Timothy Snyder: Can History Save Us From Ourselves?
Channel: De Balie
Date: 2017-02-06

Reflections on the decline of liberal democracy  by Yale professor Timothy Snyder. Snyder gives us 20 Lessons from the 20th Century on How to Survive in Trump’s America.

Full programme, including interview at: 
https://vimeo.com/debalie/timothysnyder

 A week after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, American author and professor Timothy Snyder, one of the greatest historians of our time, will shed light on this new era. What can we expect from the Trump-era and do we want to learn from our past? What will happen to Europe in 2017 after the Pax Americana and the Russian-supported advance of the New Right in the US?

“We seem to be poised between two moments: one of optimism about globalization and its economic and political benefits, and one of pessimism, populism, and, at the extreme, opposition to the liberal democratic consensus. Must we slip from one to the other?” – Timothy Snyder 

After a survey of the history of horrors and achievements of the West in the twentieth century, professor Snyder will offer a few lessons from its darkest moments, which might still be applicable today. To what extend will populism pose a threat to the liberal democratic system? And will Russian interference in Western media influence Western values? What can we learn from history? During this program, Snyder will reflect on these and other questions.

“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.” – Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny

About the author
Timothy D. Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which received the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. He also wrote Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Snyder is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, serves as the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.

Moderator: Caspar van Gemund

Full programme, including interview at: 
https://vimeo.com/debalie/timothysnyder

NEDERLANDS:

http://www.debalie.nl/agenda/podium/timothy-snyder%3a-can-history-save-us-from-ourselves%3f/e_9782730/p_11768233/

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