Signs of Hate and Loyalty Symbol Analysis

Authoritarians frequently ask citizens to display symbols of identity and loyalty, which represent not only citizens’ submission to these powerful, tyrannical regimes, but also the process by which tyranny gradually gains power by taking over the spheres of civil society and private life in order to turn normal people into unwitting accomplices to its violence. Authoritarians gradually change the symbolic landscape of a society, Snyder explains, to control citizens psychologically. When their exclusionary and antidemocratic ideas are still not widely accepted, authoritarians introduce them through innocent-seeming symbols that, over time, transform into mandatory signs of loyalty and group membership. For instance, the Nazis initially marked Jewish and “Aryan” (non-Jewish) businesses just to make citizens notice and begin identifying on the basis of this “us versus them” division. Eventually, however, this division—and the symbols like the swastika and gold star that represented it—became the criterion on the basis of which people were allowed to live or sent to die in concentration camps. Initially, displaying a symbol is voicing support for the government, but eventually, to not display the symbol is to signal dissent from the government, which can prove deadly. Snyder implores his readers to notice and refuse to condone these symbols, especially in the early days, by pointing out that they are not as innocuous as they seem and replacing them with symbols of openness and inclusion. By displaying official symbols of hate, even normal people become unwittingly complicit in violence. However, normal people also have significant power to fight the injustices that surround them and help preserve democracy just by putting up inclusionary symbols (or taking down exclusionary ones) all around them.