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The TOTALITARIANISM of Stalin, Hitler and... Trump? With Prof. Marci Shore · The Smart Cookies podcast

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Marci Shore is a historian, chair in European
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intellectual history, a professor at the Munk
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School of Global Affairs, and the author of the
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extremely acclaimed book, The Taste of Ashes,
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The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.
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Professor, welcome to the program. Thank you,
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Zaza. Thank you for the invitation. Superbly
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bizarre times we're living in, mildly put, and
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we're going to come. to that later on. But since
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you're an expert in totalitarianism, which is,
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if I can employ a modicum of dark humor, an extremely
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yummy, if not the yummiest subject for every
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proud Eastern European such as myself. So I wanted
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us to explore what that is, actually, because
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this word gets thrown around a lot, especially
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when people are trying their best to annihilate
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each other on Twitter or something. So when we
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say... So totalitarianism. Historically, we usually
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think of Hitler and Stalin and perhaps Mussolini
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before them. But that's probably not really where
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this system of governing, for lack of a better
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word, really begins with just those three figures.
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Or does it? Well, let me first say that all of
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these words that we use, totalitarianism, fascism,
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authoritarianism, they're all imperfect. You
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know, they are all attempts to create mediating
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layers between the particular and the universal
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that will allow us to compare disparate phenomenon.
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In real life, of course, no given historical
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situation is exactly the same as any other historical
1:39
situation. It's also the case that once we immerse
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ourselves in the infinite singularity and particularity
1:47
of any given event, we make it very hard to process
1:50
or to see anything. There's a very famous passage
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in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason where he says
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that concepts without intuitions are empty and
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intuitions without concepts are blind. And Kant's
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founding... The founding idea of epistemology
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was that we need both the concepts that are structuring
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our thoughts and the particular sensory data
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that is coming to us from real life in order
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for us to be able to think or cognize anything.
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There has to be some kind of synthesis of the
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particular data with larger structure and concepts.
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And that's just a basic insight that we need
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metaphors, we need concepts in order to be able
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to think. They are never perfect and no two situations
2:43
are ever identical. And so I always caution my
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students, do not fetishize the concepts. We use
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them as... hermeneutical devices as tools to
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help us think critically, but they should not
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be fetishized. Totalitarianism, really, as a
3:00
concept in some ways distinct from autocracy,
3:03
from authoritarianism, is born largely of the
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revelation that there was something fundamentally
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similar in the phenomenon of Nazism and Stalinism.
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Despite their enmity and despite their ostensibly
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being on radically different ends of the political
3:23
spectrum, there was something that was fundamentally
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similar about them. And how we use that concept
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really most famously and most essentially comes
3:33
from Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism,
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in which she tries to tease out what was distinctive
3:41
about these forms of tyranny. in contrast to
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other forms. And I do think it's a useful concept
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because as in any moment in history, you have
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elements of continuity and elements of discontinuity.
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And again, in one way or the other, they shouldn't
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be fetishized. We should use them to help us
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understand. So one of the things that Hannah
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Arendt said was that, okay, in previous... previous
4:08
corrupt and tyrannical political regimes, you
4:12
always had lying in politics. There have always
4:15
been a role that was played for falsehood in
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political power. And she said, but these pre
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-modern, pre -totalitarian forms were essentially
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like tears in the fabric of reality. The lies
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were places where reality was torn. And the careful
4:33
observer could spot the place where something
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had been severed and sewn back together. She
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said, what's distinctive about what we're getting
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in phenomenon like Nazism and Stalinism is a
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complete reconstruction of reality created in
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such a way as to be seamless. There's no longer
4:56
a tear to perceive. And that was a fundamental
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insight. So it's not just the use of terror.
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It's not just the use of oppression. It's not
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just the fact that there's one guy in a leadership
5:08
principle. It also has to do with these big existential
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epistemological questions about what is true
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and what is false. And it has to do in a very
5:19
profound way with the relationship between public
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and private. And among the other key insights
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that Arendt had is that in previous forms of
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autocracy, be it monarchy, sometimes more tyrannical,
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sometimes less tyrannical, there was always a
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private space that you could stay out of the
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way of power. And at a certain point, and most
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classically in Stalinism, that space disappears.
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There is no longer such a space because suddenly
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the regime is interested in everything, not just
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what you're doing on the street or at work, but
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also what you say to your lover in bed and the
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thoughts that are going on inside your own mind.
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And that was something new. So that is basically
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the crucial distinction between a totalitarian
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state and a mere dictatorship. let's say i'm
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thinking about like of course there's a lot of
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legends about north korea because it's such a
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secretive and closed off society but apparently
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they have radios that they can't really turn
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off even when they're you know at home that they're
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always projecting these speeches i don't know
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but that made me think of there's really no private
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space anymore where you can retreat whereas in
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a in a uh in a dictatorship you could still retreat
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to a private space. Is that what we're saying?
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Right. This collapsing of the distinction between
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public and private, this striving for absolute
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transparency was a classic feature of how she
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was using this term totalitarianism. So that's
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where the term comes from. And that's where the
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concept comes from. But who, I mean, what was
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the first historical incarnation of a regime?
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such as that. Is it with Nazi Germany? Is it
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with Stalin? Is it with Mussolini? Or is it way
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before that, that we already see some elements?
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I would say it's profoundly modern. I think she
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would put Stalin first and then Hitler and Mussolini
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as a more imperfect version. Origins of Totalitarianism,
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which is still the book I go back to, it's a
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very thick book, it's hundreds of pages, I go
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back to again and again with my students, really
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goes through Nazism and Stalinism and tries to
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tease out the common elements and really looks
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at these existential variables like the destruction
7:46
of subjectivity before physical death. You know,
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what does it mean to get rid of personhood before
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you have actually physically annihilated something?
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And she makes a very controversial statement
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there, which is that before the Jews were led
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to the gas chambers, they were already dead.
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Their subjectivity had been killed as spontaneous
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agents. And she also makes the claim that this
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totalitarianism is ultimately striving to eradicate
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subjectivity, not only on the part of the victims,
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but also on the part of the perpetrators. So
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that ideally anyone is ideally suited for either
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role. And the distinction begins to be effaced.
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Yeah, we're going to talk. more about that later
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on but i wanted to ask what are some of the key
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sort of essential building blocks of a totalitarian
8:32
regime things that absolutely must possess to
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be recognized as such for example is it necessary
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that it fosters a cult of personality or have
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an extensive secret police program or that part
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of its ideology is predicated on hunting for
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internal enemies all the time or could it do
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without one of these or all of those Well, that's
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a good question. I mean, social scientists then
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like to come up with lists. But in real life,
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you can't do a control study. You can only empirically
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describe the different elements. You know, certainly
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the role of the secret police is key. You know,
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and classically, this situation in which everyone
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is potentially an agent provocateur of everybody
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else. Anyone can denounce anyone else at any
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time. Some sort of eternal inquisition program.
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Yes. And you create this climate of constant
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suspicion where the fabric of society is eroded
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by the fact that nobody can trust anybody else.
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That's why she uses the phrase a lot, atomization.
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And that's something I've been coming back to
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a lot lately, the way in which these regimes
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use terror to foster atomization. So that everybody
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is isolated. Nobody knows who is going to be
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next. Everybody tries to retreat. And it erodes
9:55
the possibility for solidarity. which is why,
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in some sense, the only possible antidote to
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that kind of atomization is solidarity, which
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is very hard to get to in a situation where everyone
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has been terrorized. And part of the terrorizing
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and this climate of everyone can denounce everybody
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else at every time is this arbitrariness, because
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you don't know who will be next. And that keeps
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everybody in this state of insecurity. You know,
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which is one of the things I've been, there's
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a great word in Russian that we don't actually
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have in English, which you might have in either
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Slovenian or Croatian, you can tell me, which
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is proizvol, which is literally arbitrariness,
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kind of always already tinged with tyranny and
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the potential for terror. And it's the way in
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which this capriciousness, you could kind of
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use willkur in German, you know, already has
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a very dark side. And so you don't know – the
10:56
secret police can come knock at anyone's door
10:58
at any time, and you don't know who is going
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to be next. And that creates a situation of mass
11:06
disempowerment and atomization in which the social
11:10
ties that ideally are present in society are
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eroded. I'm particularly interested in those
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moments where things – begin to spiral from the
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the current system to a totalitarian one like
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the the tipping points if they exist so to speak
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and let's take let's maybe take germany because
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russia had a pretty brutal tsarist regime before
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the revolution already so it's complicated but
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while germans actually enjoyed at least a period
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of liberal democracy the the weimar era before
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the rise of the nazis but but here's what i'm
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wondering when hitler begins to take over our
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regular people instantly aware of the seismic
11:48
shift for the worse? Or do things seem gradual,
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almost organic to them? Because we must have
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a lot of personal diaries or correspondences
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available from that time. Yes. And for the most
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part, it's the latter, which is one of the things
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that's so scary. The general rule is that it's
12:07
step by step. You know, Alexander von der Wellen
12:11
here, that president in Austria, once said at
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one of the commemorations of Auschwitz, he said,
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Auschwitz ist nicht von Himmel gefallen. You
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know, Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It's
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step by step by step. There's a very famous speech
12:26
that Toni Morrison gives, I think at Howard University
12:29
in 1995, where she talks about it. It's one step
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and then another and then another. And so the
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borders recede very gradually. You know, and
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that's it's one of the tricks in a way, because
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people normalize the abnormal. And it's especially
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easy to do that when things are happening gradually.
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And that's traditionally been the way it's happened.
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You know, people swallow one thing and then another
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thing and then another thing, you know, and then
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before you know it, you're in this space you
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never could have imagined. And that's why it's
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so important to be vigilant. Whew, bad news.
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I know, it's not very cheerful. But necessary.
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So in the 1930s, we have, like you said, these
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two nightmarish totalitarian systems in Europe.
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We had Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet
13:21
Union. What are some of, if we're a little bit
13:24
more concrete, what are some of the similarities
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and some of perhaps the differences between the
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two? Well, you have a cult of a leader. You have
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a search for scapegoats. You have demands for
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certain kinds of unconditional loyalty. You have
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interesting things happening with language and
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the way that public language is manipulated.
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You have terror. You know, now, I mean, among
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the, I find Stalinism kind of intellectually.
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a much more interesting phenomenon than Nazism.
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I mean, in some sense in Nazism, the line between,
14:00
you know, who is the scapegoat and who is part
14:03
of the chosen class is much more stable. You
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know, you may be eroding the subjectivity, you
14:11
know, of those guards in the camps, but you know
14:16
if you're an Aryan or a non -Aryan. There's that
14:19
famous movie you may have seen, Untergang, you
14:21
know, that's based on the diary of Hitler's secretary,
14:26
a fictionalized version of that. Yes. I mean,
14:31
you see in those last days of the bunker that
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the people who are around him do feel that they
14:41
are part of this chosen class and chosen group
14:44
and that he's not about to turn on them. And
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that was not true under Stalin. There really,
14:50
really was no safe space and no position under
14:53
Stalin. Because whoever was the leading Bolshevik,
14:58
you know, or the most important second party
15:00
member could be declared an enemy of the people
15:03
who had always been a spy and saboteur and working
15:07
for the bourgeoisie the next moment. And so there
15:11
really was no safe space. The way in which the
15:15
party turns against itself. during the Stalinist
15:19
purges is quite distinct, I think, from anything
15:22
that happens under Nazism. And it's much more
15:25
complex in that sense. And also there's something
15:28
quite primitive about the idea of saying that,
15:31
you know, okay, you know, we are the chosen people
15:33
and these other people who are of some other
15:36
racial category, you know, we're going to scapegoat
15:39
them, we're going to purge them. But the categories
15:42
of the people being purged under Stalinism and
15:45
the attempts to create You know, a utopian world
15:49
based on these purified people, which was not
15:53
necessarily racially based at all. I think it's
15:56
psychologically more complex and I think it's
15:58
intellectually more complex. And one of the things
16:02
that I remember hearing back in the 90s when
16:05
the Communist Party archives were opening, which
16:07
is when I became. A historian with some of the
16:10
the older people in the field said, well, you
16:12
know, we find out that the big secret about the
16:15
communists that we learned from opening the Communist
16:17
Party archives is that they really were communist.
16:21
They really they really did believe that they
16:25
were going to build this future. And they were
16:29
willing to make all sorts of sacrifices for it.
16:33
Even when, for example, after Stalin is gone
16:35
and then Khrushchev takes over and he's denouncing
16:38
Stalin, aren't these fellas saying, like, maybe
16:41
the system we've created is pretty monstrous?
16:45
Like, why wasn't, when there was the chance of
16:48
this kind of a break when Stalin died, nobody
16:52
kind of did any sort of, I don't know, cleaning
16:55
of the closet of sorts? Well, there was three
16:59
years. There were three years between Stalin's
17:02
death in March 1953 and Khrushchev's secret speech
17:06
in February 1956. The question of why it took
17:11
those three years is another question. And the
17:14
question of when does Stalinism end, does it
17:16
end in March 1953, does it end in February 1956,
17:19
remains an open question. But that speech, there
17:24
are a few moments in history that have the electrifying,
17:28
tearing effect. of Khrushchev's speech. And people
17:32
really were devastated. People really felt like
17:36
Boleslav Beirut has some kind of heart attack
17:40
or mental breakdown or physical breakdown and
17:43
never comes back to Poland. He dies some 10 days
17:45
after that speech in Moscow. But the sense of
17:49
what it did and the devastation that I, one of
17:55
the things I read through years and years ago
17:56
was the The Czechoslovak Writers Union was forced
18:01
to have a meeting in the wake of Khrushchev's
18:03
secret speech to discuss these revelations. And
18:08
these writers were traumatized, you know, and
18:10
people stood up there and said, listen, my generation,
18:14
we grew up with Stalin's name. And my best friends,
18:18
they went to their deaths in the Nazi camps with
18:20
Stalin's name on their lips. And now you're telling
18:24
me. Well, no, I'm not going to apologize. I'm
18:27
not ashamed. I mean, I can also say that just
18:30
as recently as two weeks ago, three weeks ago,
18:34
the Russian Communist Party, the Communist Party
18:37
of the Russian Federation, officially declared
18:40
that Khrushchev's secret speech was erroneous,
18:44
you know, and based on historical prejudice,
18:47
you know, and they are trying officially now
18:49
and formally to rehabilitate Stalin. And this
18:54
is happening in Russia, you know, where arguably,
18:57
you know, they bear the most responsibility for
19:00
Stalin, but also they were at the center of the
19:03
people who were victimized by Stalin. So there's
19:05
a sadomasochistic element to this. Okay, sorry,
19:09
but we do back to back to Stalinism. We have
19:13
to talk about the purges because this must be
19:15
one of the most grotesque chapters in 20th century
19:18
history. And I'm still struggling to understand.
19:21
Why people, and especially people in Stalin's
19:23
inner circle, fellow communists, basically just
19:27
sat around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for
19:30
their turn, even though they knew fully well,
19:32
like you said, there might be a knock at the
19:34
door and they're going to be up next. They're
19:36
usually along with their families. I mean, how
19:38
did that work? It really is that heart of darkness
19:42
at the very essence of the Stalinist experience
19:46
that many, many historians have torn their hair
19:49
out trying to understand. how people were broken
19:53
in such a way. And there are, you know, history
19:57
is always both overdetermined and underdetermined.
19:59
I mean, in individual cases, you could see certain
20:02
factors working. They used torture. They used
20:04
terror. You know, they used essentially holding
20:07
threats against somebody's family against them.
20:10
You can get people to confess to a lot if you
20:13
torture them, if you threaten to torture their
20:15
children. In that sense, it's not such a mystery.
20:18
But the But the other thing is that these diehard
20:22
Bolsheviks, part of it was a sense of, if this
20:27
is what the party needs from me to take the blame
20:32
for X or Y, I am prepared to do whatever the
20:36
party needs for me. That played a role. These
20:40
people who absolutely had devoted their lives
20:44
to this project. And the sense that if it has
20:47
all gone wrong, If this was all some kind of
20:50
a grotesque mistake, you know, if we have really
20:54
led humanity not to liberation, but to terror,
20:58
then how can I go on living at all? You know,
21:01
then what is the point? Then I've given my life
21:04
for something truly evil. I mean, this is what
21:07
you see. It's best that I carry on instead of
21:09
potentially uncovering that we've all made like
21:11
a colossal mistake. Or that I allow myself to
21:15
be sacrificed, you know, or that there were quite
21:17
a lot of suicides as well. But this is what you
21:20
see in like Arthur Kessler's Darkness at Noon.
21:23
I haven't read it. I have it on my to read list.
21:26
Yeah. It's about show trials. That's the classic
21:28
account. I mean, it's really based above all
21:32
on the Bukharin trial in Moscow. And Bukharin's
21:37
confession at the end in which he's embracing
21:39
his own guilt and he's embracing the fact that
21:43
he's about to be executed. Another story I can
21:47
tell you is that when Rudolf Slonsky and his
21:51
co -conspirators, all of these high -ranking
21:53
communists, 14 of them, were put on trial in
21:56
Prague in 1952. AutoCats gets up there. and gives
22:03
a closing speech that is taken almost verbatim
22:07
from Kessler's Darkness at Noon. And Kessler
22:10
took it from Bucharin's Confession in the 1930s.
22:13
So it was too fantastic to be believed, you know,
22:17
in Moscow in the 1930s. Kessler exposes it in
22:20
the meantime in this novel that millions of people
22:23
read. You know, AutoCat spits it back out in
22:27
Prague in 1952, and they buy it, and they hang
22:31
him. And it's an extraordinary story. In fact,
22:35
the French director, Ruth Silberman, recently,
22:38
a few years ago, 2022, 2021, made a documentary
22:45
film about the Slonsky trial using very newly
22:49
discovered footage from the trial. And it's fantastically
22:52
good. It's definitely worth seeing. And trying
22:56
to figure out how did these people confess? How
22:59
do you get these people to confess, and how do
23:01
you get a whole population to believe in it?
23:04
At the time of the Slonsky trial, all of the
23:07
newspapers splattered across the front page,
23:09
death to the fascists, death to the imperialists.
23:13
The workers demand death, death, death. It's
23:16
this orgy of bloodlust. By the way, if we backtrack
23:21
just a little bit, because I'm not too familiar
23:22
with Bukharins. case, how did one, perhaps if
23:26
we stay with him, how did one fell out of favor
23:30
with the regime? Very easily because it was largely
23:33
arbitrary. So it didn't take much. You didn't
23:37
have to pelt Stalin with eggs to be denounced
23:41
and then arrested. No. By the height of the terror,
23:45
you didn't have to do anything. You didn't have
23:48
to make a critical remark. But one of the things
23:52
that... One of the characteristics is that because
23:57
anyone could denounce anyone at any time, everyone
24:02
was both infinitely powerful and infinitely vulnerable.
24:05
You want the apartment of the person next door?
24:07
Well, you might mention that you thought that
24:10
person was rolling his eyes when there was the
24:12
mention of Stalin. But somebody could do the
24:15
same thing to you. And so that spirals. There's
24:19
also this sense of contagion. Somebody gets arrested,
24:22
and then anyone who has any association with
24:24
them gets arrested. One of the things I'm going
24:28
to make students read this year is some passages
24:31
from Nadezhda Mandelstam's extraordinary memoir,
24:34
which is a book everybody should read, Hope Against
24:36
Hope. You know, and she talks about their protocols
24:39
when, when Osip, when Oshet Mandelstam, her husband
24:42
gets arrested and Anna Hakhmatova's son comes
24:45
over that morning, you know, and she says immediately,
24:48
Osip got arrested, go away. She said, yeah, we
24:50
have a protocol. When somebody gets arrested,
24:52
everybody immediately goes as far away as possible
24:55
because any kind of contact can be a contagion.
24:58
You know, and because of this contagiousness,
25:01
everything spreads. There was no safe space of
25:04
any line to stand on, which I think was different
25:06
in Nazi Germany. I think you did have a choice,
25:09
I think, to be on a good side of Hitler, you
25:13
know, to know what you had to do and what you
25:16
had to say. And that was just not true in the
25:18
Stalinist terror. There was absolutely no safe
25:20
space. And Molotov, they purge his wife and he
25:24
remains loyal. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. But
25:28
then it was completely arbitrary. How did you
25:30
get selected, so to speak, by this rotisserie
25:32
of death? I mean, probably wasn't a good idea
25:35
to be close to Stalin, that much is certain,
25:37
right? Certainly the party was turning against
25:39
itself. You know, I think it was more dangerous
25:42
in the cities. But then there was also a huge
25:46
amount of arbitrariness involved. Another question
25:50
I believe is always worth asking here is how
25:53
do... ordinary people end up becoming like you
25:56
said not just believers but henchmen who are
25:58
enacting these massive crimes within the regimes
26:01
and since you've clearly studied the work of
26:04
anna aren't extensively perhaps we could illustrate
26:07
this with the example of adolf eichmann the notorious
26:10
ss officer who helped organize the holocaust
26:12
and who she wrote about in her book eichmann
26:15
in jerusalem now this is another topic I've been
26:19
going back to a lot lately. In fact, I was just
26:21
in Kiev at the Kiev Book Arsenal and my brilliant
26:25
philosopher colleague Vladimir Yermolenko and
26:28
I had a public discussion precisely about Hannah
26:31
Arendt and the problem of evil. And to what extent
26:34
can Arendt's model of Eichmann and the banality
26:37
of evil be extended? So for your viewers who
26:40
haven't read and reread obsessively the Eichmann
26:43
book, as I have, I'll just say a little bit about
26:45
this. So Adolf Eichmann was the the organizer
26:49
of the final solution to kill all the Jews in
26:53
Europe. He was not the theoretician. He was not
26:57
the ideologue. He was the very practical organizer
27:00
who figured out which trains were going where
27:03
and how you were going to get these people to
27:05
that camp and those people to this other camp.
27:07
He was basically a bureaucrat. After the war,
27:11
he escaped. He fled to Argentina. He was living
27:14
under an assumed name. The Israeli Mossad, the
27:17
Israeli secret police, pursued him for years
27:21
and years. They finally catch him in Argentina,
27:26
1960, 1961, something like that, and illegally
27:30
kidnap him and bring him back to Jerusalem to
27:33
stand trial. And he is put on, essentially on
27:37
show trial, as not just... an example of revenge
27:42
or vindication or just punishment, but also as
27:45
a pedagogical exercise, as a lesson in teaching
27:49
a new generation of Israelis what happened during
27:52
the Holocaust. It was really a moment of breaking
27:55
open what had been a very long silence, you know,
27:59
about what had happened. And so person after
28:01
person and all of these survivors who had ended
28:03
up in Israel got up to testify. The three judges,
28:07
the three Israeli judges were all native German
28:10
speakers, which was important because they were
28:13
listening to Eichmann in his own language. Hannah
28:17
Arendt, who was in the United States, is sent
28:20
by the New Yorker to cover that trial. She flies
28:24
to Jerusalem. She's also listening in her native
28:27
language. I thought of this, by the way, years
28:29
later when Slovenka Drakulic went to The Hague
28:32
to listen to the war crimes trials of Yugoslav
28:34
war criminals, because it was significant that
28:36
she was listening in her own language and not
28:38
through the translator. So Hannah Arendt goes
28:41
and she's listening to Eichmann. And what completely
28:44
shocks her is the discrepancy between the sheer
28:52
monstrosity of what this person has done and
28:55
the total mediocrity of his person. Not the most
29:00
charismatic guy out there, has to be said. No,
29:03
he wasn't charismatic at all. I mean, he was...
29:06
you know, he was defensive, he was self -justifying,
29:11
but he was basically a kind of middle range bureaucrat
29:15
who was not particularly bright. She said every
29:18
sentence he uttered sounded like a cliche. He
29:21
was incapable of really thinking for himself
29:23
in any kind of critical way of coming up with
29:25
his own language. And she said his inability
29:27
to talk struck me as being part of an inability
29:30
to think and namely to think from the point of
29:33
view of somebody else. But what struck her is
29:35
that this man was not a monster. He wasn't motivated
29:38
by hate or by lust or by any kind of demonic
29:43
evil. He was basically an opportunistic bureaucrat,
29:47
from his point of view, trying to perform his
29:51
duties very diligently and as well and as enthusiastic
29:54
as possible in the hopes that he would be promoted.
29:58
And his defense is, well, the loyal subjects
30:01
of good regimes are lucky. The loyal, hardworking
30:05
subjects of bad regimes are unlucky. I was a
30:07
loyal, hardworking subject of a bad regime. I
30:09
happen to be unlucky. And of course, people who
30:13
are bureaucrats who would like to be promoted,
30:17
move up, who are trying to do their work conscientiously
30:20
in order for there to be some kind of social
30:23
mobility or career gain, that's a very ordinary
30:26
thing. So how does this very ordinary thing land
30:31
us in Auschwitz? And that's the question she's
30:35
asking. How is that the total banality of his
30:41
motives, the ordinariness, the fact that you
30:44
want to see in this man a demon, and he's really
30:48
just a kind of pathetic clown. What does that
30:51
mean for how we understand evil? And what was...
30:56
the answer that she came up with her answer is
31:00
that ultimately Well, there are two answers.
31:03
Her answer is that ultimately only goodness really
31:06
has depth, and there's something very thin about
31:10
evil. But the other answer, which she develops
31:12
further in Life of the Mind, she says that is
31:16
there something about the faculty of thinking
31:20
as such that is connected to being able to make
31:24
moral distinctions? And maybe the greatest crime
31:27
is a failure to think. i think people completely
31:31
misinterpreted this book they hated arent for
31:33
this they felt like she was trying to exculpate
31:35
eichmann and saying ah he wasn't such a bad guy
31:38
but that was a misunderstanding for arent Eichmann's
31:42
crime was not that he hated Jews, but that he
31:44
failed to think. He failed to think for himself.
31:47
And that for her, that did not make him better
31:49
than other criminals, if anything, that made
31:51
him worse. Because the greatest failure is the
31:54
failure to think. And she really comes up with
31:57
this. There's something about thinking as such
31:59
that is the moral imperative. There is never
32:02
an excuse for not thinking. And there is no substitute
32:06
for a population who knows how to think. Oof,
32:10
especially relevant with the advent of AI and
32:13
chat GPT. Incredibly relevant. It is absolutely
32:16
on point. One of the things I keep coming back
32:21
to is after February 2022, of course, everybody
32:25
was asking obsessively, what are Russians really
32:28
thinking? What are Russians really thinking?
32:30
What is going on? And an interviewer asked Masha
32:33
Gessen this question, and they answered. which
32:37
I think was the best answer I've yet heard and
32:39
still feels unsatisfying, but is the one that's
32:42
most on point. They said, you know, it's very
32:47
hard to determine what people are really thinking
32:50
in a totalitarian society because the whole point
32:53
of a totalitarian regime is to prevent people
32:55
from thinking as such. And I think that is a
33:00
key. I think Arendt was on to something. There
33:03
is never an excuse for failure to think. And
33:07
Eichmann simply wasn't thinking. He didn't see
33:11
it as his job to think. He saw it as his job
33:15
to perform the duties as they were given to him.
33:18
By the way, in a totalitarian state, how much
33:21
is the whole thing driven by, let's say, deeper
33:24
more structural forces with the leader on top
33:27
more of a figurehead and possibly replaceable
33:29
and how much is it in fact an extension of a
33:32
particular dictator's personality i guess i'm
33:35
asking if we had someone other than hitler at
33:38
the top of the third reich or another apparatchik
33:40
guy ruling the soviet union let's say trotsky
33:43
instead of stalin would these two regimes still
33:46
be essentially the same or not this isn't This
33:51
is a classic historical question, which, of course,
33:54
we can't actually answer because we can't do
33:56
a control study on real life. But it's an excellent
33:59
question because it's one we've come back to
34:01
again and again and again. What if Lenin had
34:03
lived? What if Trotsky had won the power struggle?
34:06
What if Hitler had been accepted at that art
34:09
school in Vienna? You know, what if we don't
34:12
know? Because you can't do a control study in
34:14
real life. You can't go back and run the same
34:16
scene again, holding certain variables constant
34:19
in the interest. to figuring out which variables
34:21
were actually causal. I tend to think there's
34:25
an enormous amount of contingency involved. I
34:27
think it's very possible that if Hitler had been
34:30
accepted into... art school in Vienna. This would
34:34
not have happened. I think if anything happens
34:35
to that sealed German train car that Lenin was
34:39
on in spring of 1917 being whisked by the Germans
34:43
from Switzerland to Petrograd, I think anything
34:46
happens to that sealed German train car and Lenin
34:48
does not get to Petrograd in April 1917. And
34:52
I think arguably there's no Bolshevik revolution
34:53
and the whole 20th century as we know it plays
34:56
out totally differently. Okay. I recently interviewed
35:02
historian Timothy Ryback on his book, Takeover,
35:05
Hitler's Final Rise to Power. And towards the
35:07
end of the conversation, he made some startling
35:10
comparisons between the events described in his
35:12
book and what's going on in the US these days.
35:15
I don't believe I nudged him towards mentioning
35:17
Donald Trump, but he did. As a historian of totalitarianism,
35:21
where do you see some of the parallels between
35:23
the regimes we discussed and MAGA of today? Yeah,
35:28
it's absolutely terrifying. I mean, I see both
35:30
similarities and differences. But one of the
35:33
problems of being a historian is that history
35:35
doesn't tell you what will happen, but it gives
35:38
you a sense of what can happen. The possibilities
35:41
are generally much more capacious than we imagine
35:43
them to be. And once you know what can happen,
35:47
you can't unknow that. There's no way to unknow
35:51
that. You know what the possibilities are. You
35:53
know they're very dark. And you also know that
35:56
a combination of certain kinds of charismatic
36:00
personalities plus underlying structural conditions
36:03
can exploit vulnerabilities that are inherent
36:07
in the human condition. And I certainly see that
36:10
with Donald Trump. I see the use of terror. I
36:13
see the use of arbitrariness. I see the way in
36:18
which he sends out ice like the Gestapo. And
36:22
you don't know who will be next because there's
36:24
no more rule of law. You don't know what student's
36:28
going to be taken off the street. I'm a professor.
36:31
And I've now just, you know, as of very recently,
36:34
I've left Yale and I'm teaching at University
36:36
of Toronto. But all last year when I was on leave
36:39
from Yale, I was going back and forth to New
36:42
Haven, you know, and among other things, I was
36:44
meeting with my advisees there who I will continue
36:47
to advise. I would never just drop my graduate
36:49
students. Many of our students are foreign students.
36:52
At a big university like Yale or Harvard, it's
36:55
probably around 25%. In a field like mine in
36:59
East European history, it's probably closer to...
37:00
40%. And I'm thinking, okay, I'm sitting at a
37:04
coffee shop. We're talking about someone's thesis.
37:06
We're talking about a dissertation. What would
37:09
I do if guys in masks come and try to take that
37:13
person away? Would I fight with them? Would I
37:16
be brave? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would
37:20
I be paralyzed? Would I say nothing? Would I
37:23
start crying? Would I scream? Would I call for
37:25
help? You don't know. You don't know who's going
37:29
to be next and you don't know how you're going
37:32
to react. My brother, who is a professor of music
37:35
in Boston, his students are probably closer to
37:41
40 % to foreign students. I mean, people from
37:44
all over the world come to these elite music
37:47
conservatories. And one of the first things he
37:49
posted on Facebook. at the time of the inauguration
37:52
was, okay, crowdsourcing assistance. What do
37:56
I do if ICE comes into my classroom and tries
37:59
to take one of my students? How do I model courage?
38:01
How do I model integrity? How can I protect my
38:04
students? And the fact is nobody knows because
38:08
you don't know who's going to be next. And that
38:11
is a classic, how that terror works, the atomization,
38:14
the way that people start shutting up and getting
38:17
in line. That you can see happening very, very
38:22
quickly. You can see the gathering around the
38:25
leader. You can see the use of terror. You can
38:28
see the way people start making small compromises.
38:32
Right around the time of the election, J .D.
38:35
Vance tweeted that my husband, Tim Snyder, who
38:39
was also a professor at Yale until we both left
38:42
for the Munk School very recently, he sent out
38:45
a tweet saying, you know, Tim Snyder is an embarrassment
38:48
to Yale. Now, I didn't for a moment suspect that
38:52
our colleagues were more sympathetic to Vance
38:56
than to Tim. You know, I was quite sure that
38:59
I understood where they stood. But nobody publicly
39:03
spoke up for him, including all of our colleagues
39:06
in the law school, who, in my opinion, bear some
39:09
responsibility for the creation and promotion
39:12
of J .D. That's crazy. And that that terrified
39:15
me because I thought, OK, that's how it starts.
39:18
I'm curious about your opinion on the ideological
39:21
sort of conundrum MAGA represents. But it seems
39:24
that, you know, Hitler and Stalin had broader.
39:27
more well -defined ideologies propelling them.
39:29
Not so much with Trump. I don't know if you've
39:32
seen the film, but I'm a big fan of the film
39:34
The Big Lebowski. It's this sort of dark comedy
39:37
by the Coen brothers. There's this fantastic
39:38
line by one of the characters who's talking about
39:41
the nihilists, who are some sort of quasi -antagonists
39:45
in the movie. And he says... I mean, say what
39:47
you want about the tenets of national socialism,
39:49
dude. At least it's an ethos. Because Trump,
39:52
on the other hand, does seem like a nihilist,
39:55
a totally empty shell, more like a con man willing
39:59
to do and say anything to keep himself in the
40:02
limelight and in power. What's your take here?
40:06
This, to me, has been the single most provocative
40:10
distinction. I would say, between the totalitarianisms
40:15
of the 20th century and what we're getting in
40:17
the 21st century with Putinism and Trumpism.
40:20
You know, this kind of postmodern nihilist version,
40:24
you know, because one of the things Arendt would
40:27
say, you see, I'm a big Arendtian, I keep going
40:28
back to Arendt, was that one of the advantages
40:31
that these big totalitarian political lies have,
40:35
one of the advantages that ideology has, is that
40:38
even though it's false, it can be much more logical
40:43
and consistent than actual reality. Because the
40:47
problem with reality is that reality is permeated
40:51
by arbitrariness. You know, that facts, empirical
40:55
facts, always bear the vulnerability of their
40:58
original contingency. The fact that Germany invades
41:02
Belgium in 1914, that's not a law of physics
41:06
that made that happen. You can imagine a world
41:09
in which something else might much more reasonably
41:11
have happened. And so ideologies can make everything
41:15
examples of consistent laws, and they can make
41:18
the world much more coherent and pointing in
41:22
a teleological direction than it actually is.
41:24
And that's a huge advantage that these ideologies
41:28
have. They make everything make sense. They edit
41:30
out the arbitrariness and the inconsistency,
41:33
and they give everything a direction. Now, what
41:36
is perversely fascinating to me at the moment
41:39
is that we're no longer in that world. You know,
41:43
now for both Putin and Trump, there's not even
41:46
an attempt to be consistent. You change your
41:50
mind one day, you know, one hour after another
41:54
hour. I mean, you've seen how Trump fluctuates.
41:58
whether it's arms for Ukraine or tariffs for
42:02
Canada, you know, or whether or not he's going
42:04
to release the Epstein files or what the Epstein
42:07
files are, whatever it is, you know, there's
42:10
absolutely no attempt to weave a consistent story,
42:13
you know, and to even give people some kind of
42:16
vision of where they're going and that it has
42:19
a certain direction. It's just this laying bare
42:22
of nihilism. It's just this naked reign of nihilism.
42:27
Yeah. And unmitigated narcissism, you know, and
42:30
it's been much more this post -truth form of
42:33
whether we call it, we can call it neo -fascism,
42:35
we can call it neo -totalitarianism, whatever,
42:38
whatever, whatever we choose to try to kind of
42:41
create some concept for this postmodern variation.
42:44
It's much more about undermining the idea that
42:49
there is anything such as directionality and
42:53
truth and coherence as it is about. providing
42:57
people with a kind of directionality and truth
43:00
and coherence. And this sense we really are in
43:03
new territory and that the technological possibilities
43:07
for throwing out one story after another story
43:10
after another story and disseminating them on
43:14
this massive, massive level had not previously
43:16
in human history existed. I mean, but I still
43:19
kind of don't understand because this is a guy
43:22
who's selling golden sneakers and cryptocurrency
43:25
scams and saying, I have the best words and stuff
43:29
like this. How is this particular person making
43:32
it all stand together? Just seems pretty crazy.
43:36
Yeah, no, no, it is pretty crazy. I mean, there
43:38
are a couple things. One, I think there is something
43:40
very visceral that appeals to certain people,
43:43
which I fundamentally don't understand because
43:46
I have such a visceral sense of disgust that
43:50
I can't even stand to listen to him. You know,
43:52
when I have to watch clips, I try to watch the
43:55
subtitled version so I don't have to hear his
43:57
voice because it makes me feel physically sick.
44:00
But clearly other people have precisely. you
44:04
know, the opposite reaction. There's something
44:05
very visceral. The only thing that I really see
44:10
that makes sense to me as a historian is this
44:15
idea of authenticity or honesty. And when people
44:19
say that, well, he feels real to me, you know,
44:22
it doesn't mean, of course, that there's a correspondence
44:25
between what he says and empirical reality, because
44:28
we know there is no such correspondence. The
44:31
joke that... The parody, that satire that the
44:35
New Yorker published back in 2015, early 2016,
44:39
was the fact checker who passes out from exhaustion
44:42
at the end of the Republican primary debates
44:44
because nobody can. And there's just a total
44:47
unhinging from empirical reality. But what people
44:49
are seeing and they identify as authenticity
44:53
or honesty, you know, would be what Freud would
44:57
call the free expression of Eros and Thanatos.
45:01
So I don't think we can find this in the political
45:03
scientist. I think we've got to go back to psychoanalysis.
45:06
And Freud says eros and thanatos, lust, you know,
45:10
and a drive for destruction and violence and
45:13
aggression. The fact that we want to and kill
45:15
one another all the time. Freud says that's just
45:18
hardwired. It's part of the human condition.
45:22
Civilization, Freud says, is about repressing.
45:25
those desires to rip and kill one another all
45:28
the time. And therefore, he says, civilization
45:31
is bound to make us unhappy because it involves
45:34
repression. Now, liberation from that repression,
45:40
which is what Trump is offering. Now, if you
45:43
see a woman walking down the street and you want
45:45
to rip her, go ahead, say that aloud. That's
45:47
perfectly okay. Freud would say that is authentic
45:51
liberation. And for that, we pay only the small
45:54
price. of the destruction of civilization. And
45:57
we are paying that price of the destruction of
46:00
civilization. But I think that is the deep appeal
46:03
of Trump, that kind of liberation. Now all of
46:06
that lust and anger and aggression is given free
46:10
reign. And it's true. I mean, civilization is
46:14
based on repression. We might get furious at
46:16
someone who cuts us off in traffic, but there
46:19
are good reasons why we shouldn't take out a
46:22
gun and shoot that person. There are good reasons
46:25
why we should repress various things in order
46:27
to live together. I listened to an interview
46:29
of yours where you used the phrase post -truth,
46:32
post -modern totalitarianism. That's fascinating.
46:35
What exactly did you mean by that? The idea is
46:40
less to instill in the minds of one's followers
46:44
a coherent ideology and more to undermine the
46:48
notion that there is such a thing as truth at
46:50
all. So Stalin, for instance, was very good at
46:53
mobilizing people into kinds of fanatical devotions
46:58
and willingness to engage and declare their faith
47:04
and their loyalty and their excitement about
47:07
the coming of the communist utopia, blah, blah,
47:09
blah. Putinism is much better at demobilizing
47:13
people than at mobilizing them. And if, you know,
47:17
when we actually do get some intelligence coming
47:20
from Russia, you see people saying, well, you
47:23
know, what do you think about X or Y? And the
47:25
answer is, I'm not interested in politics. You
47:30
know, I stay out of that, you know, and everything,
47:33
what you get day after day is a sense of, well,
47:38
on the one hand, on the other hand, you have
47:40
your facts, I have alternative facts. And I can
47:43
give you an example of this that struck me at
47:46
the very beginnings of the war in the Donbas.
47:49
So the beginnings of the war in the Donbas, Putin
47:52
was saying there are no Russian soldiers in the
47:54
Donbas. You know, these are just this is local.
47:56
This is a civil war. These are people who have
47:59
been oppressed by the CIA sponsored Ukrainian
48:01
Nazis in Kiev, blah, blah, blah. And then there's
48:06
an episode of the Russian propaganda channel
48:08
RT that is in English. that is designed for foreign
48:13
consumption. There's some 25 -year -old approximately
48:16
host there, you know, who with a little bit of
48:20
Russian, who is hosting this episode and ostensibly
48:26
in the Donbass. We don't know where he really
48:28
was, but let's just say he was there. And he
48:29
says, and the episode opens like, today we're
48:32
here to investigate whether there are really
48:34
Russian soldiers in the Donbass. We know this
48:36
is a big question. Lots of people are interested.
48:39
So I'm here to help you find out. Okay, let's,
48:43
like, here we are in this town. Let's walk down
48:45
the street and see who we can find. Oh, look,
48:47
you know, there are some guys over there in camouflage.
48:50
Let's figure out who they are. He moseys over
48:52
to them, like, здравствуйте, привет, привет,
48:55
вы русский? Like, are you Russians? They're shaking
48:59
their head. They're like, no, no, I'm kind of
49:01
a, you know, I'm local. I live over here. I live
49:02
over there. And he's like. I don't know. You
49:05
know, these guys don't seem to be Russians, but
49:07
let's like, let's walk down another street. Like,
49:09
look, there are some more guys who seem to be
49:11
in camouflage. Let's see if we can figure out
49:13
where they're from. You would never get this
49:16
during Stalinism. There would be one very clear
49:19
line that everyone was supposed to be fanatically
49:22
devoted to. But at the end of this episode, you're
49:24
like, well, I don't know. He didn't seem to run
49:26
into anyone who said they were from Russia. But,
49:29
you know, these guys were from here. These guys
49:30
were from there. Who knows who they are, really?
49:32
And you kind of give up on the idea that there
49:35
really is such a thing as truth and that it's
49:37
even worth your time to try to figure it out.
49:40
So this undermining of the notion that. There
49:44
is an empirical reality that acts as a kind of
49:47
constraint, you know, is at the center of this
49:50
postmodern version. And that's true for both
49:53
Trump and it's true for Putinism and its new
49:55
territory. You know, and of course, it's a it's
49:58
a very dark side. of postmodernism, which originally
50:02
developed, you know, it originally developed
50:05
as an outgrowth of the critical sensibility of
50:08
the left and a desire never again to fall prey
50:12
to the absolutist narratives that gave us Nazism
50:15
and Stalinism. You know, and now it's come back
50:18
to bite us. And the key figures there, you really
50:21
have to go back to the 1990s and look at the
50:23
role of Gleb Pavlovsky and Vladislav Sokolov,
50:26
who were really the postmodern spin doctor masterminds
50:31
of this. That's interesting because contemporary
50:35
kind of conservative ideologues, people such
50:38
as Jordan Peterson, usually accuse the left of
50:41
being completely, you know, total postmodernists
50:44
and stuff, like having no values and just like,
50:48
yeah, making a mockery of reality. But in reality,
50:52
what you're saying is it's pretty much the other
50:54
way around, if I understood you correctly. It
50:57
very much develops from the critical sensibility
50:59
of the left, but then is kind of turned around
51:01
and used as a weapon from the right. And this
51:03
is the thing about the history of ideas, right?
51:05
The person who first articulates X doesn't get
51:08
a monopoly on its interpretation. Once ideas
51:11
are out there, they move, they take on new forms.
51:14
And one of the interesting things, I was talking
51:16
to Ivan Krastev about this, is that There was
51:21
a kind of delay before all this Derrida and Foucault
51:25
and all this French post -structuralism really
51:27
makes its way into Russia en masse. It's the
51:32
1990s, and these are things that are developing
51:34
through late 60s, 70s, and 80s. And one of the
51:39
intellectual history arguments you get about
51:42
the Russian Empire comes from Isaiah Berlin,
51:45
who who makes a very strong argument that the
51:50
fatal intellectual philosophical import into
51:53
the Russian empire was not Marxism, but Hegelianism.
51:58
And Isaiah Berlin's argument is kind of like,
52:00
OK, you know, a little like you give some Hegel,
52:03
some Hegel to the Germans. It might have been
52:05
one thing for the Germans. You give some Hegel
52:07
to the Russians. They just get drunk on him and
52:09
they never come back. You know, and the way in
52:12
which Russian intellectuals took to Hegel, he
52:15
feels was the fatal moment. I mean, there's some
52:18
very interesting material about this. I'm a big
52:20
fan of Isaiah Berlin, who himself is a native
52:22
Russian speaker coming from Riga. Alexander Hertzen
52:25
writes in his memoirs that, you know, phenomenology
52:28
of spirit. That's not a book you read. It's an
52:30
experience. You live through the phenomenology
52:33
of spirit. But the idea that Hegel comes relatively
52:36
late, you know, decades after he's already been
52:39
absorbed in Germany to the Russian empire, but
52:41
then the Russians kind of get drunk on him. And
52:44
one could make a similar argument, you know,
52:47
about, say, French post -structuralism. You know,
52:50
it comes into Russia late, but then they kind
52:54
of go off the deep end. You know, and the idea
52:58
that nothing is true, you know, and everything
53:01
is a game and a whole society can be designed
53:05
in which nothing is true and everything is the
53:07
game. And this was the evil genius of Vladislav
53:10
Circle. Do you think Stalin read Hegel? Do I
53:14
think Stalin read Hegel? I think he probably
53:17
did read some Hegel. I mean, how much Hegel he
53:19
understood, I'm not sure. I think certainly Bukharin
53:23
did. A lot of these guys did. I mean, people,
53:25
you have all these accounts of Bolsheviks, like
53:27
some of them, they get purged. They end up in
53:29
prison. They spend their time in prison studying
53:32
Hegel. You know, it was not a joke. And people
53:34
read Hegel very, very seriously. You know, especially
53:37
these hardcore Bolsheviks. Now, I mean, the thing
53:41
about getting drunk on Hegel is that Hegel is
53:43
incredibly difficult. You know, when I teach
53:46
Hegel to my students. I tried and I failed. Yeah.
53:49
Right. It's amazing that a book that seduced
53:52
so many people, how do you even get through the
53:54
first three sentences? I can't go back. I'm never
53:57
going to go back. I've already made this decision,
53:59
unfortunately. Well, if you do go back, and for
54:02
the benefit of your listeners, the breakthrough
54:06
for me was listening to Jay Bernstein's lectures
54:10
on Hegel, which are fantastic. Jay Bernstein
54:14
is a professor, philosopher at the New School,
54:17
New York. He teaches a year -long lecture course
54:20
on phenomenology of spirit. He goes through paragraph
54:22
by paragraph. He's a fantastically entertaining
54:25
lecturer with a great sense of humor. Years ago,
54:30
I listened to that whole lecture course, and
54:32
that was when things really came together for
54:35
me. So for any of your listeners who want to
54:37
commune with Hegel, it's free. It's on the internet.
54:41
I think it's called the Bernstein Tapes. His
54:43
students recorded and put them up there. You
54:45
can read along with Jay's lectures. Okay, cool.
54:49
Because I was about to wait for some sort of
54:51
a comic book edition. You know, they're turning
54:53
everything into comic books now. Like I've just
54:56
seen like Rosa Luxemburg's life in a comic book
54:58
and stuff. So I was like, oh, maybe they're going
55:00
to make Hegel once and that's when I'm going
55:02
to go back. But that sounds lovely. Rosa Luxemburg
55:04
definitely read Hegel. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine.
55:08
Professor, back to what's happening in the States
55:12
today. You obviously believe what you say because
55:14
like you already mentioned, you recently made
55:16
headlines when you announced that you are...
55:17
uprooting your family and despite your fruitful
55:21
career as an academic moving from the U .S. to
55:23
Canada. What was the final nail in the coffin
55:27
that made you take this drastic step? Well, the
55:32
first thing I should say is it's really not such
55:34
a drastic move. What totally blew me away is
55:37
that A handful of middle -aged academics go from
55:42
one very good university to another very good
55:44
university, which is the most boring, ordinary,
55:48
banal thing. And this actually makes international
55:52
news, which kind of stunned me. I mean, that
55:57
New York Times video has like 3 million views
55:59
when all three of you are getting interviewed.
56:02
Those are all Justin Bieber numbers. Yeah. It's
56:06
completely crazy. I mean, it was for Jason Stanley,
56:10
for our friend Jason really did make the decision
56:13
after. After the inauguration, when Columbia
56:17
capitulated and he panicked, you know, for for
56:20
me and my husband, I think we were inclined to
56:22
take these offers anyway. I wanted to get I wanted
56:25
to get the kids away from the gun violence in
56:27
the States, which is something I'd wanted for
56:30
a long time. And there are reasons why the Munk
56:33
School in Toronto is a particularly attractive
56:36
place. I mean, among other things, it's not only
56:39
interdisciplinary, but it was created by this
56:42
extraordinary political scientist, Jenna Stein,
56:44
who is a. force of nature, as a space that would
56:47
cultivate academic scholarship that was simultaneously
56:51
publicly engaged and public facing, which is
56:55
not something that... is taken for granted at
56:58
universities, including and sometimes especially,
57:00
you know, at the most elite universities. Because,
57:03
you know, often we feel that the purity of what
57:07
we do is dependent on being in a kind of ivory
57:09
tower and not letting ourselves be unduly influenced
57:13
or affected by what's going on around us. That
57:16
we're supposed to be writing scholarship, you
57:19
know, that is for other scholars and that is
57:21
at the highest level. And I'm sympathetic to
57:24
that in various ways. I also feel, you know,
57:28
as somebody who is a historian of totalitarianism
57:31
in Eastern Europe, as someone who is a Slavicist
57:34
who has been very engaged my whole adult life
57:36
with Eastern Europe, and now my friends and colleagues
57:38
are being slaughtered in Ukraine, I do not feel
57:41
it's been a moment, certainly for the past decade
57:44
or so, that I can disengage. from the world around
57:48
me and pretend that I am above that or apart
57:51
from that or not letting myself be touched by
57:53
it. It's not a time when I feel that I'm not
57:57
going to write for a public audience because
57:59
that involves dumbing things down. I feel like
58:02
it's a time where I feel an enormous moral imperative
58:05
to be engaged on behalf of Ukraine. I feel now
58:09
I also feel a moral imperative to be engaged
58:12
on behalf of what's happening in my own country,
58:15
which I've just left. And so the idea of a school,
58:19
of an institute within a great university that's
58:22
specifically kind of promoting and supporting
58:24
that was very appealing to me. So that was the
58:28
first thing. But then after the election, I absolutely
58:31
did not want to bring my kids back to this because
58:34
I knew that we were about to spiral into a rate
58:37
of terror. I fear we're heading to a civil war.
58:40
I hope I'm wrong. You know, I would love to be
58:43
wrong. But I did feel like this is not where
58:49
I want my kids spending their teenage years.
58:51
And I feel guilty about that. I feel like there's
58:53
certainly an opportunism in that. Like, I want
58:55
them someplace safer to the extent that's possible.
58:58
But the other thing that shocked me about the
59:01
story, I would say, especially with respect to
59:04
the Europeans, is that I then gave interview
59:07
after interview to these very smart European
59:10
journalists who were asking me these questions
59:13
like, but... you don't really think that this
59:16
could happen in America, or you don't really
59:18
think things could get that bad in America, or
59:20
surely it couldn't go that far in America. And
59:22
I felt like, do you really need this silly story
59:26
about these middle -aged academics going to a
59:28
different university to shake you into seeing
59:31
what is right in front of you? I have no secret
59:35
privileged information that other journalists
59:38
or other writers don't have. We're all watching
59:42
this play out. in real time. And I felt like
59:46
a Freudian psychoanalyst trying to coax people
59:49
out of this Freudian denial that what they were
59:51
seeing, they were actually seeing. And I thought
59:54
that's very curious because so often... I feel
59:58
in Europe that, you know, from the point of view
1:00:00
of the Europeans, maybe especially the Germans,
1:00:02
America is a barbaric country. We have a culture
1:00:06
industry. We have a cultural industry. We don't
1:00:09
have real culture. And to a certain extent, these
1:00:11
criticisms are fair, you know, but then but underlying
1:00:14
that there is still this sense, which I think
1:00:18
I had not fully appreciated before. But but after
1:00:21
all, you are the land of the free and the home
1:00:23
of the brave. But really, you know, things could
1:00:25
fall apart everywhere else, but not in America.
1:00:28
My colleague, my historian colleague, Vlado Petrovic,
1:00:33
who's from Serbia, wrote a great piece recently
1:00:35
in Eurozine. And he's like, my dear reader, yes,
1:00:39
it could happen here. It could happen there.
1:00:42
It could happen anywhere. It could happen wherever
1:00:44
you happen to be. A good old European snobbism
1:00:48
coupled with the fact that we've watched Independence
1:00:51
Day one too many times, where America always
1:00:54
saves the day and is the most stable place on
1:00:57
earth. But you mentioned that America might spiral
1:00:59
into civil war. So I just have to ask you about
1:01:02
that. Where do you see this manifesting? Because
1:01:04
this is pretty, for a European, again, this is
1:01:08
a pretty shocking statement. Yeah. Well, I see
1:01:12
it manifesting in various ways, one of which
1:01:15
is that Trump is clearly playing with the politics
1:01:18
of provocatia. And this is another word that
1:01:21
we have in English, but it doesn't exactly have
1:01:23
the same that it has in Slavic languages. Provocation
1:01:27
as not just an inspiration or an impetus, but
1:01:30
as a complex game or a setup. you know, in which
1:01:34
certain groups are set up so that they can then
1:01:37
be turned against other groups or through that
1:01:39
violence that might otherwise or anger that might
1:01:41
be directed against the government is redirected
1:01:44
somewhere else. One of the things that scared
1:01:47
me when They took away Mahmoud Khalil, that pro
1:01:52
-Palestinian Columbia student protester, with
1:01:55
no due process. They just take him from his apartment,
1:01:58
throw him in this prison for indefinite length
1:02:00
of time in Louisiana. His wife is about to give
1:02:03
birth, ostensibly because they are protecting
1:02:09
Jewish students from anti -Semitism. And I rarely
1:02:13
engage publicly as a Jew. But in this case, I
1:02:17
did sign an open letter by Jewish faculty members
1:02:20
from all different universities called Not In
1:02:23
Our Name, saying, you know, if we allow this
1:02:26
cynical, disingenuous pretext of protecting Jews
1:02:29
from anti -Semitism to be used as an excuse for
1:02:33
abusing the rights of other people, we have morally
1:02:35
bankrupted ourselves. Moreover, I could already
1:02:39
see in my slightly paranoid, perhaps East Europeanist
1:02:43
way, the possibility that this regime cynically
1:02:49
uses, well, we need to protect Jews from anti
1:02:51
-Semitism as a pretext for abusing other people's
1:02:54
rights. And then the justifiable anger of people
1:02:59
whose rights are abused can then be redirected
1:03:02
against the Jews. Which there's nothing this
1:03:05
regime would relish more than seeing that anger
1:03:07
redirected against other people. So there's a
1:03:09
lot of provocation. Sending the Marines, sending
1:03:12
the National Guard into Los Angeles unnecessarily.
1:03:15
It's a provocation. You're going to create more
1:03:18
violence. Also, a permissiveness, a permissiveness
1:03:23
for political violence. All of those January
1:03:25
6th insurrectionaries. who's violently stormed
1:03:30
the Capitol building being pardoned. On the morning
1:03:34
of the All Kings protest, you know, just last
1:03:38
month, was it? There was a political assassination
1:03:42
of an attempted political assassination of four
1:03:45
Democrats in Minnesota. Two of them were actually
1:03:48
killed. I think two of them are now recovering.
1:03:53
So a permissiveness from the highest issue of
1:03:58
government for political violence, attempts at
1:04:01
provocation. And then you put that, you overlay
1:04:03
that on a very heavily armed population. I think
1:04:07
Europeans often fail to appreciate the extent
1:04:10
of guns and gun violence. So you have to think
1:04:16
about all of the political violence, the instigation,
1:04:19
the provocation. And this is being laid on top.
1:04:22
of a population that is already heavily armed,
1:04:25
in which there is already a lot of so -called
1:04:28
ordinary, everyday, non -political violence.
1:04:31
In New Haven, where Yale is, if you end up in
1:04:34
the emergency room or if you break your arm or
1:04:37
something on a Saturday night, everyone else
1:04:39
has been shot. And there are police there and
1:04:42
people are screaming and people are being tied
1:04:44
to beds and people are threatening the nurses.
1:04:46
Yale has a security app. You know, in which every
1:04:51
time there's a shooting in New Haven, you get
1:04:53
a little message saying there's been a shooting
1:04:54
at this corner. Please avoid the area while police
1:04:57
investigate. And we get these all the time. And
1:05:01
here's me in Japan, where the most dangerous
1:05:03
object in a five -kilometer radius is a baguette
1:05:07
from the 7 -Eleven convenience store. It's a
1:05:11
good reason to be in Japan. I'm not complaining.
1:05:15
All right, Professor, so far, I think it's fair
1:05:18
to say that things are looking a little bit grim
1:05:21
out there, but we still have some wiggle room
1:05:23
here. What would you say is the most effective
1:05:25
guardrail against totalitarianism? The only real
1:05:30
guardrail is then the only real antidote to atomization
1:05:34
is solidarity, which is very, very hard when
1:05:36
people are terrorized. But you really need people
1:05:41
to continue to speak up on behalf of other people
1:05:45
and especially on behalf of those who are most
1:05:48
vulnerable. I definitely I had never really been
1:05:52
so explicitly engaged in American politics as
1:05:55
I have been since Trump came on the scene. I'm
1:05:57
American, but I'm not an Americanist in the sense
1:06:00
of my and my expertise is not actually in American
1:06:03
politics. But in some sense, all the more so,
1:06:06
because, you know, I'm now I'm talking to you
1:06:09
now from Vienna. But, you know, in principle,
1:06:11
I'm now going to go back to Toronto in September.
1:06:15
I feel all the more so obliged to speak up on
1:06:18
behalf of my fellow Americans who are in more
1:06:21
vulnerable positions. And I should also say that
1:06:23
it's not the case that there is no resistance.
1:06:26
The structural checks and balances are breaking
1:06:29
down and they're breaking down quickly. They're
1:06:31
breaking down violently because the Supreme Court
1:06:34
has been bankrupted by being stacked with Trump's
1:06:37
people. And because the lower courts, which have
1:06:40
by and large been doing their jobs, and they've
1:06:43
been issuing rulings saying, you have to bring
1:06:45
this person back. You can't actually deport this
1:06:47
person to this prison in El Salvador. And the
1:06:49
Trump administration has essentially been saying,
1:06:51
fuck you, we're not going to do it. You know,
1:06:53
and that's sui generis territory. We've never
1:06:55
been in that situation. What happens when the
1:06:58
executive branch refuses to respect the judicial
1:07:01
branch? But that said, there are definitely people,
1:07:04
you know, both in Washington, both Democratic
1:07:07
members of Congress, you know, and ordinary people
1:07:11
who have been resisting. And that should be acknowledged,
1:07:15
you know, and they should get support. You know,
1:07:18
one thing, one project I've been involved in
1:07:20
starting up is a website called Small Acts of
1:07:23
Democratic Resistance, in which we're just starting
1:07:26
to simply document, you know, acts of democratic
1:07:30
resistance, even if they'd be very local and
1:07:33
on a small scale, just as a platform for mutual
1:07:36
recognition, for solidarity, and potentially
1:07:39
as a resource for foreign journalists. Last question.
1:07:43
Another ungrateful task. I know historians are
1:07:46
not big fans of counterfactuals, but how do you
1:07:50
think future historians are going to look at
1:07:52
this period we're living through right now? That's
1:07:56
a good question. What's hard to imagine is how
1:08:00
the technological changes will evolve. You know,
1:08:04
certain that certain kinds of vulnerabilities
1:08:07
of people to being taken in by leaders of having
1:08:11
their resentments and grievances directed against
1:08:14
scapegoats. Those are those play out again and
1:08:18
again in history. The idea that, OK, you're having
1:08:21
a hard time. Well, it's because of these people.
1:08:23
We're going to deport them. We're going to get
1:08:25
rid of them. We're going to throw them in prison.
1:08:27
You know, that is a very old mechanism. That
1:08:30
we can predict as part of the human condition.
1:08:33
But the ways in which troll factories are turning
1:08:38
out algorithms to plant insane stories and manipulate
1:08:44
people's minds, that is very, very new territory.
1:08:48
And I can't imagine how the combination of the
1:08:54
new technology with the with the hardwired aspects
1:08:59
of the human condition, that is what I can't
1:09:03
figure out. I mean, I think historians will look
1:09:05
back and say, couldn't they have given all the
1:09:08
information they had? I mean, one thing that
1:09:10
is really different, you know, is the way in
1:09:14
which we know everything in real time. And this
1:09:16
is also an aspect of this postmodern neo -totalitarianism.
1:09:19
You know, in Russian, you would say, the laying
1:09:23
bare. Now we're seeing it all in real time. You
1:09:27
know, Putin and Trump really aren't even pretending,
1:09:30
you know, to not be, you know, the sadistic lunatics
1:09:34
that they are. I mean, not only do you have this
1:09:36
egregious open disregarding of the value of other
1:09:40
people's lives, but now we have performative
1:09:42
reveling in statism and it is not hidden. Like
1:09:45
if people remember what Jan Karski, the Polish
1:09:48
underground courier, what he went through to
1:09:51
bring news of the Holocaust to the West, you
1:09:54
know, during the German occupation of Poland.
1:09:57
It was this heroic effort. He was tortured by
1:10:02
the Gestapo. He had teeth removed. He had a microfilm
1:10:05
in his tooth. He gets to London. People don't
1:10:07
believe him. He goes to Washington. People don't
1:10:10
want to believe him there either. Just to bring
1:10:13
news to the world of what's happening, he went
1:10:17
through incredible lengths, and it took a long
1:10:19
time for that information to penetrate. Now we're
1:10:22
watching it all live streamed. Now we see the
1:10:26
kids being buried under rubble in real time.
1:10:29
Now everyone sees everything in real time. And
1:10:32
how that impacts on our, how this watching all
1:10:37
of this atrocity live stream impacts on the human
1:10:41
psyche is something we haven't yet had time to
1:10:44
absorb. Unfortunately, it seems that most people
1:10:47
just get numb. spurned into action i i worry
1:10:52
about this right that the open engineer paradoxically
1:10:55
disempowers us and people start looking around
1:10:58
the resistance starts looking around for the
1:11:00
thing that is concealed as the secret if revealed
1:11:04
that will free us But I feel like the problem
1:11:07
is not what remains concealed. I'm sure there
1:11:10
are details, but basically all of this horrific
1:11:13
atrocity is right there in front of our face.
1:11:15
The problem is not what's concealed. The problem
1:11:18
is what we've managed to normalize. Professor
1:11:20
Short, thank you so much for this slightly scary,
1:11:23
sobering, if necessary, conversation. Really,
1:11:27
really appreciate it. By the way, where can people...
1:11:31
Where can people find your work? I think you
1:11:33
have social media. You have Twitter or X. Yeah,
1:11:36
I have. I'm on Blue Sky. I'm on Twitter. I'm
1:11:40
on Facebook. I have a research assistant who
1:11:42
is on Instagram for me. I have a faculty web
1:11:49
page at the Munk School where they post some
1:11:52
of my text. I'm very findable. Okay, awesome.
1:11:57
Again, thank you so much. And I hope we get to
1:11:59
do this again in the future. Oh, you're very
1:12:02
welcome. I hope I'll speak in person at some
1:12:04
point. Thank you so much for listening. Please
1:12:06
subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. Follow and
1:12:08
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1:12:11
tutorials. Insist, it's really important that
1:12:14
I hassle you about that. doing it uh also if
1:12:17
you'd like to please support me on patreon uh
1:12:19
this is a one -person podcast i know i say this
1:12:21
every time but i do everything by my little old
1:12:23
self there's no team behind me uh it's very very
1:12:27
sad i know but you can help by hopping on patreon
1:12:30
and finding the smart cookies podcast on there
1:12:33
and then last but certainly not least i have
1:12:35
to thank my existing patrons without you there
1:12:38
would be no smart cookies which makes you the
1:12:41
real actual producers of this show so eternal
1:12:44
thanks to thank you so much your support means
1:13:08
the world to me