by Nancy Reese Jones, Stevensville
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That phrase, attributed to George Santayana, is a powerful call to action. In our current political climate, that action is to educate oneself about the history of the past 100 years. What we are now experiencing in Trump 2.0 isn’t new: it is an unfolding reprise of autocracy that enveloped much of eastern and western Europe during that period. Rick Steves, the travel guru, produced a chilling special entitled “Fascism in Europe” that traces fascism’s history from its roots in the aftermath of WWI to its horrific consequences. Released in 2017, it is more relevant than ever in 2025. You can access it at ricksteves.com (https://www.ricksteves.com/tv-programmers/fascism) or on YouTube (I searched “rick steves + fascism).
Another terrific resource that doubles as history lesson and call to arms to resistance is Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of central and western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He wrote “On Tyranny” in 2017 during Trump 1.0 but it, like Steves’ special, has only increased in relevance in the past eight years. It’s a quick read: a pocket-sized, pithy handbook with ideas for how to preserve our freedoms in the face of myriad threats. His “lessons” draw directly upon European history of the twentieth century that, as he writes in the prologue, “shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”