36
votes
Book recommendations for regular people living through fascist/authoritarian regimes?
I have a sudden unexplainable urge to learn about how people got through it, and I don't really mind what century or location.
I'm talking about people who couldn't be heroes, who couldn't just leave, and just had to do what they could to survive.
Does anybody know any books that touch on this subject matter?
I’ve been listening to On Tyranny: 20 Lessons for the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. Each chapter is focused on a lesson learned by people resisting authoritarian regimes.
Autocracy Inc. by Anne Applebaum is also an excellent read about how modern authoritarians operate and have adapted to resistance throughout the twentieth century.
And a recent fiction book I found surprisingly prescient: The Mercy of Gods by James SA Corey (The Expanse authors). Deals with the different psychological responses individuals under go during a harsh shift into an authoritarian regime (in this case an alien invasion).
Probably not quite what you had in mind, but the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" has been going around recently. It's a short pamphet aimed at normal people looking for easy, low risk ways to fight fascism and written in 1943/44 (I wonder what related thing was happening around that time...).
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
More readable scan of a booklet here, especially on mobile:
https://ia601309.us.archive.org/14/items/Simplesabotage/Simplesabotage.pdf
.gov hosted pdf providing advice about fighting facism seems a bit like a canary wrt the removal of info from the other .gov websites.
I'm not sure we need a canary at this point.
My response was that it sure looks a lot more like a honeypot than a canary. Yep, let's make it super easy to see who's downloading it.
Eh, it's a historical CIA handbook from the 20th century that was used to combat enemy regimes. I don't think there's any deep conspiracy theory here.
Agreed, media consumption and spending habits are going to be much better flags if anyone is trying to target potential resistance members.
Ah yeah that sounds more CIA like.
also transcribed on project gutenberg
Less a guide on what you should do under a fascist regime, and more simply a depiction of the internal experience of everyday people who end up collaborating with the regime: Milton Sanford Mayer's 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945'. It's simply a series of interviews with ten members of the Nazi party - not men of distinction, but just 'regular' people with mundane lives. I see this book as a useful tool for understanding those of our (former) friends, family, neighbors etc. who support Trump or at least are ambivalent to his abuses. It also contains one of my favorite quotes explaining why 'the slow creep of fascism' is in fact a slow creep:
You reminded me of a book I read a few years ago that I thought I'd crack open again.
The Authoritarians -- free download
Here's an excerpt from the end of the book, which was actually just referring to getting out and voting, so it may be too little too late...
Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy and Suki Kim’s Without You, There Is No Us are both about living in North Korea.
Demick’s is the better and more illuminating of the two books, but I found both of them to be worthwhile reads.
Neither is an exact fit for what you’re looking for: Demick interviewed defectors, while Kim was working with kids from “wealthy” families. Still, each gives a lot of insight into everyday life within North Korea.
Seconding Nothing to Envy, I enjoyed the way she wove the stories together, and it felt like a pretty good on-the-ground account of a few different viewpoints the average person might hold in that situation, as well as how/if they changed.
Another great one is Cambodian Witness, which is a memoir rather than journalism. This one really drives home how very quickly things can go wrong, how they can just as suddenly be righted (somewhat, obviously nothing was ever right again the way it had been, but), and how those on the ground can only really do their best and get a little lucky. Which doesn't seem like it would be comforting, but honestly for me it kinda was.
Dancing Bears: People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny is another investigative reporting similar to the first one, but here we're looking at post-Soviet society and how trauma can color one's memory in ways that seem unintuitive.
All three are very well written and engaging. Heavy, obviously, but well worth the read.
I will bear witness, diary of Victor Klemperer,
I can recommend Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
These are all great history-related recs, but does anyone have any good fiction to recommend? I guess the obvious one is Handmaid's Tale, but I wasn't sure what else should go on the list.
Here are two related r/AskHistorians threads I just found: