back to indexNorman Naimark: Genocide, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Absolute Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #248
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The following is a conversation with Norman Namark,
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a historian at Stanford specializing in
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genocide, war, and empire.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with Norman Namark.
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Did Stalin believe that communism was good
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not just for him, but for the people of the Soviet Union
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and the people of the world?
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Oh, absolutely, I mean, Stalin believed that, you know,
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socialism was the be all and end all of,
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you know, human existence.
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I mean, he was a true Leninist,
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and in Lenin's tradition, this was, you know,
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I mean, that set of beliefs didn't exclude
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other kinds of things he believed or thought or did.
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But, no, the way he defined socialism,
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the way he thought about socialism,
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you know, he absolutely thought it was in the interest
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of the Soviet Union and of the world.
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And, in fact, that the world was one day going to go
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socialist, in other words.
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I think he believed in, eventually,
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in the international revolution.
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So, given the genocide in the 1930s that you describe,
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was Stalin evil, delusional, or incompetent?
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Evil, delusional, or incompetent.
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Well, you know, evil is one of those words,
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you know, which has a lot of kind of religious
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and moral connotations.
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And, in that sense, yes, I think he was an evil man.
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I mean, he, you know, eliminated people
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absolutely unnecessarily.
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He tortured people, had people tortured.
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He was completely indifferent to the suffering of others.
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He couldn't have carried a wit, you know,
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that millions were suffering.
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And so, yes, I consider him an evil man.
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I mean, you know, historians don't like to.
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Use the word evil.
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Use the word evil.
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It's, you know, it's a word for moral philosophers,
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but I think it certainly fits who he is.
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I think he was delusional.
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And there is a wonderful historian at Princeton,
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a political scientist, actually, named Robert Tucker,
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who said he suffered from a paranoid delusional system.
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And I always remember that of Tucker's writing
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because what Tucker meant is that he was not just paranoid,
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meaning, you know, I'm paranoid.
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I'm worried you're out to get me, right?
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But that he constructed whole plots of people,
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whole systems of people who were out to get him.
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So, in other words, his delusions were that there were
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all of these groups of people out there
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who were out to diminish his power
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and remove him from his position
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and undermine the Soviet Union, in his view.
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So, yes, I think he did suffer from delusions.
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And this had a huge effect,
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because whole groups then were destroyed by his activities,
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which he would construct based on these delusions.
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He was not incompetent.
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He was an extremely competent man.
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I mean, I think most of the research that's gone on,
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especially since the Stalin archive was opened
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at the beginning of the century,
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and I think almost every historian who goes in that archive
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comes away from that archive
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with the feeling of a man who is enormously hardworking,
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intelligent, you know, with an acute sense of politics,
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a really excellent sense of political rhetoric,
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a fantastic editor, you know, in a kind of agitational sense.
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I mean, he's a real agitator, right?
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And of a, you know, a really hard worker.
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I mean, somebody who works from morning till night
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a micromanager in some ways.
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So his competence, I think, was really extreme.
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Now, there were times when that fell down,
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you know, times in the 30s, times in the 20s,
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times during the war where he made mistakes.
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It's not as if he didn't make any mistakes.
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But I think, you know, you look at his stuff,
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you know, you look at his archives, you look what he did.
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I mean, this is an enormously competent man
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who in many, many different areas of his life,
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areas of enterprise, because he, you know,
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he had this notion that he should know everything
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and did know everything.
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I remember one archive, it's called, you know,
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a kind of folder that I looked at
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where he actually went through the wines
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that were produced in his native Georgia
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and wrote down how much they should make
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of each of these wines, you know,
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how many barrels they should produce of these wines,
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which grapes were better than the other grapes,
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sort of correcting, in other words,
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what people were putting down there.
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So he was, you know, his competence ranged very wide,
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or at least he thought his competence ranged very wide.
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I mean, both things, I think, are the case.
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If we look at this paranoid delusional system,
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Stalin was in power for 30 years.
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He is, many argue, one of the most powerful men in history.
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Did, in his case, absolute power corrupt him
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or did it reveal the true nature of the man?
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And maybe just in your sense,
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as we kind of build around this genocide
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of the early 1930s, this paranoid delusional system,
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did it get built up over time?
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Was it always there?
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It's kind of a question of did the genocide,
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was that always inevitable, essentially, in this man,
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or did power create that?
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I mean, it's a great question, and I don't think you can,
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I don't think you can say that it was always
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kind of inherent in the man.
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I mean, the man without his position and without his power,
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you know, wouldn't have been able to accomplish
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what he eventually did in the way of murdering people,
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you know, and murdering groups of people,
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which is what genocide is.
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So, you know, I don't, it wasn't sort of in him.
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I mean, there were, and again, you know,
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the new research has shown that, you know,
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he had his childhood was, you know,
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not a particularly nasty one.
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People used to say, you know, the father beat him up,
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and it turns out, actually, it wasn't the father,
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it was the mother once in a while.
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But basically, you know, he was not
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an unusual young Georgian kid or student even.
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And, you know, it was the growth of the Soviet system
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and him within the Soviet system,
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I mean, his own development within the Soviet system,
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I think that led, you know, to the kind of mass killing
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that occurred in the 1930s.
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You know, he essentially achieved complete power
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by the early 1930s.
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And then as he, as he rolled with it,
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as you would say, you know, or people would say,
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you know, it increasingly became murderous.
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And there was no, you know, there were no checks
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and balances, obviously, on that murderous system.
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And not only that, you know, people supported it
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in the NKVD and elsewhere, he learned
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how to manipulate people.
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I mean, he was a superb, you know, political manipulator
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of those people around him.
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And, you know, we have, we've got new transcripts,
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for example, of, you know, police bureau meetings
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in the early 1930s.
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And you read those things and you read, you know,
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he uses humor and he uses sarcasm, especially,
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he uses verbal ways to undermine people, you know,
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to control their behavior and what they do.
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And he's a really, you know, he's a real,
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I guess, manipulator is the right word.
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And he does it, he does it with, you know,
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a kind of skill that on the one hand is admirable.
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And on the other hand, of course, is terrible
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because it ends up, you know, creating the system
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of terror that he creates.
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I mean, I guess just to linger on it,
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I just wonder how much of it is a slippery slope
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in the early 20s, 1920s, did he think he was going
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to be murdering even a single person,
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but thousands and millions?
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I just wonder maybe the murder of a single human being
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just to get them, you know, because you're paranoid
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about them potentially threatening your power,
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does that murder then open a door?
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And once you open the door,
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you become a different human being.
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A deeper question here is the soldier Knitsen,
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you know, the line between good and evil runs
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in every man, are all of us once we commit one murder
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in the situation, does that open a door for all of us?
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And I guess even the further deeper questions,
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how easy it is for human nature to go
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on the slippery slope that ends in genocide?
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There are a lot of questions in those questions.
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And, you know, the slippery slope question
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I would answer, I suppose by saying, you know,
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Stalin wasn't the most likely successor of Lenin,
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there were plenty of others, there were a lot
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of political contingencies that emerged in the 1920s
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that made it possible for Stalin to seize power.
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I don't think of him as, you know,
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if you would just know him in 1925,
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I don't think anybody would say much less himself
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that this was a future mass murderer.
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I mean, Trotsky mistrusted him and thought he was,
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you know, a mindless bureaucrat.
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You know, others were less mistrustful of him,
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but, you know, he managed to gain power
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in the way he did through this bureaucratic
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and political maneuvering that was very successful.
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You know, the slippery slope, as it were,
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doesn't really begin until the 1930s, in my view.
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In other words, once he gains complete power
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and control of the Politburo,
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once the programs that he institutes
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of the Five Year Plan and collectivization go through,
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once he reverses himself and is able to reverse himself
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or reverse the Soviet path, you know,
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to give various nationalities their, you know,
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their ability to develop their own cultures
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and sort of internal politics, once he reverses all that,
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you know, you have the Ukrainian famine in 32, 33,
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you have the murder of Kirov,
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who is one of the leading figures, you know,
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in the political system, you have the suicide of his wife,
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you have all these things come together in 32, 33
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that then, you know, make it more likely,
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in other words, that bad things are gonna happen.
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And people start seeing that, too, around him.
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They start seeing that it's not a slippery slope,
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it's a dangerous, it's a dangerous situation
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which is emerging, and some people really understand that.
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So I don't, I really do see a differentiation
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then between the 20s.
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I mean, it's true that Stalin, during the Civil War,
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there's a lot of, you know, good research on that,
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you know, shows that he already had some of these
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characteristics of being, as it were, murderous
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and being, you know, being dictatorial
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and pushing people around and that sort of thing.
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That was all there, but I don't really see that
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as kind of the necessary stage
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for the next thing that came, which was the 30s,
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which was really terror of the worst sort,
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you know, where everybody's afraid for their lives
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and most people are afraid for their lives
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and their family's lives and where torture
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and that sort of thing becomes a common part,
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you know, of who, what people had to face.
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So it's a different, it's a different world.
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And you know, people will argue,
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they'll argue this kind of Lenin, Stalin continuity debate,
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you know, that's been going on
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since I was an undergraduate, right?
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That argument, you know, was Stalin the natural
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sort of next step from Lenin
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or was he something completely different?
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Many people will argue, you know,
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because of Marxism, Leninism, because of the ideology
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that, you know, it was the natural,
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it was a kind of natural next step.
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You know, I would tend to lean the other way.
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I mean, I won't make an absolute argument
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that what Stalin became had nothing to do with Lenin
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and nothing to do with Marxism, Leninism.
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It had a lot to do with it.
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But you know, he takes it one major step further.
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And again, that's why I don't like the slippery slope,
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you know, metaphor,
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because that means it's kind of slow and easy.
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And we call, you know, I mean,
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historians talk about the Stalin revolution,
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you know, in 28 and 29, you know,
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that he, in some senses, creates a whole new system,
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you know, through the five year plan,
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collectivization and seizing political power
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Can you talk about the 1930s?
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Can you describe what happened in Holodomor,
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the Soviet terror famine in Ukraine
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That killed millions of Ukrainians.
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It's a long story, you know,
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but let me try to be as succinct as I can be.
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I mean, the Holodomor, the terror famine of 32, 33
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comes out of, in part, an all union famine
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that is the result of collectivization.
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You know, collectivization was a catastrophe.
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You know, the more or less, the so called kulaks,
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the more or less richer farmers,
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I mean, they weren't really rich, right?
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Anybody with a tin roof and a cow was considered a kulak,
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you know, and other people who had nothing
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were also considered kulaks if they opposed collectivization.
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So these kulaks, we're talking millions of them, right?
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And Ukraine, it's worth recalling,
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and I'm sure you know this,
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was a, you know, heavily agricultural area,
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and Ukrainian peasants, you know,
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were in the countryside and resisted collectivization
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more than even Russian peasants resisted collectivization,
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suffered during this collectivization program.
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And they, you know, burned sometimes their own houses,
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they killed their own animals,
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they were shot, you know, sometimes on the spot,
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and tens of thousands and others were sent into exile.
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So there was a conflagration in the countryside.
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And the result of that conflagration
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in Ukraine was terrible famine.
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And again, there was famine all over the Soviet Union,
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but it was especially bad in Ukraine,
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in part because Ukrainian peasants resisted.
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Now in 3233, a couple of things happen.
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I mean, I've argued this in my writing,
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and, you know, I've also worked on this,
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I continue to work on it, by the way,
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with a museum in Kiev that's going to be
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about the Holodomor.
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They're building the museum now,
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and it's going to be a very impressive set of exhibits,
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and talk with historians all the time about it.
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So what happens in 3233, a couple of things.
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First of all, the Stalin develops,
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develops an even stronger, I say even stronger,
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because they already had an antipathy for the Ukrainians,
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an even stronger antipathy for the Ukrainians in general.
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First of all, they resist collectivization.
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Second of all, he's not getting all the grain he wants
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out of them, and which he needs.
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And so he sends in, then, people to expropriate the grain,
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and take the grain away from the peasants.
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These teams of people, you know, some policemen,
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some urban thugs, some party people,
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some poor peasants, you know, take part too,
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go into the villages, and forcibly seize grain
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and animals from the Ukrainian peasantry.
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They're seizing it all over.
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I mean, let's remember again,
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this is all over the Soviet Union, in 32, especially.
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Then, you know, in December of 1932, January of 33,
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February of 33, Stalin has convinced the Ukrainian peasantry
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needs to be shown who's boss,
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that they're not turning over their grain,
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that they're resisting the expropriators,
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that they're hiding the grain,
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which they do sometimes, right?
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That they're basically not loyal to the Soviet Union,
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that they're acting like traitors,
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that they're ready, and he says this, you know,
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I think it's Kaganovich he says it too,
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you know, they're ready to kind of pull out
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of the Soviet Union and join Poland.
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I mean, he thinks Poland is, you know,
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out to get Ukraine, and so he's gonna then,
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essentially, break the back of these peasantry.
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And the way he breaks their back
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is by going through another expropriation program,
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which is not done in the rest of the Soviet Union.
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So he's taking away everything they have,
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everything they have.
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There are new laws introduced,
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where they will actually punish people,
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including kids, with death, if they steal any grain,
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you know, if they take anything from the,
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you know, from the fields.
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So, you know, you can shoot anybody,
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you know, who is looking for food.
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And then he introduces measures in Ukraine,
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which are not introduced into the rest of the Soviet Union.
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For example, the Ukrainian peasantry
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are not allowed to leave their villages anymore.
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They can't go to the city to try to find some things.
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I mean, we've got pictures of, you know,
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Ukrainian peasants dying on the sidewalks
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in Kharkiv, and in Kiev, and places like that,
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who've managed to get out of the village
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and get to the cities, but now they can't leave.
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They can't leave Ukraine to go to Belorussia,
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or Belarus today, or to Russia, you know, to get any food.
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There's no, he won't allow any relief to Ukraine.
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Number of people offer relief, including the Poles,
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but also the Vatican offers relief.
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He won't allow any relief to Ukraine.
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He won't admit that there's a famine in Ukraine.
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And instead, what happens is that Ukraine turns into,
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the Ukrainian countryside turns into what my now past
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colleague who died several years ago, Robert Conquest,
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called a vast Belsen.
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And by that, you know, the image is of bodies
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just lying everywhere, you know, people dead.
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And dying, you know, of hunger, which is, by the way,
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I mean, as you know, I've spent a lot of time
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studying genocide, I don't think there's anything worse
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than dying of hunger from what I have read.
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I mean, you see terrible ways that people die, right?
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But dying of hunger is just such a horrible, horrible thing.
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And so, for example, we know there were many cases
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of cannibalism in the countryside
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because there wasn't anything to eat.
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People were eating their own kids, right?
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And Stalin knew about this.
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And again, you know, we started with this question
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a little bit earlier, he doesn't,
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there's not a sign of remorse, not a sign of pity, right?
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Not a sign of any kind of human emotion
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that normal people would have.
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What about the opposite of joy for teaching them a lesson?
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I don't think there's joy.
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I'm not sure Stalin really understood
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emotion, what joy was, you know.
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I think he felt it was necessary to get those SOBs, right?
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That they deserved it.
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He says that several times, this is their own fault, right?
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This is their own fault.
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And as their own fault, you know,
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they get what they deserve, basically.
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How much was the calculation?
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How much was it reason versus emotion?
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In terms of, you said he was competent.
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Was there a long term strategy
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or was this strategy based on emotion and anger?
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No, I think actually the right answer is a little of both.
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I mean, usually the right answer in history
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is something like that.
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No, you can't, you can't.
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It wasn't just, I mean, first of all,
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you know, the Soviets had it in for Ukraine
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and Ukrainian nationalism, which they really didn't like.
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And by the way, Russians still don't like it, right?
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So they had it in for Ukrainian nationalism.
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They feared Ukrainian nationalism.
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As I said, you know, Stalin writes, you know,
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we'll lose Ukraine, you know, if these guys win.
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You know, so there's a kind of long term determination,
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as I said, you know, to kind of break the back
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of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian nationalism
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as any kind of separatist force whatsoever.
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And so there's that rational calculation.
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At the same time, I think Stalin is annoyed
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and peeved and angry on one level
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with the Ukrainians for resisting collectivization
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and for being difficult and for not conforming, you know,
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to the way he thinks peasants should act in this situation.
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So you have both things.
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He's also very angry at the Ukrainian party
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and eventually purges it for not being able
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to control Ukraine and not be able to control the situation.
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You know, Ukraine is in theory the bread basket, right?
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Well, how come the bread basket isn't turning over to me
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all this grain so I can sell it abroad
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and, you know, build new factories
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and support the workers in the cities?
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So there's a kind of annoyance.
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You know, when things fail,
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and this is absolutely typical of Stalin,
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when things fail, he blames it on other people
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and usually groups of people, right?
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Not individuals, but groups again.
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So a little bit of both I think is the right answer.
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This blame, it feels like there's a playbook
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that dictators follow.
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I just wonder if it comes naturally
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or just kind of evolves.
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Because, you know, blaming others
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and then telling these narratives
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and then creating the other
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and then somehow that leads to hatred and genocide.
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It feels like there's too many commonalities
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for it not to be a naturally emergent strategy
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that works for dictatorships.
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I mean, it's a very good point.
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And I think it's one, you know, that has its merits.
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In other words, I think you're right
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that there's certain kinds of strategies
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by dictators that, you know, are common to them.
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A lot of them do killing, not all of them
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of that sort that Stalin did.
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I've written about Mao and Pol Pot, you know, and Hitler.
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And, you know, there is a sort of, as you say,
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a kind of playbook for political dictatorship.
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Also for, you know, a kind of communist totalitarian way
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of functioning, you know?
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And that way of functioning was described already
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by Hannah Arendt early on
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when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism.
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And she more or less writes the playbook
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and Stalin does follow it.
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The real question, it seems to me, is to what extent,
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you know, and how deep does this go
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and how often does it go in that direction?
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I mean, you can argue, for example,
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I mean, Fidel Castro was not a nice man, right?
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He was a dictator, he was a terrible dictator.
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But he did not engage in mass murder.
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Ho Chi Minh was a dictator, a communist dictator
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who grew up, you know, in the communist movement,
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went to Moscow, you know, spent time in Moscow in the 30s
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and went to find, found the Vietnamese Communist Party.
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You know, he was a horrible dictator.
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I'm sure he was responsible
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for a lot of death and destruction.
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But he wasn't a mass murderer.
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And so you get those, you know.
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I mean, I would even argue, others will disagree,
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that Lenin wasn't a mass murderer.
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You know, that he didn't kill the same way,
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you know, that Stalin killed.
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Or people after him, they're communist dictators too,
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after all, Khrushchev, you know, was a communist dictator.
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But he stopped this killing.
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And, you know, he's still responsible for a gulag
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and people sent off into a gulag and imprisonment
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and torture and that sort of thing.
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But it's not at all the same thing.
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So there are some, you know, like Stalin, like Mao,
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like Pol Pot, you know, who commit these horrible,
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horrible atrocities, extensively engaging,
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in my view, in genocide.
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And there are some who don't.
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And, you know, what's the difference?
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Well, you know, the difference is partly in personality,
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partly in historical circumstance, you know,
link |
partly in who is it that controls the reins of power.
link |
How much do you connect the ideas of communism
link |
or Marxism or socialism to Holodomor, to Stalin's rule?
link |
So how naturally, as you kind of alluded to,
link |
does it lead to genocide?
link |
That's also, I mean, in some ways,
link |
I've just addressed that question by saying
link |
it doesn't always lead to genocide.
link |
You know, in the case, again, you know,
link |
Cuba is not pretty, but it didn't have,
link |
there was no genocide in Cuba.
link |
And same thing in North Vietnam.
link |
You know, even North Korea, as awful as it is,
link |
is a terrible dictatorship, right?
link |
And people's rights are totally destroyed, right?
link |
They have no freedom whatsoever.
link |
You know, it's not, as far as we know, genocidal.
link |
Who knows whether it could be
link |
or whether if they took over South Korea,
link |
you know, mass murder wouldn't take place
link |
and that kind of thing.
link |
But my point is, is that the ideology
link |
doesn't necessarily dictate genocide.
link |
In other words, it's an ideology, I think,
link |
that makes genocide sometimes too easily possible
link |
given, you know, the way it thinks through history
link |
as being, you know, you're on the right side of history
link |
and some people are on the wrong side of history
link |
and you have to destroy those people
link |
who are on the wrong side of history.
link |
I mean, there is something in, you know, Marxism, Leninism,
link |
which, you know, has that kind of language
link |
and that kind of thinking.
link |
But I don't think it's necessarily that way.
link |
There's a wonderful historian at Berkeley
link |
named Martin Malia who has written, you know,
link |
wrote a number of books on this subject
link |
and he was very, very, he was convinced
link |
that the ideology itself, you know,
link |
played a crucial role in the murderousness
link |
of the Soviet regime.
link |
I'm not completely convinced.
link |
You know, when I say not completely convinced,
link |
I think you could argue it different ways.
link |
Equally valid, you know, with equally valid arguments.
link |
I mean, there's something about the ideology of communism
link |
that allows you to decrease the value of human life.
link |
Almost like this philosophy, if it's okay to crack
link |
a few eggs to make an omelet.
link |
So maybe that, if you can reason like that,
link |
then it's easier to take the leap of,
link |
for the good of the country, for the good of the people,
link |
for the good of the world, it's okay to kill a few people.
link |
And then that's where, I wonder about the slippery slope.
link |
Yeah, no, no, again, you know,
link |
I don't think it's a slippery slope.
link |
I think it's, I think it's dangerous.
link |
In other words, I think it's dangerous,
link |
but I don't consider, you know,
link |
I don't like Marxism, Leninism any better than the next guy.
link |
And I've lived in plenty of those systems
link |
to know how they can beat people down
link |
and how they can, you know,
link |
destroy human aspirations
link |
and human interaction between people.
link |
But they're not necessarily murderous systems.
link |
They are systems that contain people's autonomy,
link |
that force people into work and labor and lifestyles
link |
that they don't want to live.
link |
I spent a lot of time, you know,
link |
with East Germans and Poles, you know,
link |
who lived in, and even in the Soviet Union,
link |
you know, in the post Stalin period,
link |
where people lived lives they didn't want to live,
link |
you know, and didn't have the freedom to choose.
link |
And that was terrifying in and of itself,
link |
but these were not murderous systems.
link |
And they, you know, ascribed to Marxism, Leninism.
link |
So I suppose it's important to draw the line
link |
between mass murder and genocide and mass murder
link |
versus just mass violation of human rights.
link |
And the leap to mass murder, you're saying,
link |
maybe easier in some ideologies than others,
link |
but it's not clear that somehow one ideology
link |
definitely leads to mass murder and not.
link |
I wonder how many factors, what factors,
link |
how much of it is a single charismatic leader?
link |
How much of it is the conflagration
link |
of multiple historical events?
link |
How much of it is just dumb, the opposite of luck?
link |
Do you have a sense where if you look at a moment
link |
in history, predict, looking at the factors,
link |
whether something bad's going to happen here?
link |
When you look at Iraq at when Saddam Hussein
link |
first took power, well, you could,
link |
or you can, you know, go even farther back in history,
link |
would you be able to predict?
link |
So you said, you already kind of answered that
link |
with Stalin saying there's no way you could have predicted
link |
that in the early 20s.
link |
Is that always the case?
link |
You basically can't predict.
link |
It's pretty much always the case.
link |
In other words, I mean, history is a wonderful,
link |
you know, discipline and way of looking at life
link |
and the world in retrospect, meaning it happened.
link |
And we know it happened.
link |
And it's too easy to say sometimes it happened
link |
because it had to happen that way.
link |
It almost never has to happen that way.
link |
And, you know, things.
link |
So I very much am of the school that emphasizes,
link |
you know, contingency and choice and difference
link |
and different paths and not, you know,
link |
not necessarily a path that has to be followed.
link |
And those, you know, and, you know,
link |
sometimes you can warn about things.
link |
I mean, you can think, well, something's going to happen.
link |
And usually the way it works,
link |
let me just give you one example.
link |
I mean, I'm thinking about an example right now,
link |
which was the war in Yugoslavia, you know,
link |
which came in the 1990s and eventually
link |
ventuated in genocide in Bosnia.
link |
And, you know, I remember very clearly, you know,
link |
the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia,
link |
and people would say, you know, there's trouble here
link |
and, you know, something could go wrong.
link |
But no one in their wildest imagination
link |
thought that there would be outright war between them all.
link |
Then the outright war happened, genocide happened,
link |
and afterwards people would say, I saw it coming.
link |
You know, so you get a lot of that,
link |
especially with pundits and journalists,
link |
and that's, I saw it coming, I knew it was happening.
link |
You know, well, I mean, what happens in the human mind,
link |
and it happens in your mind too,
link |
is, you know, you go through a lot of alternatives.
link |
I mean, think about January 6th, you know, in this country,
link |
and all the different alternatives
link |
which people had in their mind,
link |
or before January 6th, you know, after the lost election.
link |
You know, things could have gone in lots of different ways,
link |
and there were all kinds of people
link |
choosing different ways it could have gone,
link |
but nobody really knew how it was going to turn out.
link |
It wasn't as smart people really understood
link |
that there'd be this kind of cockamamie uprising
link |
on January 6th, you know, that almost,
link |
you know, caused us enormous grief.
link |
So all of these kinds of things in history,
link |
you know, are deeply contingent.
link |
They depend on, you know, factors that we cannot predict,
link |
and, you know, and it's the joy of history that it's open.
link |
You know, you think about how people are now,
link |
I mean, let me give you one more example,
link |
and then I'll shut up, but, you know,
link |
there's the environmental example.
link |
You know, we're all threatened, right?
link |
We know it's coming.
link |
We know there's trouble, right?
link |
We know there's gonna be a catastrophe at some point,
link |
What's the catastrophe?
link |
Yeah, what's the nature of the catastrophe?
link |
Everyone says catastrophe.
link |
And what's the nature of it, right, right, right.
link |
Is it gonna be wars because resource constraint?
link |
Is it going to be hunger?
link |
Is it gonna be, like, mass migration of different kinds
link |
that leads to some kind of conflict and immigration,
link |
and maybe it won't be that big of a deal,
link |
and a total other catastrophic event
link |
will completely challenge the entirety
link |
of the human civilization.
link |
That's my point, that's my point, that's my point.
link |
You know, we really don't know.
link |
I mean, there's a lot we do know.
link |
I mean, the warming business and all this kind of stuff,
link |
you know, it's scientifically there,
link |
but how it's going to play out.
link |
And everybody's saying, you know, different things.
link |
And then you get somewhere in 50 years or 60 years,
link |
which I won't see, and people say, aha,
link |
I told you it was gonna be X,
link |
or it was gonna be Y, or it was gonna be Z.
link |
So I just don't think in history you can,
link |
well, you can't predict.
link |
You simply cannot predict what's going to happen.
link |
It's kind of when you just look at Hitler in the 30s,
link |
for me, oftentimes when I kind of read different accounts,
link |
it is so often, certainly in the press,
link |
but in general, me just reading about Hitler,
link |
I get the sense, like, this is a clown.
link |
There's no way this person will gain power.
link |
Which one, Hitler or Stalin?
link |
No, no, no, with Stalin, you don't get a sense
link |
he's a clown, he's a really good executive.
link |
You think, you don't think it'll lead to mass murder,
link |
but you think he's going to build a giant bureaucracy,
link |
at least with Hitler, it's like a failed artist
link |
who keeps screaming about stuff.
link |
There's no way he's gonna, I mean,
link |
you certainly don't think about the atrocities,
link |
but there's no way he's going to gain power,
link |
especially against communism.
link |
There's so many other competing forces
link |
that could have easily beat him.
link |
But then, you realize, event after event,
link |
where this clown keeps dancing,
link |
and all of a sudden, he gains more and more power,
link |
and just certain moments in time,
link |
he makes strategic decisions in terms of cooperating
link |
or gaining power over the military,
link |
all those kinds of things that eventually
link |
give him the power.
link |
I mean, this clown is one of the most impactful
link |
in the negative sense human beings in history.
link |
Right, and even the Jews who are there
link |
and are being screamed at and discriminated against,
link |
and there's a series of measures taken against them
link |
incrementally during the course of the 1930s,
link |
and very few who leave.
link |
Yeah, I mean, some pick up and go and say,
link |
I'm getting the hell out of here, and some Zionists
link |
try to leave, too, and go to the United States and stuff,
link |
but go to Israel and Palestine at the time,
link |
but, or to Britain or France.
link |
But in general, even the Jews who should have been
link |
very sensitive to what was going on
link |
didn't really understand the extent of the danger,
link |
and it's really hard for people to do that.
link |
It's almost impossible, in fact, I think.
link |
So most of the time, in that exact situation,
link |
nothing would have happened,
link |
or there'd be some drama and so on,
link |
and it'd be there's some bureaucrat,
link |
but every once in a while in human history,
link |
there's a kind of turn,
link |
and maybe something catalyzes something else,
link |
and just it accelerates to accelerate,
link |
escalates, escalates, and then war breaks out,
link |
or totally, you know, revolutions break out.
link |
Can we go to the big question of genocide?
link |
What are the defining characteristics of genocide?
link |
Dealing with genocide is a difficult thing
link |
when it comes to the definition.
link |
There is a definition, the December 1948 UN Convention
link |
on the Prep Prevention and Punishment of Genocide
link |
is considered the sort of major document of definition,
link |
in the definitional sense of genocide,
link |
and it emphasizes the intentional destruction
link |
of an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group,
link |
those are the four groups, again, comma, as such.
link |
And what that means, basically,
link |
is destroying the group as a group.
link |
In other words, there's a kind of beauty in human diversity,
link |
and different groups of people, you know,
link |
Estonians, you know, a tribe of Native Americans,
link |
South African tribes, you know, the Rohingya in Myanmar,
link |
there's a kind of beauty humanity recognizes
link |
in the distinctiveness of those groups.
link |
You know, this was a notion that emerges really
link |
with Romanticism after the French Revolution,
link |
then the beginning of the 19th century,
link |
with Herder, mostly.
link |
And this beauty of these groups, then,
link |
you know, is what is under attack in genocide.
link |
And it's with intent, you know,
link |
the idea is that it's intentional destruction.
link |
So this is a kind of, you know,
link |
analogy to first degree, second degree,
link |
and third degree murder, right?
link |
First degree murder, you know,
link |
you're out to kill this person, and you plan it,
link |
and you go out, and you do it, right?
link |
That's intent, right?
link |
Manslaughter is not intent.
link |
You end up doing the same thing, but it's different.
link |
So, you know, the major person behind the definitions,
link |
a man named Raphael Lemkin, I don't know if you heard
link |
his name or not, but he was a Polish Jewish jurist
link |
who came, you know, from Poland,
link |
came to the United States during the war,
link |
and had been a kind of crusader for recognizing genocide.
link |
It's a word that he created, by the way,
link |
and he coined the term in 1943,
link |
and then published it in 1944 for the first time.
link |
Geno, meaning people, and side, meaning killing, right?
link |
And so Lemkin then had this term,
link |
and he pushed hard to have it recognized,
link |
and it was in the UN Convention.
link |
So that's the rough definition.
link |
The problem with it is the definition,
link |
the problems with the definition are several.
link |
You know, one of them is, is it just these four groups?
link |
You know, racial, religious, ethnic, or national?
link |
See, this comes right out of the war.
link |
And what's in people's minds in 1948 are Jews,
link |
Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs sometimes,
link |
who were killed by the Nazis.
link |
That's what's in their mind.
link |
But there are other groups, too, if you think about it,
link |
you know, who are killed,
link |
social groups or political groups.
link |
And that was not allowed in the convention,
link |
meaning for a lot of different reasons,
link |
the Soviets were primary among them.
link |
They didn't want other kinds of groups,
link |
let's say Kulaks, for example, to be considered.
link |
That's a social group.
link |
Or peasants, which is a social group.
link |
So, or a political group.
link |
I mean, let's take a group, you know, communists killed
link |
groups of people, but non communists also killed
link |
groups of people in Indonesia in 1965, 66, they killed,
link |
you know, I don't know exactly,
link |
but roughly 600,000 Indonesian communists.
link |
Well, is that genocide or not?
link |
You know, at my point of view, it is genocide,
link |
although it's Indonesians killing Indonesians.
link |
And we have the same problem with the Cambodian genocide.
link |
I mean, we talk about a Cambodian genocide,
link |
but most of the people killed in the Cambodian genocide
link |
were other Cambodians.
link |
They give it the name, they're ready to recognize
link |
this genocide because they also killed some other peoples,
link |
meaning the Vietnamese, Aham people who are,
link |
you know, Muslim, smaller Muslim people in the area,
link |
So the question then becomes, well,
link |
does it have to be a different nationality
link |
or ethnic group or religious group for it to be genocide?
link |
And my answer is no.
link |
You know, you need to expand the definition.
link |
It's a little bit like with our constitution.
link |
We got a constitution, but we don't live
link |
in the end of the 18th century, right?
link |
We live in the 21st century.
link |
And so you have to update the constitution
link |
over the centuries.
link |
And similarly, the genocide convention needs updating too.
link |
So that's how I work with the definition.
link |
So this is this invention.
link |
Was it an invention, this beautiful idea,
link |
romantic idea that there's groups of people
link |
and the group is united by some unique characteristics?
link |
That was an invention in human history, this idea?
link |
Not to see as individuals?
link |
In some senses, it was.
link |
I mean, it's not, you know,
link |
there are things that are always constructed
link |
in one fashion or another and the construction,
link |
you know, more or less represents the reality.
link |
And what the reality is always much more complicated
link |
than the construction or the invention of a term
link |
or a concept or a way of thinking about a nation, right?
link |
And this way of thinking of nations, you know,
link |
as again, you know, groups of religious, linguistic,
link |
not political necessarily, but cultural entities
link |
is something that was essentially invented, yes.
link |
Yeah, so I mean, you know, if you look at...
link |
There are no Germans in the 17th century.
link |
There are no Italians in the 17th century, right?
link |
They're only there after, you know,
link |
the invention of the nation, which comes again,
link |
mostly out of the French Revolution
link |
and in the Romantic movement,
link |
a man named Johann Gottfried von Herder, right?
link |
Who was really the first one who sort of went around,
link |
collected people's languages and collected their sayings
link |
and their dances and their folkways and stuff
link |
and said, isn't this cool, you know,
link |
that they're Estonians and that they're Latvians
link |
and that they're these other,
link |
these interesting different peoples
link |
who don't even know necessarily
link |
that they're different peoples, right?
link |
That comes a little bit later, right?
link |
Once the concept is invented, then people start to say,
link |
hey, we're nations too, you know?
link |
And the Germans decide they're a nation and they unify.
link |
And the Italians discover they're a nation
link |
and they unify instead of being, you know,
link |
Florentines and Romans and, you know, Sicilians.
link |
But then beyond nations, there's political affiliations,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
It's fascinating that, you know, you start,
link |
look at the early Homo sapiens
link |
and then there's obviously tribes, right?
link |
And then that's very concrete.
link |
That's a geographic location and it's a small group
link |
of people and you have warring tribes probably connected
link |
to just limited resources.
link |
But it's fascinating to think that that is then taken
link |
to the space of ideas, to where you can create a group
link |
at first to appreciate its beauty.
link |
You create a group based on language,
link |
based on maybe even political, philosophical ideas,
link |
religious ideas, all those kinds of things.
link |
And then that naturally then leads
link |
to getting angry at groups and making them the other.
link |
That comes more towards the end of the 19th century,
link |
you know, with the influence of Darwin.
link |
I mean, you can't blame Darwin for it,
link |
but neo Darwin, Darwinians, you know,
link |
who start to talk about, you know,
link |
the competition between nations, the natural competition,
link |
the weak ones fall away, the strong ones get ahead.
link |
You know, you get this sort of combination also
link |
with, you know, modern antisemitism
link |
and with racial thinking, you know,
link |
the racial thinking at the end of the 19th century
link |
So now, you know, at the end of the 19th century
link |
versus the beginning of the, you know,
link |
the middle of the 19th century, you know,
link |
you can be a German and be a Jew
link |
and there's no contradiction.
link |
As long as you speak the language and you, you know,
link |
you dress and think and act and share the culture.
link |
By the end of the 19th century, people saying, no, no,
link |
you know, they're not Germans.
link |
They're Jews, they're different.
link |
They have different blood.
link |
They have different, they don't say genes yet,
link |
but you know, that's sort of a sense of people.
link |
And that's when, you know,
link |
there's this sense of superiority too, and inferiority.
link |
You know, that they're inferior to us.
link |
You know, and that we're the strong ones
link |
and we have to, you know, and Hitler, by the way,
link |
just adopts this hook line and sinker.
link |
I mean, there are a whole series of thinkers
link |
at the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th century
link |
who he cites in Mein Kampf, you know,
link |
which is written in the early 1920s,
link |
that, you know, basically pervades this racial thinking.
link |
So nationalism changes.
link |
So nationalism in and of itself is not bad.
link |
I mean, it's not bad, you know,
link |
to share culture and language and, you know,
link |
folkways and a sense of common belonging.
link |
There's nothing bad about it inherently.
link |
But then what happens is it becomes, you know,
link |
frequently is used and becomes, especially on fascism,
link |
becomes dangerous.
link |
And it's especially dangerous
link |
when the two conflicting groups share geographic location.
link |
So like with Jews, you know, I come, you know,
link |
I'm a Russian Jew and it's always interesting.
link |
I take pride in, you know, I love the tradition
link |
of the Soviet Union, of Russia.
link |
So I love these countries.
link |
They have beautiful tradition in literature and science
link |
and art and all those kinds of things.
link |
But it's funny that people, not often,
link |
but sometimes correct me that I'm not Russian.
link |
And it's a, it's a, it's a nice reminder.
link |
That that is always there,
link |
that desire to create these groups.
link |
And then when they're living in the same place
link |
for that division between groups,
link |
that hate between groups can explode.
link |
And I just, I wonder why is that there?
link |
Why does, why does the human heart tend so easily
link |
towards this kind of hate?
link |
You know, that's a big question in and of itself.
link |
You know, the human heart is full of everything, right?
link |
It's full of hate.
link |
It's full of love.
link |
It's full of indifference.
link |
It's full of apathy.
link |
It's full of energy.
link |
So, I mean, hate is something, you know, that,
link |
I mean, I think, and, you know,
link |
along with hate, you know, the ability to really hurt
link |
and injure people is something that's within all of us.
link |
You know, it's within all of us.
link |
And it's just something that's part of who we are
link |
and part of our society.
link |
So, you know, we're shaped by our society
link |
and our society can do with us often what it wishes.
link |
You know, that's why it's so much nicer to live in a
link |
more or less beneficent society
link |
like that of a democracy in the West
link |
than to live in the Soviet Union, right?
link |
I mean, because, you know, you have more or less
link |
the freedom to do what you wish
link |
and not to be forced into situations
link |
in which you would have to then do nasty to other people.
link |
You know, some societies, as we talked about,
link |
you know, are more have proclivities towards,
link |
you know, asking of its people to do things
link |
they don't want to do and forcing them to do so.
link |
So, you know, freedom is a wonderful thing.
link |
To be able to choose not to do evil is a great thing,
link |
you know, whereas in some societies, you know,
link |
you feel in some ways for not so much for the NKVD bosses,
link |
but for the guys on the ground, you know, in the 1930s
link |
or not so much for the Nazi bosses,
link |
but for the guys, you know, in the police battalion
link |
that were told, go shoot those Jews, you know?
link |
And you do it, not necessarily because
link |
they force you to do it, but because your social,
link |
you know, your social situation, you know, encourages you to
link |
and you don't have the courage not to.
link |
Yeah, I was just, as I often do,
link |
rereading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning
link |
and he said something, I just, I often pull out sort of lines.
link |
The mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard
link |
or a prisoner tells us almost nothing.
link |
Human kindness can be found in all groups,
link |
even those which as a whole, it would be easy to condemn.
link |
So that's speaking to, you feel for those people
link |
at the lowest level implementing the orders of those above.
link |
And also you worry yourself what will happen
link |
if you were given those same orders, you know?
link |
I mean, what would you do?
link |
You know, what kind of reaction would you have
link |
in a similar situation?
link |
And you know, you don't know.
link |
I could see myself in World War II
link |
while fighting for almost any country that I was born in.
link |
There's a love of community, there's a love of country
link |
that's just, at least to me it comes naturally,
link |
just love of community and countries wanting such community.
link |
And I could see fighting for that country,
link |
especially when you're sold a story that you're fighting evil
link |
and I'm sure every single country
link |
was sold that story effectively.
link |
And then when you're in the military
link |
and you have a gun in your hand
link |
or you're in the police force and you're ordered,
link |
go to this place and commit violence,
link |
it's hard to know what you would do.
link |
It's a mix of fear, it's a mix of,
link |
maybe you convince yourself, you know,
link |
what can one person really do?
link |
And over time, it's again, that slippery slope.
link |
Because you could see all the people who protest,
link |
who revolt, they're ineffective.
link |
So like, if you actually want to practically help somehow,
link |
you're going to convince yourself that you can't,
link |
one person can't possibly help.
link |
And then you have a family, so you want to make,
link |
you know, you want to protect your family.
link |
You tell all these stories and over time,
link |
it, you naturally convince yourself to dehumanize the other.
link |
Yeah, I think about this a lot,
link |
mostly because I worry that I wouldn't be a good German.
link |
Yeah, no, no, that's right, that's right.
link |
And one of the, you know, one of my tasks as a teacher,
link |
right, our students, and I have, you know,
link |
classes on genocide, I have one now.
link |
And another one, by the way, on Stalin.
link |
But the one on genocide, you know,
link |
one of my tasks is to try to get the students to understand
link |
this is not about weird people who live far away
link |
in time and in place, but it's about them, you know?
link |
And that, you know, that's a hard lesson,
link |
but it's an important one, you know,
link |
that this is in all of us, you know, it's in all of us.
link |
And there's nothing, you know,
link |
and you just try to gird yourself up, you know,
link |
to try to figure out ways that maybe you won't be complicit.
link |
And that you learn how to stand by your principles,
link |
but it's very hard, it's extremely difficult.
link |
And you can't, the other interesting thing about it
link |
is it's not predictable.
link |
Now, there's, they've done a lot of studies of Poles,
link |
for example, who during the war saved Jews, you know?
link |
Well, who are the Poles who saved Jews
link |
versus those who turned them in?
link |
It's completely unpredictable.
link |
You know, sometimes it's the worst anti Semites
link |
who protect them because they don't believe
link |
they should be killed, right?
link |
And sometimes, you know, it's not predictable.
link |
It's not as if the humanists among us, you know,
link |
are the ones who, you know, consistently show up,
link |
you know, and experience danger, in other words,
link |
and are ready to take on danger
link |
to defend, you know, your fellow human beings.
link |
I mean, sometimes simple people do it,
link |
and sometimes they do it for really simple reasons.
link |
And sometimes, people you would expect to do it don't.
link |
And you've got that mix, and it's just not predictable.
link |
One thing I've learned in this age of social media
link |
is it feels like the people with integrity
link |
and the ones who would do the right thing
link |
are the quiet ones.
link |
In terms of humanists, in terms of activists,
link |
there's so many points to be gained
link |
of declaring that you would do the right thing.
link |
It's the simple, quiet folks.
link |
Because I've seen quite, on a small,
link |
obviously much smaller scale,
link |
just shows of integrity and character.
link |
When there was sacrifice to be made and it was done quietly.
link |
Now, sort of the small heroes, those are,
link |
you're right, it's surprising, but they're often quiet.
link |
That's why I'm distrustful of people
link |
who kind of proclaim that they would do the right thing.
link |
And there are different kinds of integrity, too.
link |
I mean, I edited a memoir of a Polish underground fighter,
link |
member of the underground who was in Majdanek
link |
in the concentration camp at Majdanek.
link |
You know, and it was just an interesting mix
link |
of different kinds of integrity.
link |
You know, on the one hand,
link |
it really bothered him deeply
link |
when Jews were killed or sent to camp
link |
or that sort of thing.
link |
On the other hand, he was something of an anti Semite.
link |
You know, he would, you know,
link |
sometimes if Jews were his friends, he would help them.
link |
And if they weren't, sometimes he was really mean to them.
link |
You know, and you could, in their various levels,
link |
you know, a concentration camp is a terrible social experiment
link |
in some ways, right?
link |
But you learn a lot from how people behave.
link |
And what you see is that, you know,
link |
people behave sometimes extraordinarily well
link |
in some situations and extraordinarily poorly in others.
link |
And it's mixed and you can't predict it.
link |
And it's hard to find consistency.
link |
I mean, that's the other thing.
link |
It's, you know, I think we claim too much consistency
link |
for the people we study
link |
and the people we think about in the past.
link |
You know, they're not consistent any more than we are
link |
consistent, right?
link |
Well, let me ask you about human nature here on both sides.
link |
So first, what have you learned about human nature
link |
from studying genocide?
link |
Why do humans commit genocide?
link |
What lessons, first of all, why is a difficult question,
link |
but what insights do you have into humans
link |
that genocide is something that happens in the world?
link |
That's a really big and difficult question, right?
link |
And it has to be parsed, I think,
link |
into different kinds of questions.
link |
You know, why does genocide happen?
link |
You know, which the answer there is frequently political,
link |
meaning, you know, why Hitler ended up killing the Jews.
link |
Well, it had a lot to do with the political history
link |
of Germany and wartime history of Germany, right?
link |
In the 30s, and, you know, it's traceable to then.
link |
No, like you mentioned it yourself,
link |
you can't imagine Hitler in the mid 20s
link |
turning into anything of the kind of dictator
link |
he ended up being and the kind of murderer,
link |
mass murderer he ended up being.
link |
So, and the same thing goes, by the way,
link |
for Stalin and Soviet Union and Pol Pot.
link |
I mean, these are all essentially political movements
link |
where the polity state is seized, you know,
link |
by a ideological or, you know, party, single party movement
link |
and then is moved in directions
link |
where mass killing takes place.
link |
The other question, you know,
link |
let's separate that question out.
link |
The other question is why do ordinary people participate?
link |
Because the fact of the matter is,
link |
just ordering genocide is not enough.
link |
Just saying, you know, go get them is not enough.
link |
There have to be people who will cooperate
link |
and who will do their jobs, you know,
link |
both at the kind of mezzo level,
link |
the middle level of a bureaucracy,
link |
but also at the everyday level.
link |
You know, people who have to pull the triggers
link |
and that kind of thing and, you know,
link |
force people into the gas chamber
link |
and grab people, you know, in Kiev in September 1941
link |
at Babin Yar and push them, you know, towards the ravine
link |
where the machine gunners are gonna shoot them down.
link |
You know, and those are all different questions.
link |
The question of, you know, especially the lower level people
link |
who actually do the killing is a question
link |
which I think we've been talking about,
link |
which is that within all of us,
link |
you know, is the capability of being murderers
link |
and mass murderers.
link |
I mean, to participate in mass murder.
link |
I won't call them laws of social psychology,
link |
but the character of social psychology.
link |
You know, we will do it in most cases.
link |
I mean, one of the shocking things that I learned
link |
just a few years ago studying the Holocaust
link |
is that you could pull out.
link |
In other words, if they order a police battalion
link |
to go shoot Jews, you didn't have to do it.
link |
You could pull out.
link |
They weren't gonna, they never killed anybody.
link |
They never executed anybody.
link |
They never even punished people for saying,
link |
no, I'm not gonna do that.
link |
So people are doing it voluntarily.
link |
They may not want to do it.
link |
You know, they give them booze to try to, you know,
link |
numb the pain of murder,
link |
because they know there is pain.
link |
I mean, people experience pain when they murder people,
link |
but they don't pull out.
link |
And so it's the character of who we are in the society,
link |
in groups, and we're very, very influenced.
link |
I mean, we're highly influenced by the groups
link |
in which we operate.
link |
And, you know, who we talk to,
link |
and who our friends are within that group,
link |
and who is the head of the group.
link |
And I mean, you see this even,
link |
I mean, you see it in any group, you know,
link |
whether it's in the academy, right, at Stanford,
link |
or whether it's, you know, in a labor union,
link |
or whether it's in a church group in Tennessee,
link |
or wherever, you know, people pay attention to each other,
link |
and they are unwilling, frequently, to say no.
link |
Even though all of you think it's right, it's wrong.
link |
I mean, you just don't do that, usually,
link |
especially in societies that are authoritarian,
link |
or totalitarian, right?
link |
Because it's harder, because there's a backup to it, right?
link |
There's the NKVD there, or there's the Gestapo there,
link |
and there are other people there.
link |
So you just, you know, they may not be forcing you to do it,
link |
but your social being, plus this danger in the distance,
link |
you know, you do it.
link |
But then, if you go up the hierarchy,
link |
at the very top, there's a dictator.
link |
Presumably, you know, you go to, like, middle management
link |
to the bureaucracy.
link |
The higher you get up there,
link |
the more power you have to change the direction
link |
Right, right, right.
link |
But nobody seems to do it.
link |
Right, or what happens, and it does happen.
link |
It happens in the German army.
link |
I mean, it happens in the case of the Armenian genocide,
link |
where we know there are governors who said,
link |
no, I'm not gonna kill Armenians.
link |
What kind of business is this?
link |
They're just removed.
link |
They're removed, and you find a replacement very easily.
link |
So, you know, you do see people who stand up.
link |
And again, it's not really predictable who it will be.
link |
I mean, I haven't done the study of the Armenian governors
link |
I mean, the Turkish governors who said no
link |
to the Armenian genocide.
link |
But, you know, there are people who do step aside
link |
every once in a while in the middle level.
link |
And again, they're German generals who say,
link |
wait a minute, what is this business in Poland
link |
when they start to kill Jews or in Belorussia?
link |
And, you know, they're just pushed aside.
link |
You know, if they don't do their job, they're pushed aside.
link |
Or they end up doing it.
link |
And they usually do end up doing it.
link |
What about on the victim side?
link |
So, I mentioned man's search for meaning.
link |
What can we learn about human nature,
link |
the human mind from the victims of genocide?
link |
So, Viktor Frankl talked about the ability
link |
to discover meaning and beauty, even in suffering.
link |
Is there something to be said about, you know,
link |
in your studying of genocide
link |
that you've learned about human nature?
link |
Well, again, I don't, I have to say,
link |
I come out of the study of genocide
link |
with a very pessimistic view of human nature.
link |
A very pessimistic view.
link |
Even on the victim side?
link |
Even on the victim side.
link |
I mean, the victims will eat their children, right?
link |
Ukrainian case, they have no choice.
link |
You know, the victims will rob each other.
link |
The victims will form hierarchies within victimhood.
link |
So, you see, let me give you an example.
link |
Again, I told you I was working on Majdanek.
link |
And there's, in Majdanek, at a certain point in 42,
link |
a group of Slovak Jews were arrested
link |
and sent to Majdanek.
link |
Those Slovak Jews were a group,
link |
somehow they stuck together, they were very competent,
link |
they were, you know, many of them were businessmen,
link |
they knew each other,
link |
and for a variety of different reasons within the camp.
link |
And again, this shows you the diversity of the camps
link |
and also, you know, these images of black and white
link |
in the camps are not very useful.
link |
They ruled the camp.
link |
I mean, they basically had all the important jobs
link |
in the camp, including jobs like beating other Jews,
link |
and persecuting other Jews, and persecuting other peoples,
link |
And this Polish guy who I mentioned to you,
link |
who wrote this memoir, hated them
link |
because of what they were doing to the Poles, right?
link |
And he, you know, he's incensed
link |
because aren't these supposed to be the Untermenschen?
link |
He says, and look what they're doing,
link |
they're treating us, you know, like dirt.
link |
And they do, they treat them like dirt.
link |
So, you know, in this kind of work on Majdanek,
link |
there's certainly parts of it that, you know,
link |
were inspiring, you know, people helping each other,
link |
people trying to feed each other,
link |
people giving warmth to each other.
link |
You know, there's some very heroic Polish women
link |
who end up having a radio show called Radio Majdanek,
link |
which they put on every night in the women's camp,
link |
which is, you know, to raise people's spirits.
link |
And they, you know, sing songs
link |
and do all this kind of stuff, you know,
link |
to try to keep themselves from, you know,
link |
the horrors that they're experiencing around them.
link |
And so you do see that, and you do see,
link |
you know, human beings acting in support of each other.
link |
But, you know, I mean, Primo Levi is one of my favorite
link |
writers about the Holocaust and about the camps.
link |
And, you know, I don't think Primo Levi saw anything.
link |
You know, I mean, he had pals, you know,
link |
who he helped and who helped him.
link |
I mean, but he describes this kind of, you know,
link |
terrible inhuman environment,
link |
which no one can escape, really, no one can escape.
link |
He ends up committing suicide too, I think,
link |
because of his sense of, we don't know exactly why,
link |
but probably because of his sense
link |
of what happened in the camp.
link |
I mean, later he goes back to Italy,
link |
becomes a writer and that sort of thing.
link |
So I don't, I don't, especially in the concentration camps,
link |
it's really hard to find places like Wickel Frankel
link |
where you can say, you know,
link |
I am moved in a positive way, you know, by what happened.
link |
There were cases, there's no question.
link |
People hung together, they tried to help each other,
link |
but, you know, they were totally, totally caught
link |
in this web of genocide.
link |
See, so there are stories, but the thing is, I have this
link |
sense, maybe it's a hope, that within most,
link |
if not every human heart, there's a kind of, like,
link |
flame of compassion and kindness and love that waits,
link |
that longs to connect with others,
link |
that ultimately en masse overpowers everything else.
link |
If you just look at the story of human history,
link |
the resistance to violence and mass murder and genocide
link |
feels like a force that's there.
link |
And it feels like a force that's more powerful
link |
than whatever the dark momentum that leads to genocide is.
link |
It feels like that's more powerful, it's just quiet.
link |
It's hard to tell the story of that little flame
link |
that burns within all of our hearts,
link |
that longing to connect to other human beings.
link |
And there's something also about human nature
link |
and us as storytellers, that we're not very good
link |
at telling the stories of that little flame.
link |
We're much better at telling the stories of atrocities.
link |
No, you know, I think maybe I fundamentally
link |
disagree with you, I think maybe I fundamentally,
link |
I don't disagree that there is that flame.
link |
I just think it's just too easily doused.
link |
And I think it's too easily goes out in a lot of people.
link |
And I mean, like I say, I come away from this work,
link |
You know, there is this work by a Harvard psychologist,
link |
now I'm forgetting his name.
link |
Yes, yes, Stephen Pinker, that shows over time, you know,
link |
and you know, initially I was quite skeptical of the work,
link |
but in the end, I thought he was quite convincing
link |
that over time, the incidence of homicide, you know,
link |
goes down, the incidence of rape goes down,
link |
the incidence of genocide, except for the big blip,
link |
you know, in the middle of the 20th century goes down.
link |
Not markedly, but it goes down generally,
link |
that you know, more than norms, international norms
link |
are changing how we think about this and stuff like that.
link |
I thought he was pretty convincing about that.
link |
But think about, you know, we're modern people.
link |
I mean, we've advanced so fast in so many different areas.
link |
I mean, we should have eliminated this a long time ago,
link |
You know, how is it that, you know,
link |
we're still facing this business of genocide in Myanmar,
link |
in Xinjiang, in, you know, Tigray, in Ethiopia,
link |
you know, the potentials of genocide there.
link |
And all over the world, you know, we still have this thing
link |
that we cannot handle, that we can't deal with.
link |
And, you know, again, you know, electric cars and planes
link |
that fly from here to, you know, Beijing.
link |
Think about the differences between 250 years ago
link |
or 300 years ago and today, but the differences in genocide
link |
are not all that great.
link |
I mean, the incidence has gone down.
link |
I think Pinker has demonstrated, I mean,
link |
there are problems with his methodology,
link |
but on the whole, I'm with him on that book.
link |
I thought in the end, it was quite well done.
link |
So, you know, I do not, I have to say,
link |
I'm not an optimist about what this human flame can do.
link |
And, you know, I once, someone once said to me,
link |
when I posed a similar kind of question to a seminar,
link |
a friend of mine at Berkeley once said,
link |
remember original sin, Norman, well, I don't, you know,
link |
that's very Catholic and I don't really think
link |
in terms of original sin, but in some ways, you know,
link |
her point is we carry this with us, you know,
link |
we carry with us a really potentially nasty mean streak
link |
that can do harm to other people.
link |
Well, we carry the capacity to love too.
link |
Yes, we do, yes, we do.
link |
That's part of the deal.
link |
You have a bias in that you have studied
link |
some of the darker aspects of human nature
link |
and human history.
link |
So it is difficult from the trenches, from the muck,
link |
to see a possible sort of way out through love.
link |
But it's not obvious that that's not the case.
link |
You mentioned electric cars and rockets and airplanes.
link |
To me, the more powerful thing is Wikipedia, the internet.
link |
Only 50% of the world currently has access to the internet,
link |
but that's growing in information and knowledge and wisdom,
link |
especially among women in the world.
link |
As that grows, I think it becomes a lot more difficult
link |
if love wins, it becomes a lot more difficult
link |
for somebody like Hitler to take power,
link |
for genocide to occur, because people think,
link |
and the masses, I think, the people have power
link |
when they're able to think,
link |
when they can see the full kind of...
link |
First of all, when they can study your work,
link |
they can know about the fact that genocide happens,
link |
how it occurs, how the promises of great charismatic leaders
link |
lead to great, destructive mass genocide.
link |
And just even studying the fact that the Holocaust happened
link |
for a large number of people is a powerful preventer
link |
of future genocide.
link |
One of the lessons of history is just knowing
link |
that this can happen, learning how it happens,
link |
that normal human beings, leaders that give big promises,
link |
can also become evil and destructive.
link |
The fact, knowing that that can happen
link |
is a powerful preventer of that,
link |
and then you kind of wake up from this haze
link |
of believing everything you hear,
link |
and you learn to just, in your small, local way,
link |
to put more love out there in the world.
link |
I believe it's possible, it's not too good,
link |
sort of to push back, it's not so obvious to me
link |
that in the end, I think in the end, love wins.
link |
That's my intuition, I've had to put money on it.
link |
I have a sense that this genocide thing
link |
is more and more going to be an artifact of the past.
link |
Well, I certainly hope you're right.
link |
I mean, I certainly hope you're right.
link |
And it could be you are, we don't know.
link |
But the evidence is different.
link |
The evidence is different.
link |
And the capacity of human beings to do evil
link |
to other human beings is repeatedly demonstrated.
link |
Whether it's in massacres in Mexico,
link |
or ISIS and the Yazidi Kurds,
link |
or you can just go on and on.
link |
Syria, I mean, look what, I mean,
link |
Syria used to be a country, and now it's been a mass grave,
link |
and people then have left in the millions
link |
And you know, I'm not saying, you know, I'm not saying,
link |
I mean, the Turks have done nice things for the Syrians,
link |
and the Germans welcomed in a million or so,
link |
and actually reasonably absorbed them.
link |
I mean, I'm not saying bad things only happen in the world.
link |
They're good and bad things that happen,
link |
you're absolutely right.
link |
But I don't think we're on the path
link |
to eliminating these bad things,
link |
really bad things from happening.
link |
I just don't think we are.
link |
And I don't think there's any,
link |
I don't think the facts demonstrate it.
link |
I mean, I hope, I hope you're right.
link |
But I think otherwise, it's just an article of faith.
link |
You know, which is perfectly fine.
link |
It's better to have that article of faith
link |
than to have an article of faith which says,
link |
you know, things should get bad, or things like that.
link |
Well, it's not just fine.
link |
It's the only way if you want to build a better future.
link |
So optimism is a prerequisite
link |
for engineering a better future.
link |
So like, okay, so a historian
link |
has to see clearly into the past.
link |
An engineer has to imagine a future
link |
that's different from the past,
link |
that's better than the past.
link |
Because without that,
link |
they're not going to be able to build a better future.
link |
So there's a kind of saying,
link |
like you have to consider the facts.
link |
Well, at every single moment in history,
link |
if you allow yourself to be too grounded
link |
by the facts of the past,
link |
you're not going to create the future.
link |
So that's kind of the tension that we're living with.
link |
To have a chance, we have to imagine
link |
that the better future is possible.
link |
But one of the ways to do that is to study history.
link |
Which engineers don't do enough of.
link |
Which is a real problem.
link |
It's a real problem.
link |
Or basically a lot of disciplines in science
link |
and so on don't do enough of.
link |
Can you tell the story of China from 1958 to 1962,
link |
what was called the Great Leap Forward,
link |
orchestrated by Chairman Mao Zedong
link |
that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people
link |
making it arguably the largest famine in human history?
link |
I mean, it was a terrible set of events
link |
that led to the death.
link |
People will dispute the numbers.
link |
15 million, 17 million, 14 million,
link |
20 million people died in the Great Leap.
link |
Many people say 30, 40, 50 million.
link |
Some people will go that high too.
link |
That's right, that's right.
link |
Essentially, Mao and the Communist Party leadership,
link |
but it was mostly Mao's doing,
link |
decided he wanted to move the country into communism.
link |
And part of the idea of that
link |
was rivalry with the Soviet Union.
link |
Mao was a good Stalinist,
link |
or at least felt like Stalin
link |
was the right kind of communist leader to have,
link |
and he didn't like Khrushchev at all,
link |
and he didn't like what he thought were Khrushchev's reforms
link |
and also Khrushchev's pretensions
link |
to moving the Soviet Union into communism.
link |
So Khrushchev started talking about giving more power
link |
to the party, less power to the state,
link |
and if you have more power to the party versus the state,
link |
then you're moving into communism quicker.
link |
So what Mao decided to do was to engage in this vast program
link |
of building what were called people's communes.
link |
And these communes were enormous conglomerations
link |
of essentially collective farms,
link |
and what would happen on those communes
link |
is there would be places for people to eat,
link |
and there would be places for the kids to be raised
link |
in essentially kind of separate homes,
link |
and they would be schooled.
link |
Everybody would turn over their metal,
link |
which was one of the,
link |
actually it turned out to be a terribly negative phenomenon,
link |
their metal pots and pans to be melted to then make steel.
link |
Every of these big communes would all have little steel plants
link |
and they would build steel
link |
and the whole countryside would be transformed.
link |
Well, like many of these sort of,
link |
I mean a true megalomaniac project,
link |
like some of Stalin's projects too.
link |
And this particular project then,
link |
the people had no choice.
link |
They were forced to do this.
link |
It was incredibly dysfunctional for Chinese agriculture
link |
and ended up creating, as you mentioned, a terrible famine
link |
that everybody understood was a famine as a result of this.
link |
I mean, there were also some problems of nature
link |
at the same time and some flooding and bad weather
link |
and that sort of thing, but it was really a manmade famine.
link |
And Mao said at one point, who cares if millions die?
link |
It just doesn't matter.
link |
We've got millions more left.
link |
I mean, he would periodically say things like this
link |
that showed that like Stalin, he had total indifference
link |
to the fact that people were dying in large numbers.
link |
It led again to cannibalism
link |
and to terrible wastage all over the country
link |
and millions of people died
link |
and there was just no stopping it.
link |
There were people in the party
link |
who began to kind of edge towards telling Mao
link |
this wasn't a great idea and that he should back off,
link |
but he wouldn't back off.
link |
And the result was catastrophe in the countryside
link |
and all these people dying.
link |
And then compounding the problem was the political elite,
link |
which then if peasants would object
link |
or if certain people would say,
link |
no, they'd beat the hell out of them.
link |
They would beat people who didn't do
link |
what they wanted them to do.
link |
So it was really, really a horrific set of events
link |
on the Chinese countryside.
link |
I mean, and people wrote about it.
link |
I mean, we learned about it.
link |
There were people who were keeping track
link |
of what was going on and eventually wrote books about it.
link |
So we have, I mean, we have pretty good documentation,
link |
not so much on the numbers.
link |
Numbers are always a difficult problem.
link |
I'm facing this problem, by the way,
link |
this is a little bit separate with the Holodomor,
link |
where Ukrainians are now claiming
link |
11.5 million people died in Holodomor.
link |
And most people assume it's somewhere
link |
in the neighborhood of four million, 4.5 million maybe.
link |
So you have wildly different numbers that come out.
link |
Then we have different kinds of numbers,
link |
as you mentioned too, with the Great Leap Forward.
link |
So it was a huge catastrophe for China
link |
and now only backed off when he had to.
link |
And then revived a little bit
link |
with the Red Guards Movement later on
link |
when he was upset that the bureaucracy
link |
was resisting him a little bit
link |
when it came to the Great Leap.
link |
But he had to back off.
link |
It was such a terrible catastrophe.
link |
So one of the things about numbers
link |
is that you usually talk about deaths,
link |
but with the famine, with starvation,
link |
the thing I often think about
link |
that's impossible to put into numbers
link |
is the number of people
link |
and the degree to which they were suffering.
link |
You know, the number of days spent in suffering.
link |
And so, I mean, death is,
link |
death is just one of the consequences of suffering.
link |
To me, it feels like one, two, three years or months
link |
and then years of not having anything to eat is worse.
link |
And those aren't put into numbers often.
link |
And the effect on people long term,
link |
you know, in terms of their mental health,
link |
in terms of their physical health,
link |
their ability to work, all those kinds of things.
link |
I mean, Ukrainians are working on,
link |
there are people working on this subject now.
link |
You know, the longterm effect of the hunger famine on them.
link |
And I'm sure there's a similar kind of longterm effect
link |
on Chinese peasantry of what happened.
link |
You know, I mean, you're destroying.
link |
Multigenerational.
link |
Yes, multigenerational.
link |
That's right, that's right.
link |
And you know, it's a really, you're absolutely right.
link |
This is a terrible, terrible way to die.
link |
And it lasts a long time.
link |
And sometimes you don't die, you survive,
link |
but you know, in the kind of shape
link |
where you can't do anything.
link |
I mean, you can't function.
link |
Now your brain's been injured, you know.
link |
I know it's a really, these famines are really horrible.
link |
So when you talk about genocide,
link |
it's often talking about murder.
link |
Where do you place North Korea in this discussion?
link |
We kind of mentioned it.
link |
So in the, what is it?
link |
The Arduous March of the 1990s,
link |
where it was mass starvation.
link |
Many people describe mass starvation
link |
going on now in North Korea.
link |
When you think about genocide,
link |
when you think about atrocities going on in the world today,
link |
where do you place North Korea?
link |
So take a step back.
link |
When the, there were all these courts
link |
that were set up for Bosnia and for Rwanda
link |
and for other genocides in the 1990s.
link |
And then the decision was made
link |
by the international community, UN basically,
link |
to set up the International Criminal Court,
link |
which would then try genocide in the more modern period
link |
and the more contemporary period.
link |
And the ICC lists three crimes basically.
link |
The genocide crimes against humanity and war crimes.
link |
And subsumed to crimes against humanity
link |
are a lot of the kinds of things
link |
you're talking about with North Korea.
link |
I mean, it's torture, it's artificial,
link |
sometimes artificial famine or famine,
link |
that is not necessary, right?
link |
Not necessary to have it.
link |
And there are other kinds of, you know,
link |
mass rape and stuff like that.
link |
There are other kinds of things that fit
link |
into the crimes against humanity.
link |
And that's sort of where I think about North Korea
link |
as committing crimes against humanity, not genocide.
link |
And again, remember, genocide is meant to be,
link |
I mean, some people, there's a disagreement
link |
among scholars and jurists about this.
link |
Some people think of genocide as the crime of crimes,
link |
the worst of the three that I just mentioned.
link |
But some think of them as co equal.
link |
And the ICC, the International Criminal Court,
link |
is dealing with them more or less as co equal,
link |
even though we tend to think of genocide as the worst.
link |
So I mean, what I'm trying to say is that,
link |
you know, I don't wanna split hairs.
link |
I think it's sort of morally and ethically unseemly,
link |
you know, the split hairs about what is genocide,
link |
what is the crime against humanity.
link |
You know, this is for lawyers, not for historians.
link |
But terminology wise.
link |
Yeah, yeah, you know, you don't wanna get into that.
link |
Because it, I mean, it happened with Darfur a little bit,
link |
where the Bush administration had declared
link |
that Darfur was a genocide.
link |
And the UN said, no, no, it wasn't genocide,
link |
it was a crime against humanity.
link |
And then, you know, that confused things
link |
versus clarified them.
link |
I mean, we damn well knew what was happening.
link |
People were being killed and being attacked.
link |
And so, you know, on the one hand,
link |
I think the whole concept and the way of thinking
link |
about history using genocide as an important part
link |
of human history is crucial.
link |
On the other hand, I don't like to, you know,
link |
get involved in the hair splitting,
link |
what's genocide and what's not.
link |
So that, you know, North Korea, I tend to think of,
link |
like I said, as committing crimes against humanity
link |
and, you know, forcibly incarcerating people,
link |
torturing them, that kind of thing.
link |
You know, routinely incarcerating, depriving them
link |
of certain kinds of human rights
link |
can be considered a crime against humanity.
link |
But I don't think of it in the same way
link |
I think about genocide, which is an attack
link |
on a group of people.
link |
Let me just leave it at that.
link |
What in this, if we think about, if it's okay,
link |
can we loosely use the term genocide here,
link |
just let's not play games with terminology.
link |
Just bad crimes against humanity.
link |
Of particular interest are the ones
link |
that are going on today still,
link |
because it raises the question to us,
link |
what do people outside of this,
link |
what role do they have to play?
link |
So what role does the United States,
link |
or what role do I, as a human being who has food today,
link |
who has shelter, who has a comfortable life,
link |
what role do I have when I think about North Korea,
link |
when I think about Syria,
link |
when I think about maybe the Uighur population in China?
link |
Well, I mean, the role is the same role I have,
link |
which is to teach and to learn
link |
and to get the message out that this is happening,
link |
because the more people who understand it,
link |
the more likely it is that the United States government
link |
will try to do something about it,
link |
within the context of who we are and where we live, right?
link |
And so, I write books, you do shows,
link |
or maybe you write books too, I don't know.
link |
I do not write books, but I tweet.
link |
Okay, that's good too.
link |
Ineloquently, but that's not the,
link |
I guess that's not the, yes, so certainly this is true.
link |
And in terms of a voice, in terms of words,
link |
in terms of books, you are, I would say,
link |
a rare example of somebody
link |
that has powerful reach with words.
link |
But I was also referring to actions.
link |
In the United States government, what are the options here?
link |
So, war has costs,
link |
and war seems to be, as you have described,
link |
sort of potentially increase the atrocity, not decrease it.
link |
If there's anything that challenges my hope for the future
link |
is the fact that sometimes we're not powerless to help,
link |
but very close to powerless to help,
link |
because trying to help can often lead to,
link |
in the near term, more negative effects than positive effects.
link |
That's exactly right.
link |
I mean, the unintended consequences of what we do
link |
can frequently be as bad, if not worse,
link |
than trying to relieve the difficulties
link |
that people are having.
link |
So I think you're caught a little bit,
link |
but it's also true, I think, that we can be more forceful.
link |
I think we can be more forceful without necessarily war.
link |
There is this idea of the so called responsibility
link |
to protect, and this was an idea that came up
link |
after Kosovo, which was what, 1999,
link |
and when the Serbs looked like they were going to engage
link |
in a genocidal program in Kosovo,
link |
and it was basically a program of ethnic cleansing,
link |
but it could have gone bad and gotten worse,
link |
not just driving people out, but beginning to kill them.
link |
And the United States and Britain and others intervened.
link |
And Russians were there too, as you probably recall.
link |
And I think correctly, people have analyzed this
link |
as a case in which genocide was prevented or stopped.
link |
In other words, the Serbs were stopped in their tracks.
link |
I mean, some bad things did happen.
link |
We bombed Belgrade and the Chinese embassy
link |
and things like that.
link |
But it was stopped, and following upon that,
link |
then there was a kind of international consensus
link |
that we needed to do something.
link |
I mean, because of Rwanda, Bosnia,
link |
and the positive example of Kosovo, right?
link |
That genocide did not happen in Kosovo.
link |
I think that argument has been substantiated.
link |
Anyway, and this notion of the,
link |
or this doctrine or whatever,
link |
of the responsibility to protect them
link |
was adopted by the UN in 2005, unanimously.
link |
And what it says is there's a hierarchy of measures
link |
that should be, well, let me take a step back.
link |
It starts with the principle that sovereignty of a country
link |
is not, you don't earn it just by being there
link |
and being your own country.
link |
You have to earn it by protecting your people.
link |
So every, this was all agreed
link |
with all the nations of the UN agreed,
link |
Chinese and Russians too,
link |
that sovereignty is there because you protect your people
link |
against various depredations, right?
link |
Including genocide, crimes against humanity,
link |
forced imprisonment, torture, and that sort of thing.
link |
If you violate that justification for your sovereignty,
link |
that you're protecting your people,
link |
that you're not protecting them,
link |
the international community has the obligation
link |
to do something about it, all right?
link |
Now, then they have a kind of hierarchy
link |
of things you can do, you know, starting with,
link |
I mean, I'm not quoting exactly,
link |
but, you know, starting with kind of push and pull,
link |
you know, trying to convince people,
link |
don't do that, you know, to Myanmar,
link |
don't do that to the Rohingya people, right?
link |
Then it goes down the list, you know,
link |
and you get to sanctions or threatening sanctions
link |
and then sanctions, you know, like we have against Russia,
link |
but you go down the list, right?
link |
You go down the list and eventually
link |
you get to military intervention at the bottom,
link |
which they say is the last thing, you know,
link |
and you really don't wanna do that.
link |
And not only do you not wanna do it,
link |
but it, just as you said, just as you pointed out,
link |
it can have unintended consequences, right?
link |
And we'll do everything we can short,
link |
you know, of military intervention,
link |
but, you know, if necessary,
link |
that can be undertaken as well.
link |
And so the responsibility to predict, I think,
link |
is, you know, it was not implementable.
link |
Oh, one of the things it says in this last category, right?
link |
The military intervention is that the intervention
link |
cannot create more damage than it relieves, right?
link |
And so for Syria, we came to the conclusion,
link |
you know, that, I mean, the international community
link |
in some ways said this in so many words,
link |
even though the Russians were there, obviously,
link |
we ended up being there and that sort of thing,
link |
but the international community basically said,
link |
you know, there's no way you can intervene in Syria.
link |
You know, there's just no way without causing more damage,
link |
you know, than you would relieve.
link |
So, you know, in some senses,
link |
that's what the international community is saying
link |
about, you know, Xinjiang and the Uighurs too.
link |
You know, I mean, you can't even imagine
link |
what hell would break loose
link |
if there was some kind of military trouble, you know,
link |
to threaten the Chinese with.
link |
But you can go down that list
link |
with the, you know, the military leadership of Myanmar,
link |
and you can go down that list
link |
with the Chinese Communist Party,
link |
and you can go down the list, you know,
link |
with others who are threatening, you know, with Ethiopia
link |
and what it's doing in Tigray.
link |
And, you know, you can go down that list and start pushing.
link |
I think what happened,
link |
you know, there was more of a willingness in the 90s,
link |
and in, you know, right at the turn of the century,
link |
you know, to do these kinds of things.
link |
And then, you know, when Trump got elected and, you know,
link |
he basically said, you know, America first
link |
and out of the world,
link |
we're not gonna do any of this kind of stuff.
link |
And now Biden has the problem
link |
of trying to rebuild consensus
link |
on how you deal with these kinds of things.
link |
I think it's not impossible.
link |
I mean, here I tend to be maybe more of an optimist than you.
link |
You know, I think it's not impossible
link |
that the international community can, you know,
link |
muster some internal fortitude
link |
and push harder, short of war, you know,
link |
to get the Chinese and to get the, again, Myanmar,
link |
and to get others to kind of back off
link |
of violations of people's rights
link |
the way they are routinely doing it.
link |
So that's in the space of geopolitics.
link |
That's the space of politicians and UN and so on.
link |
The interesting thing about China,
link |
and this is a difficult topic,
link |
but there's so many financial interests
link |
that not many voices with power and with money
link |
speak up, speak out against China
link |
because it's a very interesting effect
link |
because it costs a lot for an individual to speak up
link |
because you're going to suffer.
link |
I mean, China just cuts off the market.
link |
Like if you have a product, if you have a company
link |
and you say something negative, China just says, okay,
link |
well then they knock you out of the market.
link |
And so any person that speaks up,
link |
they get shut down immediately financially.
link |
It's a huge cost, sometimes millions or billions of dollars.
link |
And so what happens is everybody of consequences,
link |
sort of financially, everybody with a giant platform
link |
is extremely hesitant to speak out.
link |
It's a very, it's a different kind of hesitation
link |
that's financial in nature.
link |
I don't know if that was always the case.
link |
It seems like in history, people were quiet
link |
because of fear, because of a threat of violence.
link |
Here, there's almost like a self interested
link |
preservation of financial, of wealth.
link |
And I don't know what to do that.
link |
I mean, I don't know if you can say something there,
link |
like the genocide going on
link |
because people are financially self interested.
link |
Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think the analysis is correct.
link |
And it's not only, but it's not only corporations,
link |
but it's the American government
link |
that represents the American people
link |
that also feels compelled not to challenge the Chinese
link |
on human rights issues.
link |
But the interesting thing is it's not just,
link |
you know, I know a lot of people from China
link |
and first of all, amazing human beings
link |
and a lot of brilliant people in China,
link |
they also don't want to speak out
link |
and not because they're sort of quote unquote,
link |
like silenced, but more because they're going
link |
to also lose financially.
link |
They have a lot of businesses in China.
link |
They, you know, they're running,
link |
in fact, the Chinese government and the country
link |
has a very interesting structure
link |
because it has a lot of elements that enable capitalism
link |
within a certain framework.
link |
So you have a lot of very successful companies
link |
and they operate successfully.
link |
And then the leaders of those companies,
link |
many of whom have either been on this podcast,
link |
or want to be on this podcast,
link |
they really don't want to say anything negative
link |
about the government.
link |
And the nature of the fear I sense
link |
is not the kind of fear you would have in Nazi Germany.
link |
It's a very kind of, it's a mellow,
link |
like why would I speak out when it has a negative effect
link |
on my company, on my family, in terms of finance,
link |
strictly financially.
link |
And that's difficult.
link |
That's a different problem to solve.
link |
That feels solvable.
link |
It feels like it's a money problem.
link |
If you can control the flow of money
link |
where the government has less power
link |
to control the flow of money,
link |
it feels like that's solvable.
link |
And that's where capitalism is good.
link |
That's where a free market is good.
link |
So it's like, that's where a lot of people
link |
in the cryptocurrency space,
link |
I don't know if you follow them,
link |
they kind of say, okay, take the monetary system,
link |
the power to control money away from governments.
link |
Make it a distributed,
link |
like allow technology to help you with that.
link |
That's a hopeful message there.
link |
In fact, a lot of people argue
link |
that kind of Bitcoin and these cryptocurrencies
link |
can help deal with some of these authoritarian regimes
link |
that lead to violations of basic human rights.
link |
If you can control, if you can give the power
link |
to control the money to the people,
link |
you can take that away from governments.
link |
That's another source of hope
link |
where technology might be able to do something good.
link |
That's something different about the 21st century
link |
than the 20th is there's technology
link |
in the hands of billions of people.
link |
I mean, I have to say,
link |
I think you're a naive when it comes to technology.
link |
I mean, I don't, I'm not someone who understands technology.
link |
So it's wrong of me to argue with you
link |
because I don't really spend much time with it.
link |
I don't really like it very much.
link |
And I'm not, I'm neither a fan nor a connoisseur.
link |
So I just don't really know.
link |
But what human history has shown basically,
link |
and that's a big statement.
link |
I don't wanna pretend I can tell you
link |
what human history has shown.
link |
But technology, atom bomb,
link |
I mean, that's a perfect example of technology.
link |
What happens when you discover new things?
link |
It's a perfect example.
link |
What's going on with Facebook now?
link |
It's an absolutely perfect example.
link |
And I once went to a lecture by Eric Schmidt
link |
about the future and about all the things
link |
that were gonna happen and all these wonderful things
link |
like you wouldn't have to translate yourself anything,
link |
you wouldn't have to read a book,
link |
you wouldn't have to drive a car,
link |
you don't have to do this, you don't have to do that.
link |
What kind of life is that?
link |
So my view of technology is it's subsumed
link |
to the political, social and moral needs of our day
link |
and should be subsumed to that day.
link |
It's not gonna solve anything by itself.
link |
It's gonna be you and me that solve things.
link |
If they're solved, there are political system
link |
that solve things.
link |
Technology is neutral on one level.
link |
It is simply a human, I mean, they're talking now
link |
about how artificial intelligence is gonna do this
link |
and is gonna do that.
link |
I'm not so sure there's anything necessarily positive
link |
or negative about it except it does obviously
link |
make work easier and things like that.
link |
I mean, I like email and I like word processing
link |
and all that stuff is great,
link |
but actually solving human relations in and of itself
link |
or international relations or conflict among human beings.
link |
I mean, I see technology as causing as many problems
link |
as it solves and maybe even more.
link |
You know, the kind.
link |
Maybe even more. Maybe.
link |
The question is, so like you said, technology is neutral.
link |
I agree with this.
link |
Technology is a toolkit, is a tool set that enables humans
link |
to have wider reach and more power, the printing press.
link |
The rare reason I can read your books is I would argue,
link |
so first of all, the printing press and then the internet.
link |
Wikipedia, I think, has immeasurable effect on humanity.
link |
Technology is a double edged sword.
link |
It allows bad people to do bad things
link |
and good people to do good things.
link |
It ultimately boils down to the people
link |
and whether you believe the capacity for good
link |
outweighs the capacity of bad.
link |
And so you said that I'm naive.
link |
I'm naively optimistic.
link |
I would say you're naively cynical about technology.
link |
Here we have one overdressed naive optimist
link |
and one brilliant, but nevertheless,
link |
technologically naive cynic and we don't know.
link |
We don't know whether the capacity for good
link |
or the capacity for evil wins out in the end.
link |
And like we've been talking about,
link |
the trajectory of human history seems to pivot
link |
in a lot of random seeming moments.
link |
But as a builder of technology, I remain optimistic.
link |
And I should say kind of when you are optimistic,
link |
it is often easy to sound naive.
link |
And I'm not sure what to make of that small effect.
link |
Not to linger on specific words,
link |
but I've noticed that people who kind of are cynical
link |
about the world somehow sound more intelligent.
link |
The issue is how can you be realistic about the world?
link |
It's not optimistic or pessimistic.
link |
The question is how can you be a realist, right?
link |
Yes, that's a good question.
link |
Realism depends on a combination of knowledge and wisdom
link |
and good instincts and that sort of thing.
link |
And that's what we strive for, is a kind of realism.
link |
We both strive for that kind of realism.
link |
But I mean, here's an example I would give you.
link |
What about, again, we've got this environmental issue,
link |
and technology has created it.
link |
I mean, the growth of technology,
link |
I mean, we all like to be heated well in our homes,
link |
and we wanna have cars that run quickly and fast on gas.
link |
I mean, we're all consumers and we all profit from this.
link |
I don't, not everybody profits from it,
link |
but we wanna be comfortable.
link |
And technology has provided us with a comfortable life.
link |
And it's also provided us with this incredible danger,
link |
which it's not solving, at least not now.
link |
And it may solve, but it may, it's only,
link |
my view is, you know what's gonna happen?
link |
A horrible catastrophe.
link |
It's the only way, it's the only way
link |
we will direct ourselves
link |
to actually trying to do something about it.
link |
We don't have the wisdom and the realism
link |
and the sense of purpose, you know, what's her name?
link |
Greta goes blah, blah, blah, something like that
link |
in her last talk about the environmental summit
link |
in Glasgow or whatever it was.
link |
And, you know, we just don't have it
link |
unless we're hit upside the head really, really hard.
link |
And then maybe, you know, the business with nuclear weapons,
link |
you know, I think somehow we got hit upside the head
link |
and we realized, oh man, you know,
link |
this could really do it to the whole world.
link |
And so we started, you know, serious arms control stuff.
link |
And, you know, but up to that point, you know,
link |
I mean, there was just something about, you know,
link |
Khrushchev's big bomb, his big hydrogen bomb,
link |
which he exploded in the times,
link |
I think it was the anniversary or something like that.
link |
You know, I mean, just think what we could have done
link |
Well, that's the double edged sword of technology.
link |
Yeah, I agree, it's a double edged sword.
link |
There's a lot of people, there's a lot of people
link |
that argue that nuclear weapons is the reason
link |
we haven't had a World War III.
link |
So nuclear weapons, the mutually assured destruction
link |
leads to a kind of like,
link |
we've reached a certain level of destructiveness
link |
with our weapons where we were able to catch ourselves,
link |
not to create, like you said, hit really hard.
link |
This is the interesting question about kind of hard,
link |
hard and really hard upside the head.
link |
With the environment, I would argue,
link |
see, we can't know the future,
link |
but I would argue as the pressure builds,
link |
there's already, because of this created urgency,
link |
the amount of innovation that I've seen
link |
that sometimes is unrelated to the environment,
link |
but kind of sparked by this urgency,
link |
it's been humongous, including the work of Elon Musk,
link |
including the work of just,
link |
you could argue that the SpaceX
link |
and the new exploration of space is kind of sparked
link |
by this environmental like urgency.
link |
I mean, connected to Tesla and everything they're doing
link |
with electric vehicles and so on.
link |
There's a huge amount of innovation
link |
in the space that's happening.
link |
I could see the effect of climate change
link |
resulting in more positive innovation
link |
that improves the quality of life across the world
link |
than the actual catastrophic events that we're describing,
link |
which we cannot even currently predict.
link |
It's not like there's going to be,
link |
there's going to be more extreme weather events.
link |
What does that even mean?
link |
There's going to be a gradual increase
link |
of the level of water.
link |
What does that even mean in terms of catastrophic events?
link |
It's going to be pretty gradual.
link |
There's going to be migration.
link |
We can't predict what that means.
link |
And in response to that,
link |
there's going to be a huge amount of innovators born today
link |
that have dreams and that will build devices and inventions
link |
and from space to vehicles to in the software world
link |
that enable education across the world,
link |
all those kinds of things that will on mass, on average,
link |
increase the quality of life on average across the world.
link |
So it's not at all obvious that these,
link |
the things that the technologies
link |
that are creating climate change, global warming,
link |
are going to have a negative, net negative effect.
link |
We don't know this.
link |
And I'm kind of inspired by the dreamers,
link |
the engineers, the innovators and the entrepreneurs
link |
that build, that wake up in the morning,
link |
see problems in the world and dream
link |
that they're going to be the ones who solve those problems.
link |
That's the human spirit.
link |
And that I'm not exactly,
link |
it is true that we need those deadlines.
link |
We need to be freaking out about stuff.
link |
And the reason we need to study history
link |
and the worst of human history is then we can say,
link |
oh shit, this too can happen.
link |
It's a slap in the face.
link |
It's a wake up call that if you're,
link |
if you get complacent, if you get lazy,
link |
this is going to happen.
link |
And that, listen, there's a lot of really intelligent people,
link |
ambitious people, dreamers.
link |
Skilled dreamers that build solutions
link |
that make sure this stuff doesn't happen anymore.
link |
So there's, I think there's reason to be optimistic
link |
about technology, not in a naive way.
link |
There's an argument to be made in a realistic way
link |
that like with technology, we can build a better future.
link |
And then Facebook is a lesson in the way Facebook
link |
has been done is a lesson how not to do it.
link |
And that lesson serves as a guide
link |
of how to do it better, how to do it right,
link |
how to do it in a positive way.
link |
And the same, every single sort of failed technology
link |
contains within it the lessons of how to do it better.
link |
And I mean, without that,
link |
what's the source of hope for human civilization?
link |
You know, that, I mean, by way of question,
link |
you have truly studied some of the darkest moments
link |
Put on your optimist hat.
link |
There are glimmers of it.
link |
Yes, what is your source of hope
link |
for the future of human civilization?
link |
Well, I think it resides in, you know,
link |
some of what you've been saying,
link |
which is the, in the persistence of this civilization
link |
over time, despite, you know, the incredible setbacks,
link |
you know, two enormous world wars, you know,
link |
the nuclear standoff, the, you know,
link |
the horrible things we're experiencing now
link |
with climate change and migration and stuff like that,
link |
that despite these things, you know,
link |
we are persisting and we are continuing.
link |
And like you say, we're continuing to invent
link |
and we're continuing to try to solve these problems.
link |
And, you know, we're continuing to love as well as hate.
link |
And, you know, that, you know, I'm basically,
link |
I mean, I have children and grandchildren
link |
and I think they're gonna be just fine.
link |
You know, I'm not a doom and gloomer, you know,
link |
I'm not a Cassandra saying the world is coming to an end.
link |
I'm not like that at all, you know,
link |
I think that, you know, things will persist.
link |
Another, by the way, source of tremendous optimism
link |
on my part, the kids I teach, you know,
link |
I teach some unbelievably fantastic young people,
link |
you know, who are sort of like you say,
link |
they're dreamers and they're problem solvers
link |
and they're, I mean, they have enormously humane values
link |
and ways of thinking about the world
link |
and they wanna do good.
link |
You know, if you take the kind of,
link |
I mean, this has probably been true all the way along,
link |
but I mean, the percentage of do gooders,
link |
you know, is really enormously large.
link |
Now, whether they end up working
link |
for some kind of shark law firm or something,
link |
you know, or, you know, that kind of thing,
link |
or whether they end up human rights lawyers
link |
is they all wanna be, right?
link |
You know, is a different kind of question,
link |
but certainly, you know, these young people are talented,
link |
they're smart, they have wonderful values,
link |
they're energetic, they work hard, you know,
link |
they're focused and of course, it's not just Stanford.
link |
I mean, it's all over the country,
link |
you know, you have young people
link |
who really wanna contribute and they wanna contribute.
link |
I mean, it's true some of them end up,
link |
you know, working to get rich.
link |
I mean, that's inevitable, right?
link |
But the percentages are actually rather small,
link |
at least at this age, you know,
link |
maybe when they get a mortgage and a family
link |
and that sort of thing, you know,
link |
financial wellbeing will be more important to them.
link |
But right now, you know, you catch this young generation
link |
and they're fantastic, they're fantastic.
link |
And they're not what they're often portrayed as being,
link |
you know, kind of silly and naive and knee jerk leftists
link |
and that, they're not at all like that.
link |
You know, they're really fine young people.
link |
So that's a source of optimism to me too.
link |
What advice would you give to those young people today,
link |
maybe in high school, in college, at Stanford,
link |
maybe to your grandchildren about how to have a career
link |
they can be proud of, have a life they can be proud of?
link |
Pursue careers that are in the public interest,
link |
you know, in one fashion or another
link |
and not just in their interests.
link |
And that would be, I mean, it's not bad to pursue a career
link |
in your own interests.
link |
I mean, as long as it's something that's useful
link |
and positive for their families or whatever.
link |
But yeah, so I mean, I try to advise kids
link |
to find themselves somehow, you know, find who they wanna be
link |
and what they wanna be and try to pursue it.
link |
And the NGO world is growing, as you know,
link |
and a lot of young people are kind of throwing themselves
link |
into it and, you know, human rights watch
link |
and that kind of stuff.
link |
And, you know, they wanna do that kind of work
link |
and it's very admirable.
link |
I tend to think that even if you're not working
link |
in human rights, there's a certain way in which
link |
if you live with integrity, I believe that all of us
link |
or many of us have a bunch of moments in our lives
link |
when we're posed with a decision.
link |
Maybe it'll never be written about or talked about.
link |
But you get to choose whether you, there's a choice
link |
that is difficult to make, it may require sacrifice,
link |
but it's the choice that the best version
link |
of that person would make.
link |
That's the best way I can sort of say
link |
how to act with integrity.
link |
It's the very thing that would resist the early days
link |
It sounds dramatic to say, but those little actions.
link |
And I feel like the best you can do
link |
to avoid genocide on scale is for all of us
link |
to live in that way, within those moments,
link |
unrelated potentially to human rights, to anything else,
link |
is to take those actions.
link |
Like I believe that all of us know the right thing to do.
link |
I know that's right.
link |
I think that's right.
link |
You put it very well.
link |
I couldn't have done it better myself.
link |
I agree completely that there are, to live with truth,
link |
which is what Václav Havel used to say,
link |
this famous Czech dissident talked about living in truth,
link |
but also to live with integrity.
link |
And that's really super important.
link |
Well, let me ask you about love.
link |
What role does love play in this whole thing
link |
in the human condition?
link |
In all of the study of genocide,
link |
it does seem that hardship in moments
link |
brings out the best in human nature
link |
and the best in human nature is expressed through love.
link |
Well, as I already mentioned to you,
link |
I think hardship is not a good thing for,
link |
you know, it's not the best thing for love.
link |
I mean, it's better to not have to suffer
link |
and not have to, yes, I think it is.
link |
I think it's, you know, as I mentioned to you,
link |
you know, studying concentration camps,
link |
you know, this is not a place for love.
link |
It happens, it happens,
link |
but it's not really a place for love.
link |
It's a place for rape.
link |
It's a place for torture.
link |
It's a place for killing.
link |
And it's a place for inhuman action one to another,
link |
you know, and also, as I said,
link |
among those who are suffering,
link |
not just between those who are,
link |
and then there are whole gradations,
link |
you know, the same thing in the gulag.
link |
You know, there are gradations all the way
link |
from the criminal prisoners
link |
who beat the hell out of the political prisoners,
link |
you know, who then have others below them
link |
who they beat down, you know,
link |
so everybody's being the hell out of everybody else.
link |
So I would not idealize in any way suffering as,
link |
you know, a source of beauty and love.
link |
I wouldn't do that at all.
link |
I think it's a whole lot better
link |
for people to be relatively prosperous.
link |
I'm not saying super prosperous,
link |
but to be able to feed themselves
link |
and to be able to feed their families
link |
and house their families and take care of themselves,
link |
you know, to foster loving relations between people.
link |
And, you know, I think it's no accident
link |
that, you know, poor families have much worse records
link |
when it comes to crime and things like that, you know,
link |
and also to wife beating and to child abuse
link |
and stuff like that.
link |
I mean, you just, you don't want to be poor and indigent
link |
and not have a roof over your head, be homeless.
link |
I mean, it doesn't mean, again, you know,
link |
homeless people are mean people.
link |
That's not what I'm trying to say.
link |
What I'm trying to say is that, you know,
link |
what we want to try to foster in this country
link |
and around the world, and one of the reasons, you know,
link |
I mean, I'm very critical of the Chinese in a lot of ways,
link |
but I mean, we have to remember they pulled that country
link |
out of horrible poverty, right?
link |
And I mean, there's still poor people in the countryside.
link |
There's still problems, you know,
link |
with want and need among the Chinese people.
link |
But, you know, there were millions and millions of Chinese
link |
who were living at the bare minimum of life,
link |
which is no way to live, you know,
link |
and no way, again, to foster love and compassion
link |
and getting along.
link |
So I want to be clear, I don't speak for history, right?
link |
I'm giving you, there used to be historians,
link |
you know, in the 19th century who really thought
link |
they were speaking for history, you know?
link |
I don't think that way at all.
link |
I mean, I understand I'm a subjective human being
link |
with my own points of view and my own opinions, but.
link |
I'm trying to remember this in this conversation
link |
that you're, despite the fact that you're brilliant
link |
and you've written brilliant books,
link |
that you're just human with an opinion.
link |
That's it, yeah, no, no, that's absolutely true.
link |
And I tell my students that too.
link |
I mean, I make sure they understand
link |
this is not history speaking, you know,
link |
this is me and Norman and I'm, you know,
link |
and this is what it's about.
link |
I mean, I spent a long time studying history
link |
and have enjoyed it enormously.
link |
But, you know, I'm an individual with my points of view.
link |
And one of them is that I've developed over time,
link |
is that, you know, human want is a real tragedy for people
link |
and it hurts people and it also causes upheavals
link |
and difficulties and stuff.
link |
So I feel for people, you know, I feel for people in Syria,
link |
I feel for people in, you know, in Ethiopia, in Tigray,
link |
you know, when they don't have enough to eat.
link |
And, you know, what that does, I mean,
link |
it doesn't mean they don't love each other, right?
link |
And it doesn't mean they don't love their kids.
link |
But it does mean that it's harder, you know, to do that.
link |
I'm not so sure, it's obvious to me that it's harder.
link |
It's, there's suffering, there is suffering.
link |
But the numbers, we've been talking about deaths,
link |
we've been talking about suffering,
link |
but the numbers we're not quantifying.
link |
The history that you haven't perhaps been looking at
link |
is all the times that people have fallen in love,
link |
deeply with friends, with romantic love,
link |
the positive emotion that people have felt.
link |
And I'm not so sure that amidst the suffering,
link |
those moments of beauty and love can be discovered.
link |
And if we look at the numbers,
link |
I'm not so sure the story is obvious.
link |
That, you know, I mean, again,
link |
I suppose you may disagree with Viktor Frankl.
link |
I may too, maybe depending on the day.
link |
I mean, he says that if there's meaning to this life at all,
link |
there's meaning to the suffering too,
link |
because suffering is part of life.
link |
There's something about accepting the ups and downs,
link |
even when the downs go very low.
link |
And within all of it, finding a source of meaning.
link |
I mean, he's arguing from the perspective of psychology,
link |
but just this life is an incredible gift,
link |
almost no matter what.
link |
And I'm not, it's easy to look at suffering
link |
and think if we just escape the suffering,
link |
it will all be better, but we all die.
link |
There's beauty in the whole thing.
link |
And it is true that it's just,
link |
from all the stories I've read,
link |
especially in famine and starvation, it's just horrible.
link |
It is horrible suffering.
link |
But I also just want to say that there's love amidst it,
link |
and we can't forget that.
link |
No, no, I don't forget it, I don't forget it.
link |
And I think it's from the stories.
link |
Now, I don't want to make that compromise or that trade,
link |
but the intensity of friendship in war,
link |
the intensity of love in war is very high.
link |
So I'm not sure what to make of these calculations,
link |
but if you look at the stories,
link |
some of the people I'm closest with,
link |
and I've never experienced anything
link |
even close to any of this,
link |
but some of the people I'm closest with
link |
is people I've gone through difficult times with.
link |
There's something about that.
link |
They're a society or a group where things are easy.
link |
The intensity of the connection between human beings
link |
I don't know what to do with that calculus
link |
because I too agree with you.
link |
I want to have as little suffering in the world as possible,
link |
but we have to remember about the love
link |
and the depth of human connection
link |
and find the right balance there.
link |
No, there's something to what you're saying.
link |
There's clearly something to what you're saying.
link |
I was just thinking about the Soviet Union
link |
when I lived there and people on the streets
link |
were so mean to one another and they never smiled.
link |
You grew up there?
link |
No, but you were, you're too young to.
link |
No, no, I remember well.
link |
I came here when I was 13, yeah.
link |
Okay, so anyway, I remember living there
link |
and just how hard people were on each other on the streets.
link |
And when you got inside people's apartments,
link |
when they started to trust you,
link |
the friendships were so intense and so wonderful.
link |
So in that sense, I mean, they did live a hard life,
link |
but there wasn't a food on the table
link |
and there was a roof over their heads.
link |
There's a certain line.
link |
There's a certain, there are lines.
link |
I don't think there's one line,
link |
but it's kind of a shading.
link |
And the other story I was thinking of as you were talking
link |
was not a story, it's a history,
link |
a book by a friend of mine
link |
who wrote about love in the camps,
link |
in the refugee camps for Jews in Germany after the war.
link |
So these were Jews who had come mostly from Poland
link |
and some survived the camps,
link |
came from awful circumstances.
link |
And then they were put in these camps,
link |
which were not joyful places.
link |
I mean, they were guarded sometimes by Germans even,
link |
but they're basically under the British control
link |
and they were trying to get to Israel,
link |
trying to get to Palestine right after the war.
link |
And how many pairs there were, how many people coupled up.
link |
But remember, this is after being in the concentration camp.
link |
It's not being in the concentration camp.
link |
And it's also being free to, more or less free,
link |
to express their emotions and to be human beings
link |
after this horrible thing which they suffered.
link |
So I wonder whether there's, as you say,
link |
some kind of calculus there where the level of suffering
link |
is such that it's just too much for humans to bear.
link |
And which I would suggest,
link |
I mean, I haven't studied this myself.
link |
I'm just giving you my point of view,
link |
my off the cuff remarks here.
link |
But it was very inspiring to read about these couples
link |
who had met right in these camps
link |
and started to couple up and get married.
link |
And tried to find their way to Palestine,
link |
which was a difficult thing to do then.
link |
When did you live in Russia and the Soviet Union?
link |
What's your memory of the time?
link |
Well, so a number of different times.
link |
So I went there, I first went there in 69, 70.
link |
Wow. A long time ago.
link |
And then I lived in Leningrad mostly,
link |
but also in Moscow in 1975.
link |
So it was detente time.
link |
But it was also a time of political uncertainty
link |
and also hardship for Russians themselves,
link |
standing in long lines.
link |
I mean, you must remember this for food
link |
and for getting anything was almost impossible.
link |
It was a time when Jews were trying to get out.
link |
In fact, I just talked to a friend of mine from those days
link |
who I helped get out and get to Boston
link |
and the lovely people who had managed to have a good life
link |
in the United States after they left.
link |
But it wasn't an easy time.
link |
It wasn't an easy time at all.
link |
I remember people set fire to their doors
link |
and their daughter was persecuted in school
link |
once they declared that they wanted to immigrate
link |
and that sort of thing.
link |
So it was a very, it was a lot of antisemitism.
link |
So it was a tough time.
link |
Dissidents hung out with some dissidents
link |
and one guy was actually killed.
link |
We think by the, nobody knows exactly by the KGB,
link |
but his art studio was,
link |
he had a separate studio in Leningrad,
link |
St. Petersburg today, just a small studio
link |
where he did his art and somebody set it on fire.
link |
And we think it was KGB, but you never really know.
link |
And he died in that fire.
link |
So it was not, it was a tough time.
link |
And you knew you were followed,
link |
you knew you were being reported on
link |
as a foreign scholar as I was.
link |
There was a formal exchange between the United States
link |
and the Soviet Union and they let me work in the archives,
link |
but then Ivanov got to work in the physics lab
link |
at Rochester or something like that.
link |
So it was an exchange which sent historians
link |
and literary people and some social scientists to Russia
link |
and they sent all scientists here to grab what they could
link |
from MIT and those places.
link |
How's your Russian?
link |
Do you have any knowledge of Russian language
link |
that has helped you to understand?
link |
I mean, I can read it fine.
link |
And the speaking comes and goes,
link |
depending on whether I'm there or I've been there recently
link |
or if I spend some time there,
link |
because I really need, you know,
link |
I have Russian friends who speak just Russian.
link |
So, you know, when I'm there, I then, you know,
link |
I can communicate pretty well.
link |
Well, I can't really write it unfortunately.
link |
I mean, I can, but it's not very good,
link |
but I get along fine in Russia.
link |
What's your fondest memory of the Soviet Union, of Russia?
link |
It's friends, it's friends.
link |
Was it vodka involved or is it just vodka involved?
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Little bit, you know, I'm not much of a drinker.
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So I would, you know, they'd just make fun of me
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and I'd make fun of myself and that was easy enough.
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I don't really like, you know, a heavy drink.
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I've done a lot of that, not a lot.
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I'd done some of that, but I never really enjoyed it
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and would get sick and stuff.
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But no, it's friends.
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You know, one friend I made in the dormitory, you know,
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it was a dormitory for foreigners,
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but also Siberians who had come, you know,
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to Leningrad to study.
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And so I met a couple of guys
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and one in particular from Omsk became a wonderful friend.
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And we talked and talked and talked outside.
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You know, we would go walk outside
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because we both knew they were, you know,
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people were listening and stuff.
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And he would say, well, this is, he was an historian,
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you know, and so we would talk history.
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And he'd say, well, this was the case, wasn't it?
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I said, no, I'm sorry, Sasha, it wasn't the case.
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we think Stalin actually had a role in killing Kirov.
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I mean, we're not sure, but he said, no.
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You know, so, you know, we had these conversations
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and he was, what I would,
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I don't know if he would agree with me or not.
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I mean, we're still friends.
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So he was a naive, maybe he'll listen to the blog
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or I'll send it to him or something.
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He was a kind of naive Marxist, Leninist.
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And he thought I was, you know, I was, you know,
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I had this capitalist ideology.
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He'd say, what ideology you have?
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And I said, I don't have an ideology.
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You know, I try to just put together kind of reason
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and facts and accurate stories
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and try to tell them in that way.
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No, no, no, no, you must, you know, you're a bourgeois,
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you know, this or that.
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I said, no, I'm really not.
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And so we would have these talks
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and these kinds of arguments.
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And then, I mean, sure enough, you know,
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we corresponded for a while
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and then he had to stop corresponding
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because he became a kind of local official in Omsk.
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And he sort of migrated more and more to being a Democrat.
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And he was then in the, you know,
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democratic movement under Gorbachev
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and, you know, in the council of people's deputies,
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which they set up, which was, you know,
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elected as a Democrat from Omsk
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and had a political career through the Yeltsin period.
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And once Putin came along, you know, it was over.
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He didn't like Putin and, you know,
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and Putin didn't like the Yeltsin people, right?
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Who were, tried to be, some of them tried to be Democrats.
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And Sasha was one who really did.
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He just published his memoirs in Russian, by the way,
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which are very good, I think.
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I think I've been hearing it.
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Komanderovkifovlast, that's what it's called.
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It's hard to translate in English, Komanderovkifovlast.
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But I mean, I translated it full points once for him.
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This is so beautiful.
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Like the, do you find that the translation is a problem
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It's such a different language.
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Yes, translation is very difficult.
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With the Russian language, I mean,
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it's the only language I know deeply except English.
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And it seems like so much is lost of the pain,
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the poetry, the beauty of the people.
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And translators are to be treasured and good ones,
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to be, I mean, those who do the translations,
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when you read things in translation,
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sometimes they're quite beautiful,
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whether it's Russian or Polish or German or anything French.
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Yeah, I'm actually traveling to Paris
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to talk to the famous translators that Dostoevsky told story.
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And I'm just gonna do a several conversations with them
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about like, you could just sometimes just grab
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a single sentence and just talk about the translation
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in that sense, that's, and also, as you said,
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I would love to be a fly on the wall
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with some of those friends that you had
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because the perspective on history, nonacademic,
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sort of without just as human beings is so different
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from the United States versus Russia.
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When you talk about the way the World War II is perceived
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and all those kinds of things, it's fascinating.
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History also has, in it, opinion and perspective.
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And so sometimes stripping that away is really difficult.
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And then I guess that is your job and at its highest form,
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that is what you do as a historian.
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Spasibo bashoi shto sivonya samaya katorini.
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I really appreciate your valuable time.
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It's truly an honor to talk to you
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and thank you for taking us through a trip,
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through some of the worst parts of human history
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and talking about hope and love at the end.
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So I really appreciate your time today.
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Thank you for having me.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation
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with Norman Namark.
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To support this podcast,
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please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Stalin.
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A single death is a tragedy.
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A million deaths is a statistic.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.