Bob McKillop’s Oct. 3 letter on the dangers of not understanding history’s lessons, “We need to take threat to democracy very seriously,” advises a reading of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William Shirer.
There is a shorter, more easily understood and recent publication, titled “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” by Timothy Snyder, who is a Yale University history professor and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
In it, the author describes 20 steps taken by Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco on the march to totalitarian rule and equates those actions to what the leading candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination, Donald Trump, and zealots within the party are now doing. Our political order is threatened by a new totalitarianism.
In Europe, democracy succumbed to fascism, communism and Nazism. History is a good teacher. During World War II, 407,300 American servicemen died to “make the world safe for democracy.” American extremists dishonor their memories.
Elaine Kahaner
Cape Elizabeth
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