It was no easy thing to risk your job when over a third of the workforce was unemployed, as it was in 1933. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome.

And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. On Tyranny is less an anatomy of tyranny itself than an essay about how we might stop it from happening. Photograph: EPA/Alexey Druzhinin/Ria Novosti/Kremlin Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, lays flowers to commemorate the 73th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. A similar process may well be under way with the advent of the Trump regime in the United States. What makes it worse is that such would-be dictators enjoy popular support for what they are doing. Democracies are now being destroyed in Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Poland, as strongmen such as Putin, Orban, Erdoğan and Kaczyński dismantle civil liberties, silence critical voices and suppress independent institutions. After a period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when constitutional democracy spread to many countries not just in Europe but across the globe, and Francis Fukuyama declared that history had come to an end, the tide seems to have turned.

W inston Churchill once famously declared: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Underpinned by the rule of law and the popular will, democracy is the only way we can prevent the arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power: suppression of free speech curtailment or abolition of civil liberties laws passed by decree without public debate or popular approval arrest and imprisonment without trial torture and murder by unchecked agencies of the government and theft, extortion and embezzlement by politicians in power, who inevitably turn into kleptocrats when democracy is destroyed.

Timothy snyder on tyranny 20 lessons