Shadows of Tyranny
with Ken McGoogan
Hosted by David Currie
This literate and clear-eyed look at the parallels between Europe in the 1930s and North America today should be required reading for every Canadian.
Join bestselling historian and author Ken McGoogan as he delves into dictatorships of the twentieth century to sound this crucial alarm about the possibility of democratic collapse in the US and its implications for Canada.
Shadows of Tyranny draws on this sense of looping history to show how figures like Donald Trump replay many aspects of the authoritarianism that spread in the middle of the last century. Calling not only on Orwell and Atwood, but also on H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Jack London and Hannah Arendt, McGoogan traces the ways democracy succumbed to paranoia, polarisation, scapegoating and demagoguery less than a hundred years ago. These same forces, he argues, are now driving a far-right movement in the United States that seems devoted to using Trump’s warped charisma as a “wrecking ball” to clear the way for autocracy, closely resembling the dictatorships that stoked the Second World War.
How should Canadians respond, officially and individually, to the possibility of democratic collapse in our powerful neighbour to the south? Shadows of Tyranny offers a galvanizing image of a dark possible future, as well as an urgent call to act in the belief that we still have the time and ability to ward it off.
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