Excerpt from chapter 18 of Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century” Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.

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The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

The Reichstag fire was the moment when Hitler’s government, which came to power mainly through democratic means, became the menacingly permanent Nazi regime. It is the archetype of terror management. twitter.com/fab87f/status/1631120573442015233?s=46&t=R_RcaLt_Az-MJrbc6EHKAA

On February 27, 1933, at about nine p.m., the building housing the German parliament, the Reichstag, began to burn. Who set the fire that night in Berlin? We don't know, and it doesn't really matter. twitter.com/FAB87F/status/1631301708977414148?s=20

What matters is that this spectacular act of terror initiated the politics of emergency. Gazing with pleasure at the flames that night, Hitler said: "This fire is just the beginning."

Whether or not the Nazis set the fire, Hitler saw the political opportunity: "There will be no mercy now. Anyone standing in our way will be cut down."

The next day a decree suspended the basic rights of all German citizens, allowing them to be “preemptively detained” by the police.

On the strength of Hitler's claim that the fire was the work of Germany's enemies, the Nazi Party won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections on March 5th.

The police and the Nazi paramilitaries began to round up members of left-wing political parties and place them in improvised concentration camps. On March 23 the new parliament passed an "enabling act," which allowed Hitler to rule by decree.

Germany then remained in a state of emergency for the next twelve years, until the end of the Second World War.

The authoritarians of today are also terror managers, and if anything they are rather more creative. Consider the current Russian regime. Vladimir Putin not only came to power in an incident that strikingly resembled the Reichstag fire.

Putin then used a series of terror attacks-real, questionable, and fake- to remove obstacles to total power in Russia and to assault democratic neighbors. twitter.com/Gandalfswand/status/1589624211609649153?s=20

When Putin was appointed prime minister by a failing Boris Yeltsin in August 1999, he was an unknown with a nugatory approval rating. The following month a series of buildings were bombed in Russian cities, apparently by the Russian secret state police. wilsoncenter.org/publication/foiled-attack-or-failed-exercise-look-ryazan-1999

Its officers were arrested by their own colleagues with evidence of their guilt; in another case the speaker of the Russian parliament announced an explosion a few days before it took place.

Nonetheless, Putin declared a war of revenge against Russia's Muslim population in Chechnya, promising to pursue the supposed perpetrators and "rub them out in the shithouse." twitter.com/elocio/status/809199894787461120?s=20

The Russian nation rallied; Putin's approval ratings skyrocketed; the following March he won presidential elections.

In 2002, after Russian security forces killed scores of Russian civilians while suppressing a real terrorist attack at a Moscow theater, Putin exploited the occasion to seize control of private television. twitter.com/MrMelPsychRN/status/849267959612755968?s=20

After a school in Beslan was besieged by terrorists in 2004 (in strange circumstances that suggested a provoca-tion), Putin did away with the position of elected regional governors. twitter.com/USEmbRuPress/status/1433361198074974210?s=20

Thus Putin's rise to power and his elimination of two major institutions--private television and elected regional governorships-were enabled by the management of real, fake, and questionable terrorism.

After Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, Russia introduced terror management into its foreign policy.

In its invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Russia transformed units of its own regular army into a terrorist force, removing insignia from uniforms and denying all responsibility for the dreadful suffering they inflicted.

In the campaign for the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine, Russia deployed Chechen irregulars and sent units of its regular army based in Muslim regions to join the invasion. Russia also tried (but failed) to hack the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election.

In April 2015, Russian hackers took over the transmission of a French television station, pretended to be ISIS, and then broadcast material designed to terrorize France. dw.com/en/russian-hackers-suspected-in-french-tv-cyberattack/a-18506170

Russia impersonated a "cybercaliphate" so that the French would fear terror more than they already did. The aim was presumably to drive voters to the Far-Right National Front, a party financially supported by Russia. france24.com/en/20150610-france-cyberattack-tv5-television-network-russia-hackers

After 130 people were killed and 368 injured in the terrorist attack on Paris of November 2015, the founder of a think tank close to the Kremlin rejoiced that terrorism would drive Europe toward fascism and Russia.

Both fake and real Islamic terrorism in western Europe, in other words, were thought to be in the Russian interest. In early 2016, Russia manufactured a moment of fake terror in Germany.

While bombing Syrian civilians and thus driving Muslim refugees to Eu-rope, Russia exploited a family drama to instruct Germans that Muslims were rapists of children.

The aim, again, seems to have been to destabilize a democratic system and promote the parties of the extreme right. The previous September, the German government had announced that it would take half a million refugees from the war in Syria.

Russia then began a bombing campaign in Syria that targeted civilians. Having provided the refugees, Russia then supplied the narrative.

In January 2016, the Russian mass media spread a story that a girl of Russian origin in Germany who had momentarily gone missing had been serially raped by Muslim immigrants.

With suspicious alacrity, right-wing organizations in Germany organized protests against the government. When the local police informed the population that no such rape had taken place, Russian media accused them of a cover-up. Even Russian diplomats joined the spectacle.