going to forget - that itself is a step towards authoritarianism. That very thing - the dismissal of the past - is what makes things possible in the present that otherwise wouldn't be possible.
What are some historical trends around authoritarian regimes that are evident today?
The way tyranny works in the 21st century is that we get shocked; we get told we're facing some kind of unprecedented situation. And if we believe that, it allows us not to act because if it's unprecedented, who knows what we should be doing? When in fact, everything has a precedent.
Although history doesn't repeat itself, history does offer all kinds of examples and patterns that can help things that seem totally unfamiliar at least seem somewhat familiar.
One general source of the temptation to have a [strongman] leader is the hope that you can be insulated from global forces - that somebody who tells you nice stories about you and your people can protect you from these larger factors. And of course, that's not true, but it's also something we've seen before.
We saw a very similar scenario 100 years ago with the first globalization and the First World War. So, if we can recognize that this larger pattern - of globalization, anxiety and the vain hope for some kind of strongman who will protect you - is normal and to be expected, even though it didn't work very well the last time around, that would be very helpful.
What can students expect from the course - and how do you plan to go about teaching it to such a large, diverse group of students?
This is an introductory class so it doesn't assume prior knowledge of any sort.
In the lectures, I'll mostly be doing descriptions of what happened. But in the reading materials, we're going to concentrate on the writings of dissidents and diarists, and people who lived through or didn't survive these regimes to try to bring to the surface the thinking that took place from the inside - and also to help students find ways to apply this history to our [current] predicament.
[Students] are going to be expected to do readings, to think actively. They're going to have multiple and regular in-class assignments. They're not going to be using digital gear in the classroom - they're going to be expected to be completely physically present. And they will be exposed to something that is very intense, so they will have an opportunity to change the way that they see the larger world - if they put in the work.
The diversity in terms of background is very important - and welcome - because this is, in many ways, a global history class and the events are of such a scale that everyone should know about them. The general idea is to get people to understand that history is about responsibility as opposed to the things you don't need to know.
How are you finding Toronto so far, and what are your impressions of the city?
I'm really happy to be in a big, cosmopolitan city - a city that has so much variety whether it's in terms of intellectual life or in terms of cuisine; it's fantastic to be in a city that feels not just like a big city but a world city - an unpredictable, diverse city.
In this particular moment, I'm glad to be in a place where we can move ahead freely and ambitiously with conversations about freedom and democracy.
I have the feeling that in the months and years to come, Toronto will be a very important node in a larger - not just North American - but a larger global conversation about what the future of freedom and democracy are going to be like.
