You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.
I just made my way through Timothy Snyder’s, NYT bestseller, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century.” He introduces his book with the counter-intuitive observation, “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.”
I like that Snyder puts twists on what we think we know to call us to go deeper.
Timothy Snyder
Snyder is one of the world’s leading historians, and a prominent public intellectual in the United States and Europe. An expert on eastern Europe and on the Second World War, he has written acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history, as well as political manifestos and analyses about the rise of tyranny in the contemporary world.
I often advise REVwords readers of people I trust. Timothy Snyder is one of them. I first encountered Snyder through his writings about Ukraine and then discovered the global popularity of his books.
Snyder warns, “Americans (and I include Canadians) today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, and communism in the twentieth century.”
This is the first of a REVwords series taken from his book, On Tyranny. Lesson #10 is “Believe in truth.”
Follow Snyder on Substack and if you want to go deeper, hear three short speeches he gave about truth and freedom.
I quite enjoyed listening to John Lithgow read the 20 lessons, about 10 minutes long. Watch him here.
Truth
In a 24-hour news cycle where every story is “breaking news,” it’s hard to decipher what is truly important or even what is true.
At the midpoint in his book, Snyder unpacks Victor Klemperer’s observations about the death of truth. Who is Victor Klemperer and why is he trustworthy?
Victor Klemperer was the youngest child of a Jewish family in Germany in 1881. Klemperer studied philosophy and German history in Geneva, Paris and Berlin and completed his doctorate in philology (the study of language in written and oral historical sources) in 1913. He converted to Protestantism in 1912, but under antisemitic Nazi law in the 30s, was removed from his professorial role in May 1935. He and his German-born wife were forced to live in what was known as a “Jews’ House” in Dresden during the war. Post-war he wrote, “The Language of the Third Reich,” documenting how totalitarian power corrupts everyday speech, and how language lays the groundwork for tyranny.
Klemperer noticed truth dying in four modes.
The Death of Truth
The first mode is open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.
Leaders present total lies as if they were true. This constant lying builds a fake reality for people to believe. Giving up real facts means giving up the ability to be free.
Sound familiar?
Timothy Snyder
There is an old chestnut that goes like this: How can you tell when a politician is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving.
We live in an era of a tsunami of lies.
Glenn Kessler, who took charge of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column in January 2011, is considered one of the pioneers in political fact checking.
Fact Checked
He found that America’s President (2016 – 2020) was the most fact-challenged politician he had ever encountered and lamented that “the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements means that we cannot possibly keep up”.
First year: 6 claims per day
Second year: 16 claims per day
Third year: 22 claims per day
Fourth year: 39 claims per day
Total count: He made 30,573 false or misleading statements over his four-year term.
Daily spikes: During intense campaign rallies or major political events, his daily rate often spiked past 50, and on rare occasions, topped 100 statements in a single day.
Prominent fact-checkers like CNN’s Daniel Dale have noted that Trump entered his second term in January 2025 continuing the exact same “relentless lying and inaccuracy” that characterized his first presidency and campaigns.
ABC is often labeled as “fake news” by the President because of fact checking like this on his State of the Union speech in February 2026. This was a measured, factual take on his content.
Alberta and the Truth
February 2026 was also noteworthy in our province of Alberta.
The provincial government in a TV broadcast predicated a nine-question referendum on the “facts” that they “generously” funded health care and schools; that schools and healthcare must be cuts because of immigrants; blamed Justin Trudeau because of his “out-of-control” immigration levels.
It’s not difficult to source the facts:
The Canadian Institute for Health Information, 2025 – Alberta healthcare investment per person was below the national average.
The Fraser Institute, 2025 – Alberta’s investment in public schools was the lowest in Canada.
April 1, 2025, and April 1, 2026, Alberta’s population grew by .9%. It is possible that .9 per cent population growth caused the big deficits in 2025/26 and the $9 billion deficit projected in the 2026/27 budget?
In March 2024 the Alberta government blamed Ottawa for not bringing enough immigrants, “limiting” Alberta’s economy. The premier demanded immigration levels triple.
In February 2026, the government’s chief of staff in Calgary claimed Alberta was undergoing “explosive, unmanageable population growth.” And posed the question, why would Alberta “import” people from “failed systems when our Judeo-Christian heritage and principles have worked so well here.”
Net Gains?
The biggest piece of misinformation I hear is about provincial equalization payments.
Albertans, Jared Wesley and Trevor Tombe write,
“The line of thinking involves ‘small-e’ equalization. It is a measure of fiscal flows. The vast majority (73 percent, to be precise) of this difference is simply the result of Alberta being richer, younger, and having a stronger economy than the rest of the country. We make more, so we pay more in taxes. To close that gap entirely would require making Albertans poorer.”
Alberta doesn’t pay Ottawa. Albertans do. For a vast majority of Albertans, there is a net positive return. That’s a fact.
Equalization is equal. A lawyer making $250,000/year in Charlottetown pays exactly the same for Equalization that a $250,000/year rig worker in Fort McMurray does. The difference is that there are more $250,000/year rig workers in Alberta than $250,000/year lawyers in all of Atlantic Canada.
And let’s remember that Albertan, Stephen Harper, while Prime Minister, bolstered equalization instead of shrinking it. That’s a fact.
Giving up real facts means giving up the ability to be free.
Under Assault
It’s a fact that Alberta is under assault from the US and foreign influencers seeking to stoke anti-immigrant and separatist sentiment through misinformation, disinformation, and lies.
And why for any other reason than to divide Albertans, undermine freedom, and poison relationships in our province?
Between now and October 19th, as always, follow the money.
That’s the truth.
“History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something… History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.” On Tyranny, T. Snyder, p. 126 (Kindle version)
Part 2 is coming soon.
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