Summary of Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one, and people wanted to celebrate. Our party fulfilled that criterion. There were no hotels in rural Poland in the 1990s, so our guests stayed in local farmhouses or with friends in the nearby town.

#2 Poland was on the cusp of joining the West. But after Law and Justice took over, their authoritarianism became clear.

#3 The Law and Justice government targeted state institutions that it felt were not biased in favor of the party. They fired thousands of civil servants, replacing them with party hacks. They fired army generals who had years of expensive training in Western academies. They even changed the law to make it illegal to discuss the Holocaust, as the party identified an existential threat in the form of Polish-Jewish dialogue.

#4 Some of my friends have become very anti-Semitic. One of them, for example, separated from her British husband, and now spends her days fanatically promoting a whole range of conspiracy theories.