Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Norman Namark,
00:00:03 a historian at Stanford specializing in
00:00:05 genocide, war, and empire.
00:00:09 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:11 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:13 in the description.
00:00:15 And now, here’s my conversation with Norman Namark.
00:00:20 Did Stalin believe that communism was good
00:00:22 not just for him, but for the people of the Soviet Union
00:00:25 and the people of the world?
00:00:26 Oh, absolutely, I mean, Stalin believed that, you know,
00:00:31 socialism was the be all and end all of,
00:00:34 you know, human existence.
00:00:36 I mean, he was a true Leninist,
00:00:38 and in Lenin’s tradition, this was, you know,
00:00:42 what he believed.
00:00:43 I mean, that set of beliefs didn’t exclude
00:00:46 other kinds of things he believed or thought or did.
00:00:49 But, no, the way he defined socialism,
00:00:53 the way he thought about socialism,
00:00:55 you know, he absolutely thought it was in the interest
00:00:57 of the Soviet Union and of the world.
00:00:59 And, in fact, that the world was one day going to go
00:01:02 socialist, in other words.
00:01:03 I think he believed in, eventually,
00:01:06 in the international revolution.
00:01:09 So, given the genocide in the 1930s that you describe,
00:01:13 was Stalin evil, delusional, or incompetent?
00:01:20 Evil, delusional, or incompetent.
00:01:22 Well, you know, evil is one of those words,
00:01:25 you know, which has a lot of kind of religious
00:01:27 and moral connotations.
00:01:30 And, in that sense, yes, I think he was an evil man.
00:01:33 I mean, he, you know, eliminated people
00:01:36 absolutely unnecessarily.
00:01:38 He tortured people, had people tortured.
00:01:43 He was completely indifferent to the suffering of others.
00:01:48 He couldn’t have carried a wit, you know,
00:01:51 that millions were suffering.
00:01:54 And so, yes, I consider him an evil man.
00:01:58 I mean, you know, historians don’t like to.
00:02:01 Use the word evil.
00:02:02 Use the word evil.
00:02:02 It’s, you know, it’s a word for moral philosophers,
00:02:05 but I think it certainly fits who he is.
00:02:11 I think he was delusional.
00:02:14 And there is a wonderful historian at Princeton,
00:02:18 a political scientist, actually, named Robert Tucker,
00:02:20 who said he suffered from a paranoid delusional system.
00:02:26 And I always remember that of Tucker’s writing
00:02:30 because what Tucker meant is that he was not just paranoid,
00:02:35 meaning, you know, I’m paranoid.
00:02:37 I’m worried you’re out to get me, right?
00:02:39 But that he constructed whole plots of people,
00:02:44 whole systems of people who were out to get him.
00:02:48 So, in other words, his delusions were that there were
00:02:51 all of these groups of people out there
00:02:55 who were out to diminish his power
00:02:58 and remove him from his position
00:03:01 and undermine the Soviet Union, in his view.
00:03:04 So, yes, I think he did suffer from delusions.
00:03:10 And this had a huge effect,
00:03:12 because whole groups then were destroyed by his activities,
00:03:18 which he would construct based on these delusions.
00:03:23 He was not incompetent.
00:03:24 He was an extremely competent man.
00:03:26 I mean, I think most of the research that’s gone on,
00:03:30 especially since the Stalin archive was opened
00:03:34 at the beginning of the century,
00:03:36 and I think almost every historian who goes in that archive
00:03:38 comes away from that archive
00:03:40 with the feeling of a man who is enormously hardworking,
00:03:45 intelligent, you know, with an acute sense of politics,
00:03:49 a really excellent sense of political rhetoric,
00:03:56 a fantastic editor, you know, in a kind of agitational sense.
00:04:00 I mean, he’s a real agitator, right?
00:04:02 And of a, you know, a really hard worker.
00:04:07 I mean, somebody who works from morning till night
00:04:09 a micromanager in some ways.
00:04:12 So his competence, I think, was really extreme.
00:04:15 Now, there were times when that fell down,
00:04:18 you know, times in the 30s, times in the 20s,
00:04:21 times during the war where he made mistakes.
00:04:24 It’s not as if he didn’t make any mistakes.
00:04:26 But I think, you know, you look at his stuff,
00:04:29 you know, you look at his archives, you look what he did.
00:04:31 I mean, this is an enormously competent man
00:04:34 who in many, many different areas of his life,
00:04:38 areas of enterprise, because he, you know,
00:04:42 he had this notion that he should know everything
00:04:44 and did know everything.
00:04:46 I remember one archive, it’s called, you know,
00:04:50 a kind of folder that I looked at
00:04:52 where he actually went through the wines
00:04:56 that were produced in his native Georgia
00:04:59 and wrote down how much they should make
00:05:03 of each of these wines, you know,
00:05:05 how many barrels they should produce of these wines,
00:05:10 which grapes were better than the other grapes,
00:05:12 sort of correcting, in other words,
00:05:14 what people were putting down there.
00:05:16 So he was, you know, his competence ranged very wide,
00:05:20 or at least he thought his competence ranged very wide.
00:05:23 I mean, both things, I think, are the case.
00:05:25 If we look at this paranoid delusional system,
00:05:27 Stalin was in power for 30 years.
00:05:29 He is, many argue, one of the most powerful men in history.
00:05:35 Did, in his case, absolute power corrupt him
00:05:38 or did it reveal the true nature of the man?
00:05:40 And maybe just in your sense,
00:05:43 as we kind of build around this genocide
00:05:45 of the early 1930s, this paranoid delusional system,
00:05:50 did it get built up over time?
00:05:52 Was it always there?
00:05:54 It’s kind of a question of did the genocide,
00:06:00 was that always inevitable, essentially, in this man,
00:06:03 or did power create that?
00:06:05 I mean, it’s a great question, and I don’t think you can,
00:06:08 I don’t think you can say that it was always
00:06:12 kind of inherent in the man.
00:06:14 I mean, the man without his position and without his power,
00:06:18 you know, wouldn’t have been able to accomplish
00:06:21 what he eventually did in the way of murdering people,
00:06:25 you know, and murdering groups of people,
00:06:26 which is what genocide is.
00:06:28 So, you know, I don’t, it wasn’t sort of in him.
00:06:32 I mean, there were, and again, you know,
00:06:34 the new research has shown that, you know,
00:06:36 he had his childhood was, you know,
00:06:39 not a particularly nasty one.
00:06:42 People used to say, you know, the father beat him up,
00:06:45 and it turns out, actually, it wasn’t the father,
00:06:47 it was the mother once in a while.
00:06:49 But basically, you know, he was not
00:06:51 an unusual young Georgian kid or student even.
00:06:56 And, you know, it was the growth of the Soviet system
00:07:01 and him within the Soviet system,
00:07:04 I mean, his own development within the Soviet system,
00:07:07 I think that led, you know, to the kind of mass killing
00:07:13 that occurred in the 1930s.
00:07:15 You know, he essentially achieved complete power
00:07:19 by the early 1930s.
00:07:22 And then as he, as he rolled with it,
00:07:25 as you would say, you know, or people would say,
00:07:29 you know, it increasingly became murderous.
00:07:32 And there was no, you know, there were no checks
00:07:36 and balances, obviously, on that murderous system.
00:07:39 And not only that, you know, people supported it
00:07:43 in the NKVD and elsewhere, he learned
00:07:45 how to manipulate people.
00:07:46 I mean, he was a superb, you know, political manipulator
00:07:51 of those people around him.
00:07:54 And, you know, we have, we’ve got new transcripts,
00:08:00 for example, of, you know, police bureau meetings
00:08:03 in the early 1930s.
00:08:05 And you read those things and you read, you know,
00:08:07 he uses humor and he uses sarcasm, especially,
00:08:12 he uses verbal ways to undermine people, you know,
00:08:17 to control their behavior and what they do.
00:08:20 And he’s a really, you know, he’s a real,
00:08:25 I guess, manipulator is the right word.
00:08:27 And he does it, he does it with, you know,
00:08:31 a kind of skill that on the one hand is admirable.
00:08:35 And on the other hand, of course, is terrible
00:08:39 because it ends up, you know, creating the system
00:08:43 of terror that he creates.
00:08:48 I mean, I guess just to linger on it,
00:08:50 I just wonder how much of it is a slippery slope
00:08:54 in the early 20s, 1920s, did he think he was going
00:08:58 to be murdering even a single person,
00:09:00 but thousands and millions?
00:09:04 I just wonder maybe the murder of a single human being
00:09:14 just to get them, you know, because you’re paranoid
00:09:17 about them potentially threatening your power,
00:09:19 does that murder then open a door?
00:09:22 And once you open the door,
00:09:23 you become a different human being.
00:09:25 A deeper question here is the soldier Knitsen,
00:09:29 you know, the line between good and evil runs
00:09:31 in every man, are all of us once we commit one murder
00:09:34 in the situation, does that open a door for all of us?
00:09:37 And I guess even the further deeper questions,
00:09:41 how easy it is for human nature to go
00:09:45 on the slippery slope that ends in genocide?
00:09:49 There are a lot of questions in those questions.
00:09:52 And, you know, the slippery slope question
00:09:55 I would answer, I suppose by saying, you know,
00:10:00 Stalin wasn’t the most likely successor of Lenin,
00:10:04 there were plenty of others, there were a lot
00:10:07 of political contingencies that emerged in the 1920s
00:10:12 that made it possible for Stalin to seize power.
00:10:16 I don’t think of him as, you know,
00:10:19 if you would just know him in 1925,
00:10:22 I don’t think anybody would say much less himself
00:10:25 that this was a future mass murderer.
00:10:28 I mean, Trotsky mistrusted him and thought he was,
00:10:32 you know, a mindless bureaucrat.
00:10:36 You know, others were less mistrustful of him,
00:10:39 but, you know, he managed to gain power
00:10:41 in the way he did through this bureaucratic
00:10:43 and political maneuvering that was very successful.
00:10:49 You know, the slippery slope, as it were,
00:10:52 doesn’t really begin until the 1930s, in my view.
00:10:55 In other words, once he gains complete power
00:10:58 and control of the Politburo,
00:11:01 once the programs that he institutes
00:11:05 of the Five Year Plan and collectivization go through,
00:11:10 once he reverses himself and is able to reverse himself
00:11:14 or reverse the Soviet path, you know,
00:11:17 to give various nationalities their, you know,
00:11:20 their ability to develop their own cultures
00:11:22 and sort of internal politics, once he reverses all that,
00:11:27 you know, you have the Ukrainian famine in 32, 33,
00:11:32 you have the murder of Kirov,
00:11:34 who is one of the leading figures, you know,
00:11:38 in the political system, you have the suicide of his wife,
00:11:41 you have all these things come together in 32, 33
00:11:45 that then, you know, make it more likely,
00:11:50 in other words, that bad things are gonna happen.
00:11:53 And people start seeing that, too, around him.
00:11:57 They start seeing that it’s not a slippery slope,
00:12:00 it’s a dangerous, it’s a dangerous situation
00:12:06 which is emerging, and some people really understand that.
00:12:10 So I don’t, I really do see a differentiation
00:12:13 then between the 20s.
00:12:14 I mean, it’s true that Stalin, during the Civil War,
00:12:17 there’s a lot of, you know, good research on that,
00:12:21 you know, shows that he already had some of these
00:12:24 characteristics of being, as it were, murderous
00:12:27 and being, you know, being dictatorial
00:12:32 and pushing people around and that sort of thing.
00:12:34 That was all there, but I don’t really see that
00:12:38 as kind of the necessary stage
00:12:40 for the next thing that came, which was the 30s,
00:12:43 which was really terror of the worst sort,
00:12:46 you know, where everybody’s afraid for their lives
00:12:49 and most people are afraid for their lives
00:12:51 and their family’s lives and where torture
00:12:54 and that sort of thing becomes a common part,
00:12:57 you know, of who, what people had to face.
00:13:00 So it’s a different, it’s a different world.
00:13:03 And you know, people will argue,
00:13:04 they’ll argue this kind of Lenin, Stalin continuity debate,
00:13:10 you know, that’s been going on
00:13:11 since I was an undergraduate, right?
00:13:13 That argument, you know, was Stalin the natural
00:13:16 sort of next step from Lenin
00:13:19 or was he something completely different?
00:13:23 Many people will argue, you know,
00:13:24 because of Marxism, Leninism, because of the ideology
00:13:27 that, you know, it was the natural,
00:13:30 it was a kind of natural next step.
00:13:32 I don’t think so.
00:13:33 You know, I would tend to lean the other way.
00:13:36 Not absolutely.
00:13:37 I mean, I won’t make an absolute argument
00:13:40 that what Stalin became had nothing to do with Lenin
00:13:43 and nothing to do with Marxism, Leninism.
00:13:45 It had a lot to do with it.
00:13:47 But you know, he takes it one major step further.
00:13:51 And again, that’s why I don’t like the slippery slope,
00:13:53 you know, metaphor,
00:13:54 because that means it’s kind of slow and easy.
00:13:57 It’s a leap.
00:13:58 And we call, you know, I mean,
00:14:00 historians talk about the Stalin revolution,
00:14:03 you know, in 28 and 29, you know,
00:14:05 that he, in some senses, creates a whole new system,
00:14:11 you know, through the five year plan,
00:14:13 collectivization and seizing political power
00:14:15 the way he does.
00:14:17 Can you talk about the 1930s?
00:14:19 Can you describe what happened in Holodomor,
00:14:21 the Soviet terror famine in Ukraine
00:14:23 in the 32 and 33?
00:14:25 Yes.
00:14:26 That killed millions of Ukrainians.
00:14:27 Right.
00:14:28 It’s a long story, you know,
00:14:29 but let me try to be as succinct as I can be.
00:14:34 I mean, the Holodomor, the terror famine of 32, 33
00:14:40 comes out of, in part, an all union famine
00:14:46 that is the result of collectivization.
00:14:49 You know, collectivization was a catastrophe.
00:14:52 You know, the more or less, the so called kulaks,
00:14:56 the more or less richer farmers,
00:14:57 I mean, they weren’t really rich, right?
00:15:00 Anybody with a tin roof and a cow was considered a kulak,
00:15:03 you know, and other people who had nothing
00:15:05 were also considered kulaks if they opposed collectivization.
00:15:09 So these kulaks, we’re talking millions of them, right?
00:15:12 And Ukraine, it’s worth recalling,
00:15:15 and I’m sure you know this,
00:15:16 was a, you know, heavily agricultural area,
00:15:19 and Ukrainian peasants, you know,
00:15:22 were in the countryside and resisted collectivization
00:15:27 more than even Russian peasants resisted collectivization,
00:15:33 suffered during this collectivization program.
00:15:35 And they, you know, burned sometimes their own houses,
00:15:38 they killed their own animals,
00:15:41 they were shot, you know, sometimes on the spot,
00:15:45 and tens of thousands and others were sent into exile.
00:15:50 So there was a conflagration in the countryside.
00:15:53 And the result of that conflagration
00:15:55 in Ukraine was terrible famine.
00:15:58 And again, there was famine all over the Soviet Union,
00:16:01 but it was especially bad in Ukraine,
00:16:04 in part because Ukrainian peasants resisted.
00:16:07 Now in 3233, a couple of things happen.
00:16:12 I mean, I’ve argued this in my writing,
00:16:14 and, you know, I’ve also worked on this,
00:16:18 I continue to work on it, by the way,
00:16:19 with a museum in Kiev that’s going to be
00:16:24 about the Holodomor.
00:16:25 They’re building the museum now,
00:16:27 and it’s going to be a very impressive set of exhibits,
00:16:32 and talk with historians all the time about it.
00:16:34 So what happens in 3233, a couple of things.
00:16:37 First of all, the Stalin develops,
00:16:41 develops an even stronger, I say even stronger,
00:16:46 because they already had an antipathy for the Ukrainians,
00:16:49 an even stronger antipathy for the Ukrainians in general.
00:16:53 First of all, they resist collectivization.
00:16:55 Second of all, he’s not getting all the grain he wants
00:16:59 out of them, and which he needs.
00:17:02 And so he sends in, then, people to expropriate the grain,
00:17:07 and take the grain away from the peasants.
00:17:09 These teams of people, you know, some policemen,
00:17:12 some urban thugs, some party people,
00:17:16 some poor peasants, you know, take part too,
00:17:19 go into the villages, and forcibly seize grain
00:17:23 and animals from the Ukrainian peasantry.
00:17:28 They’re seizing it all over.
00:17:29 I mean, let’s remember again,
00:17:30 this is all over the Soviet Union, in 32, especially.
00:17:34 Then, you know, in December of 1932, January of 33,
00:17:42 February of 33, Stalin has convinced the Ukrainian peasantry
00:17:49 needs to be shown who’s boss,
00:17:52 that they’re not turning over their grain,
00:17:55 that they’re resisting the expropriators,
00:17:57 that they’re hiding the grain,
00:17:59 which they do sometimes, right?
00:18:01 That they’re basically not loyal to the Soviet Union,
00:18:05 that they’re acting like traitors,
00:18:07 that they’re ready, and he says this, you know,
00:18:10 I think it’s Kaganovich he says it too,
00:18:12 you know, they’re ready to kind of pull out
00:18:14 of the Soviet Union and join Poland.
00:18:15 I mean, he thinks Poland is, you know,
00:18:17 out to get Ukraine, and so he’s gonna then,
00:18:21 essentially, break the back of these peasantry.
00:18:23 And the way he breaks their back
00:18:26 is by going through another expropriation program,
00:18:30 which is not done in the rest of the Soviet Union.
00:18:33 So he’s taking away everything they have,
00:18:36 everything they have.
00:18:38 There are new laws introduced,
00:18:40 where they will actually punish people,
00:18:42 including kids, with death, if they steal any grain,
00:18:47 you know, if they take anything from the,
00:18:49 you know, from the fields.
00:18:51 So, you know, you can shoot anybody,
00:18:53 you know, who is looking for food.
00:18:55 And then he introduces measures in Ukraine,
00:18:58 which are not introduced into the rest of the Soviet Union.
00:19:02 For example, the Ukrainian peasantry
00:19:05 are not allowed to leave their villages anymore.
00:19:08 They can’t go to the city to try to find some things.
00:19:11 I mean, we’ve got pictures of, you know,
00:19:13 Ukrainian peasants dying on the sidewalks
00:19:15 in Kharkiv, and in Kiev, and places like that,
00:19:19 who’ve managed to get out of the village
00:19:21 and get to the cities, but now they can’t leave.
00:19:24 They can’t leave Ukraine to go to Belorussia,
00:19:28 or Belarus today, or to Russia, you know, to get any food.
00:19:32 There’s no, he won’t allow any relief to Ukraine.
00:19:36 Number of people offer relief, including the Poles,
00:19:39 but also the Vatican offers relief.
00:19:42 He won’t allow any relief to Ukraine.
00:19:44 He won’t admit that there’s a famine in Ukraine.
00:19:47 And instead, what happens is that Ukraine turns into,
00:19:52 the Ukrainian countryside turns into what my now past
00:19:58 colleague who died several years ago, Robert Conquest,
00:20:01 called a vast Belsen.
00:20:04 And by that, you know, the image is of bodies
00:20:06 just lying everywhere, you know, people dead.
00:20:10 And dying, you know, of hunger, which is, by the way,
00:20:16 I mean, as you know, I’ve spent a lot of time
00:20:19 studying genocide, I don’t think there’s anything worse
00:20:21 than dying of hunger from what I have read.
00:20:24 I mean, you see terrible ways that people die, right?
00:20:27 But dying of hunger is just such a horrible, horrible thing.
00:20:31 And so, for example, we know there were many cases
00:20:35 of cannibalism in the countryside
00:20:37 because there wasn’t anything to eat.
00:20:38 People were eating their own kids, right?
00:20:41 And Stalin knew about this.
00:20:43 And again, you know, we started with this question
00:20:45 a little bit earlier, he doesn’t,
00:20:47 there’s not a sign of remorse, not a sign of pity, right?
00:20:54 Not a sign of any kind of human emotion
00:20:58 that normal people would have.
00:21:01 What about the opposite of joy for teaching them a lesson?
00:21:08 I don’t think there’s joy.
00:21:09 I’m not sure Stalin really understood
00:21:12 emotion, what joy was, you know.
00:21:15 I think he felt it was necessary to get those SOBs, right?
00:21:21 That they deserved it.
00:21:23 He says that several times, this is their own fault, right?
00:21:26 This is their own fault.
00:21:29 And as their own fault, you know,
00:21:32 they get what they deserve, basically.
00:21:36 How much was the calculation?
00:21:37 How much was it reason versus emotion?
00:21:39 In terms of, you said he was competent.
00:21:45 Was there a long term strategy
00:21:47 or was this strategy based on emotion and anger?
00:21:51 No, I think actually the right answer is a little of both.
00:21:56 I mean, usually the right answer in history
00:21:58 is something like that.
00:21:59 A little of both?
00:21:59 No, you can’t, you can’t.
00:22:01 It wasn’t just, I mean, first of all,
00:22:03 you know, the Soviets had it in for Ukraine
00:22:08 and Ukrainian nationalism, which they really didn’t like.
00:22:12 And by the way, Russians still don’t like it, right?
00:22:15 So they had it in for Ukrainian nationalism.
00:22:18 They feared Ukrainian nationalism.
00:22:22 As I said, you know, Stalin writes, you know,
00:22:24 we’ll lose Ukraine, you know, if these guys win.
00:22:29 You know, so there’s a kind of long term determination,
00:22:34 as I said, you know, to kind of break the back
00:22:37 of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian nationalism
00:22:43 as any kind of separatist force whatsoever.
00:22:46 And so there’s that rational calculation.
00:22:50 At the same time, I think Stalin is annoyed
00:22:53 and peeved and angry on one level
00:22:59 with the Ukrainians for resisting collectivization
00:23:02 and for being difficult and for not conforming, you know,
00:23:08 to the way he thinks peasants should act in this situation.
00:23:13 So you have both things.
00:23:14 He’s also very angry at the Ukrainian party
00:23:17 and eventually purges it for not being able
00:23:20 to control Ukraine and not be able to control the situation.
00:23:23 You know, Ukraine is in theory the bread basket, right?
00:23:26 Of Europe.
00:23:27 Well, how come the bread basket isn’t turning over to me
00:23:30 all this grain so I can sell it abroad
00:23:32 and, you know, build new factories
00:23:35 and support the workers in the cities?
00:23:37 So there’s a kind of annoyance.
00:23:39 You know, when things fail,
00:23:41 and this is absolutely typical of Stalin,
00:23:43 when things fail, he blames it on other people
00:23:45 and usually groups of people, right?
00:23:47 Not individuals, but groups again.
00:23:50 So a little bit of both I think is the right answer.
00:23:54 This blame, it feels like there’s a playbook
00:23:57 that dictators follow.
00:23:59 I just wonder if it comes naturally
00:24:01 or just kind of evolves.
00:24:03 Because, you know, blaming others
00:24:05 and then telling these narratives
00:24:06 and then creating the other
00:24:08 and then somehow that leads to hatred and genocide.
00:24:10 It feels like there’s too many commonalities
00:24:14 for it not to be a naturally emergent strategy
00:24:18 that works for dictatorships.
00:24:20 I mean, it’s a very good point.
00:24:23 And I think it’s one, you know, that has its merits.
00:24:27 In other words, I think you’re right
00:24:30 that there’s certain kinds of strategies
00:24:32 by dictators that, you know, are common to them.
00:24:35 A lot of them do killing, not all of them
00:24:37 of that sort that Stalin did.
00:24:40 I’ve written about Mao and Pol Pot, you know, and Hitler.
00:24:43 And, you know, there is a sort of, as you say,
00:24:46 a kind of playbook for political dictatorship.
00:24:51 Also for, you know, a kind of communist totalitarian way
00:24:56 of functioning, you know?
00:24:59 And that way of functioning was described already
00:25:01 by Hannah Arendt early on
00:25:02 when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism.
00:25:06 And she more or less writes the playbook
00:25:10 and Stalin does follow it.
00:25:12 The real question, it seems to me, is to what extent,
00:25:17 you know, and how deep does this go
00:25:19 and how often does it go in that direction?
00:25:22 I mean, you can argue, for example,
00:25:25 I mean, Fidel Castro was not a nice man, right?
00:25:27 He was a dictator, he was a terrible dictator.
00:25:30 But he did not engage in mass murder.
00:25:33 Ho Chi Minh was a dictator, a communist dictator
00:25:36 who grew up, you know, in the communist movement,
00:25:39 went to Moscow, you know, spent time in Moscow in the 30s
00:25:43 and went to find, found the Vietnamese Communist Party.
00:25:47 You know, he was a horrible dictator.
00:25:49 I’m sure he was responsible
00:25:50 for a lot of death and destruction.
00:25:52 But he wasn’t a mass murderer.
00:25:55 And so you get those, you know.
00:25:57 I mean, I would even argue, others will disagree,
00:26:02 that Lenin wasn’t a mass murderer.
00:26:04 You know, that he didn’t kill the same way,
00:26:06 you know, that Stalin killed.
00:26:08 Or people after him, they’re communist dictators too,
00:26:10 after all, Khrushchev, you know, was a communist dictator.
00:26:13 But he stopped this killing.
00:26:16 And, you know, he’s still responsible for a gulag
00:26:19 and people sent off into a gulag and imprisonment
00:26:22 and torture and that sort of thing.
00:26:23 But it’s not at all the same thing.
00:26:25 So there are some, you know, like Stalin, like Mao,
00:26:29 like Pol Pot, you know, who commit these horrible,
00:26:32 horrible atrocities, extensively engaging,
00:26:36 in my view, in genocide.
00:26:39 And there are some who don’t.
00:26:42 And, you know, what’s the difference?
00:26:44 Well, you know, the difference is partly in personality,
00:26:47 partly in historical circumstance, you know,
00:26:50 partly in who is it that controls the reins of power.
00:26:54 How much do you connect the ideas of communism
00:26:57 or Marxism or socialism to Holodomor, to Stalin’s rule?
00:27:03 So how naturally, as you kind of alluded to,
00:27:05 does it lead to genocide?
00:27:09 That’s also, I mean, in some ways,
00:27:13 I’ve just addressed that question by saying
00:27:14 it doesn’t always lead to genocide.
00:27:17 You know, in the case, again, you know,
00:27:18 Cuba is not pretty, but it didn’t have,
00:27:23 there was no genocide in Cuba.
00:27:25 And same thing in North Vietnam.
00:27:27 You know, even North Korea, as awful as it is,
00:27:30 is a terrible dictatorship, right?
00:27:32 And people’s rights are totally destroyed, right?
00:27:37 They have no freedom whatsoever.
00:27:39 You know, it’s not, as far as we know, genocidal.
00:27:43 Who knows whether it could be
00:27:45 or whether if they took over South Korea,
00:27:47 you know, mass murder wouldn’t take place
00:27:49 and that kind of thing.
00:27:50 But my point is, is that the ideology
00:27:53 doesn’t necessarily dictate genocide.
00:27:57 In other words, it’s an ideology, I think,
00:27:59 that makes genocide sometimes too easily possible
00:28:05 given, you know, the way it thinks through history
00:28:09 as being, you know, you’re on the right side of history
00:28:11 and some people are on the wrong side of history
00:28:13 and you have to destroy those people
00:28:15 who are on the wrong side of history.
00:28:17 I mean, there is something in, you know, Marxism, Leninism,
00:28:21 which, you know, has that kind of language
00:28:23 and that kind of thinking.
00:28:25 But I don’t think it’s necessarily that way.
00:28:31 There’s a wonderful historian at Berkeley
00:28:34 named Martin Malia who has written, you know,
00:28:37 wrote a number of books on this subject
00:28:39 and he was very, very, he was convinced
00:28:43 that the ideology itself, you know,
00:28:49 played a crucial role in the murderousness
00:28:53 of the Soviet regime.
00:28:54 I’m not completely convinced.
00:28:56 You know, when I say not completely convinced,
00:28:58 I think you could argue it different ways.
00:29:01 Equally valid, you know, with equally valid arguments.
00:29:05 I mean, there’s something about the ideology of communism
00:29:10 that allows you to decrease the value of human life.
00:29:15 Almost like this philosophy, if it’s okay to crack
00:29:17 a few eggs to make an omelet.
00:29:19 So maybe that, if you can reason like that,
00:29:23 then it’s easier to take the leap of,
00:29:26 for the good of the country, for the good of the people,
00:29:28 for the good of the world, it’s okay to kill a few people.
00:29:31 And then that’s where, I wonder about the slippery slope.
00:29:37 Yeah, no, no, again, you know,
00:29:38 I don’t think it’s a slippery slope.
00:29:40 I think it’s, I think it’s dangerous.
00:29:44 In other words, I think it’s dangerous,
00:29:45 but I don’t consider, you know,
00:29:48 I don’t like Marxism, Leninism any better than the next guy.
00:29:51 And I’ve lived in plenty of those systems
00:29:53 to know how they can beat people down
00:29:56 and how they can, you know,
00:30:01 destroy human aspirations
00:30:03 and human interaction between people.
00:30:06 But they’re not necessarily murderous systems.
00:30:11 They are systems that contain people’s autonomy,
00:30:15 that force people into work and labor and lifestyles
00:30:20 that they don’t want to live.
00:30:21 I spent a lot of time, you know,
00:30:23 with East Germans and Poles, you know,
00:30:27 who lived in, and even in the Soviet Union,
00:30:32 you know, in the post Stalin period,
00:30:34 where people lived lives they didn’t want to live,
00:30:37 you know, and didn’t have the freedom to choose.
00:30:40 And that was terrifying in and of itself,
00:30:44 but these were not murderous systems.
00:30:46 And they, you know, ascribed to Marxism, Leninism.
00:30:51 So I suppose it’s important to draw the line
00:30:54 between mass murder and genocide and mass murder
00:30:58 versus just mass violation of human rights.
00:31:02 Right, right.
00:31:04 And the leap to mass murder, you’re saying,
00:31:10 maybe easier in some ideologies than others,
00:31:13 but it’s not clear that somehow one ideology
00:31:15 definitely leads to mass murder and not.
00:31:17 Exactly.
00:31:18 I wonder how many factors, what factors,
00:31:21 how much of it is a single charismatic leader?
00:31:24 How much of it is the conflagration
00:31:28 of multiple historical events?
00:31:30 How much of it is just dumb, the opposite of luck?
00:31:38 Do you have a sense where if you look at a moment
00:31:40 in history, predict, looking at the factors,
00:31:46 whether something bad’s going to happen here?
00:31:49 When you look at Iraq at when Saddam Hussein
00:31:52 first took power, well, you could,
00:31:55 or you can, you know, go even farther back in history,
00:31:58 would you be able to predict?
00:32:00 So you said, you already kind of answered that
00:32:02 with Stalin saying there’s no way you could have predicted
00:32:04 that in the early 20s.
00:32:07 Is that always the case?
00:32:08 You basically can’t predict.
00:32:09 It’s pretty much always the case.
00:32:11 In other words, I mean, history is a wonderful,
00:32:14 you know, discipline and way of looking at life
00:32:17 and the world in retrospect, meaning it happened.
00:32:21 It happened.
00:32:23 And we know it happened.
00:32:24 And it’s too easy to say sometimes it happened
00:32:28 because it had to happen that way.
00:32:30 It almost never has to happen that way.
00:32:33 And, you know, things.
00:32:36 So I very much am of the school that emphasizes,
00:32:43 you know, contingency and choice and difference
00:32:48 and different paths and not, you know,
00:32:50 not necessarily a path that has to be followed.
00:32:54 And those, you know, and, you know,
00:32:59 sometimes you can warn about things.
00:33:02 I mean, you can think, well, something’s going to happen.
00:33:06 And usually the way it works,
00:33:08 let me just give you one example.
00:33:09 I mean, I’m thinking about an example right now,
00:33:11 which was the war in Yugoslavia, you know,
00:33:13 which came in the 1990s and eventually
00:33:16 ventuated in genocide in Bosnia.
00:33:19 And, you know, I remember very clearly, you know,
00:33:23 the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia,
00:33:25 and people would say, you know, there’s trouble here
00:33:28 and, you know, something could go wrong.
00:33:31 But no one in their wildest imagination
00:33:33 thought that there would be outright war between them all.
00:33:36 Then the outright war happened, genocide happened,
00:33:39 and afterwards people would say, I saw it coming.
00:33:42 You know, so you get a lot of that,
00:33:45 especially with pundits and journalists,
00:33:48 and that’s, I saw it coming, I knew it was happening.
00:33:51 You know, well, I mean, what happens in the human mind,
00:33:53 and it happens in your mind too,
00:33:54 is, you know, you go through a lot of alternatives.
00:33:58 I mean, think about January 6th, you know, in this country,
00:34:00 and all the different alternatives
00:34:03 which people had in their mind,
00:34:05 or before January 6th, you know, after the lost election.
00:34:10 You know, things could have gone in lots of different ways,
00:34:13 and there were all kinds of people
00:34:14 choosing different ways it could have gone,
00:34:16 but nobody really knew how it was going to turn out.
00:34:20 It wasn’t as smart people really understood
00:34:22 that there’d be this kind of cockamamie uprising
00:34:24 on January 6th, you know, that almost,
00:34:26 you know, caused us enormous grief.
00:34:28 So all of these kinds of things in history,
00:34:31 you know, are deeply contingent.
00:34:33 They depend on, you know, factors that we cannot predict,
00:34:37 and, you know, and it’s the joy of history that it’s open.
00:34:41 You know, you think about how people are now,
00:34:43 I mean, let me give you one more example,
00:34:45 and then I’ll shut up, but, you know,
00:34:47 there’s the environmental example.
00:34:49 You know, we’re all threatened, right?
00:34:51 We know it’s coming.
00:34:51 We know there’s trouble, right?
00:34:54 We know there’s gonna be a catastrophe at some point,
00:34:58 but when?
00:34:59 What’s the catastrophe?
00:35:00 Yeah, what’s the nature of the catastrophe?
00:35:02 Everyone says catastrophe.
00:35:03 And what’s the nature of it, right, right, right.
00:35:04 Is it gonna be wars because resource constraint?
00:35:06 Is it going to be hunger?
00:35:07 Is it gonna be, like, mass migration of different kinds
00:35:10 that leads to some kind of conflict and immigration,
00:35:13 and maybe it won’t be that big of a deal,
00:35:16 and a total other catastrophic event
00:35:19 will completely challenge the entirety
00:35:21 of the human civilization.
00:35:22 That’s my point, that’s my point, that’s my point.
00:35:25 You know, we really don’t know.
00:35:28 I mean, there’s a lot we do know.
00:35:29 I mean, the warming business and all this kind of stuff,
00:35:32 you know, it’s scientifically there,
00:35:34 but how it’s going to play out.
00:35:36 And everybody’s saying, you know, different things.
00:35:39 And then you get somewhere in 50 years or 60 years,
00:35:42 which I won’t see, and people say, aha,
00:35:45 I told you it was gonna be X,
00:35:47 or it was gonna be Y, or it was gonna be Z.
00:35:49 So I just don’t think in history you can,
00:35:54 well, you can’t predict.
00:35:56 You simply cannot predict what’s going to happen.
00:35:59 It’s kind of when you just look at Hitler in the 30s,
00:36:02 for me, oftentimes when I kind of read different accounts,
00:36:07 it is so often, certainly in the press,
00:36:09 but in general, me just reading about Hitler,
00:36:11 I get the sense, like, this is a clown.
00:36:15 There’s no way this person will gain power.
00:36:18 Which one, Hitler or Stalin?
00:36:20 Hitler, Hitler.
00:36:21 No, no, no, with Stalin, you don’t get a sense
00:36:23 he’s a clown, he’s a really good executive.
00:36:26 You think, you don’t think it’ll lead to mass murder,
00:36:28 but you think he’s going to build a giant bureaucracy,
00:36:32 at least with Hitler, it’s like a failed artist
00:36:37 who keeps screaming about stuff.
00:36:39 There’s no way he’s gonna, I mean,
00:36:42 you certainly don’t think about the atrocities,
00:36:44 but there’s no way he’s going to gain power,
00:36:47 especially against communism.
00:36:48 There’s so many other competing forces
00:36:50 that could have easily beat him.
00:36:54 But then, you realize, event after event,
00:36:58 where this clown keeps dancing,
00:37:00 and all of a sudden, he gains more and more power,
00:37:02 and just certain moments in time,
00:37:04 he makes strategic decisions in terms of cooperating
00:37:11 or gaining power over the military,
00:37:13 all those kinds of things that eventually
00:37:16 give him the power.
00:37:17 I mean, this clown is one of the most impactful
00:37:21 in the negative sense human beings in history.
00:37:25 Right, and even the Jews who are there
00:37:27 and are being screamed at and discriminated against,
00:37:30 and there’s a series of measures taken against them
00:37:33 incrementally during the course of the 1930s,
00:37:37 and very few who leave.
00:37:39 Yeah, I mean, some pick up and go and say,
00:37:40 I’m getting the hell out of here, and some Zionists
00:37:44 try to leave, too, and go to the United States and stuff,
00:37:46 but go to Israel and Palestine at the time,
00:37:51 but, or to Britain or France.
00:37:55 But in general, even the Jews who should have been
00:37:59 very sensitive to what was going on
00:38:01 didn’t really understand the extent of the danger,
00:38:06 and it’s really hard for people to do that.
00:38:08 It’s almost impossible, in fact, I think.
00:38:12 So most of the time, in that exact situation,
00:38:16 nothing would have happened,
00:38:18 or there’d be some drama and so on,
00:38:20 and it’d be there’s some bureaucrat,
00:38:22 but every once in a while in human history,
00:38:23 there’s a kind of turn,
00:38:25 and maybe something catalyzes something else,
00:38:28 and just it accelerates to accelerate,
00:38:31 escalates, escalates, and then war breaks out,
00:38:34 or totally, you know, revolutions break out.
00:38:37 Right.
00:38:40 Can we go to the big question of genocide?
00:38:43 What is genocide?
00:38:44 What are the defining characteristics of genocide?
00:38:48 Dealing with genocide is a difficult thing
00:38:50 when it comes to the definition.
00:38:53 There is a definition, the December 1948 UN Convention
00:38:58 on the Prep Prevention and Punishment of Genocide
00:39:02 is considered the sort of major document of definition,
00:39:07 in the definitional sense of genocide,
00:39:09 and it emphasizes the intentional destruction
00:39:16 of an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group,
00:39:22 those are the four groups, again, comma, as such.
00:39:26 And what that means, basically,
00:39:27 is destroying the group as a group.
00:39:31 In other words, there’s a kind of beauty in human diversity,
00:39:36 and different groups of people, you know,
00:39:39 Estonians, you know, a tribe of Native Americans,
00:39:43 South African tribes, you know, the Rohingya in Myanmar,
00:39:48 there’s a kind of beauty humanity recognizes
00:39:52 in the distinctiveness of those groups.
00:39:55 You know, this was a notion that emerges really
00:39:58 with Romanticism after the French Revolution,
00:40:00 then the beginning of the 19th century,
00:40:03 with Herder, mostly.
00:40:04 And this beauty of these groups, then,
00:40:08 you know, is what is under attack in genocide.
00:40:13 And it’s with intent, you know,
00:40:16 the idea is that it’s intentional destruction.
00:40:19 So this is a kind of, you know,
00:40:23 analogy to first degree, second degree,
00:40:25 and third degree murder, right?
00:40:27 First degree murder, you know,
00:40:28 you’re out to kill this person, and you plan it,
00:40:31 and you go out, and you do it, right?
00:40:34 That’s intent, right?
00:40:36 Manslaughter is not intent.
00:40:37 You end up doing the same thing, but it’s different.
00:40:40 So, you know, the major person behind the definitions,
00:40:46 a man named Raphael Lemkin, I don’t know if you heard
00:40:49 his name or not, but he was a Polish Jewish jurist
00:40:53 who came, you know, from Poland,
00:40:55 came to the United States during the war,
00:40:58 and had been a kind of crusader for recognizing genocide.
00:41:05 It’s a word that he created, by the way,
00:41:08 and he coined the term in 1943,
00:41:11 and then published it in 1944 for the first time.
00:41:14 Geno, meaning people, and side, meaning killing, right?
00:41:18 And so Lemkin then had this term,
00:41:20 and he pushed hard to have it recognized,
00:41:23 and it was in the UN Convention.
00:41:24 So that’s the rough definition.
00:41:27 The problem with it is the definition,
00:41:30 the problems with the definition are several.
00:41:33 You know, one of them is, is it just these four groups?
00:41:38 You know, racial, religious, ethnic, or national?
00:41:42 See, this comes right out of the war.
00:41:44 And what’s in people’s minds in 1948 are Jews,
00:41:48 Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs sometimes,
00:41:51 who were killed by the Nazis.
00:41:53 That’s what’s in their mind.
00:41:54 But there are other groups, too, if you think about it,
00:41:56 you know, who are killed,
00:41:58 social groups or political groups.
00:42:01 And that was not allowed in the convention,
00:42:05 meaning for a lot of different reasons,
00:42:07 the Soviets were primary among them.
00:42:10 They didn’t want other kinds of groups,
00:42:12 let’s say Kulaks, for example, to be considered.
00:42:16 That’s a social group.
00:42:18 Or peasants, which is a social group.
00:42:21 So, or a political group.
00:42:23 I mean, let’s take a group, you know, communists killed
00:42:28 groups of people, but non communists also killed
00:42:31 groups of people in Indonesia in 1965, 66, they killed,
00:42:35 you know, I don’t know exactly,
00:42:37 but roughly 600,000 Indonesian communists.
00:42:40 Well, is that genocide or not?
00:42:42 You know, at my point of view, it is genocide,
00:42:45 although it’s Indonesians killing Indonesians.
00:42:48 And we have the same problem with the Cambodian genocide.
00:42:51 I mean, we talk about a Cambodian genocide,
00:42:53 but most of the people killed in the Cambodian genocide
00:42:56 were other Cambodians.
00:42:58 They give it the name, they’re ready to recognize
00:43:01 this genocide because they also killed some other peoples,
00:43:04 meaning the Vietnamese, Aham people who are,
00:43:08 you know, Muslim, smaller Muslim people in the area,
00:43:13 and a few others.
00:43:14 So the question then becomes, well,
00:43:18 does it have to be a different nationality
00:43:20 or ethnic group or religious group for it to be genocide?
00:43:23 And my answer is no.
00:43:24 You know, you need to expand the definition.
00:43:26 It’s a little bit like with our constitution.
00:43:28 We got a constitution, but we don’t live
00:43:30 in the end of the 18th century, right?
00:43:32 We live in the 21st century.
00:43:33 And so you have to update the constitution
00:43:36 over the centuries.
00:43:38 And similarly, the genocide convention needs updating too.
00:43:42 So that’s how I work with the definition.
00:43:45 So this is this invention.
00:43:48 Was it an invention, this beautiful idea,
00:43:51 romantic idea that there’s groups of people
00:43:53 and the group is united by some unique characteristics?
00:43:57 That was an invention in human history, this idea?
00:44:01 Not to see as individuals?
00:44:03 In some senses, it was.
00:44:05 I mean, it’s not, you know,
00:44:06 there are things that are always constructed
00:44:09 in one fashion or another and the construction,
00:44:12 you know, more or less represents the reality.
00:44:15 And what the reality is always much more complicated
00:44:18 than the construction or the invention of a term
00:44:21 or a concept or a way of thinking about a nation, right?
00:44:26 And this way of thinking of nations, you know,
00:44:29 as again, you know, groups of religious, linguistic,
00:44:37 not political necessarily, but cultural entities
00:44:42 is something that was essentially invented, yes.
00:44:45 Yeah, so I mean, you know, if you look at…
00:44:47 There are no Germans in the 17th century.
00:44:50 There are no Italians in the 17th century, right?
00:44:52 They’re only there after, you know,
00:44:54 the invention of the nation, which comes again,
00:44:59 mostly out of the French Revolution
00:45:01 and in the Romantic movement,
00:45:03 a man named Johann Gottfried von Herder, right?
00:45:08 Who was really the first one who sort of went around,
00:45:11 collected people’s languages and collected their sayings
00:45:14 and their dances and their folkways and stuff
00:45:16 and said, isn’t this cool, you know,
00:45:19 that they’re Estonians and that they’re Latvians
00:45:21 and that they’re these other,
00:45:23 these interesting different peoples
00:45:25 who don’t even know necessarily
00:45:28 that they’re different peoples, right?
00:45:30 That comes a little bit later, right?
00:45:33 Once the concept is invented, then people start to say,
00:45:36 hey, we’re nations too, you know?
00:45:39 And the Germans decide they’re a nation and they unify.
00:45:41 And the Italians discover they’re a nation
00:45:43 and they unify instead of being, you know,
00:45:46 Florentines and Romans and, you know, Sicilians.
00:45:52 But then beyond nations, there’s political affiliations,
00:45:55 all those kinds of things.
00:45:56 It’s fascinating that, you know, you start,
00:45:59 look at the early Homo sapiens
00:46:01 and then there’s obviously tribes, right?
00:46:04 And then that’s very concrete.
00:46:06 That’s a geographic location and it’s a small group
00:46:09 of people and you have warring tribes probably connected
00:46:12 to just limited resources.
00:46:16 But it’s fascinating to think that that is then taken
00:46:18 to the space of ideas, to where you can create a group
00:46:22 at first to appreciate its beauty.
00:46:27 You create a group based on language,
00:46:30 based on maybe even political, philosophical ideas,
00:46:34 religious ideas, all those kinds of things.
00:46:36 And then that naturally then leads
00:46:38 to getting angry at groups and making them the other.
00:46:42 And then hatred.
00:46:43 Right.
00:46:44 That comes more towards the end of the 19th century,
00:46:47 you know, with the influence of Darwin.
00:46:50 I mean, you can’t blame Darwin for it,
00:46:51 but neo Darwin, Darwinians, you know,
00:46:54 who start to talk about, you know,
00:46:55 the competition between nations, the natural competition,
00:46:59 the weak ones fall away, the strong ones get ahead.
00:47:03 You know, you get this sort of combination also
00:47:05 with, you know, modern antisemitism
00:47:08 and with racial thinking, you know,
00:47:09 the racial thinking at the end of the 19th century
00:47:12 is very powerful.
00:47:14 So now, you know, at the end of the 19th century
00:47:16 versus the beginning of the, you know,
00:47:19 the middle of the 19th century, you know,
00:47:22 you can be a German and be a Jew
00:47:24 and there’s no contradiction.
00:47:26 Yeah.
00:47:27 As long as you speak the language and you, you know,
00:47:28 you dress and think and act and share the culture.
00:47:32 By the end of the 19th century, people saying, no, no,
00:47:35 you know, they’re not Germans.
00:47:37 They’re Jews, they’re different.
00:47:37 They have different blood.
00:47:38 They have different, they don’t say genes yet,
00:47:40 but you know, that’s sort of a sense of people.
00:47:43 And that’s when, you know,
00:47:45 there’s this sense of superiority too, and inferiority.
00:47:49 Yeah.
00:47:50 You know, that they’re inferior to us.
00:47:51 Yeah.
00:47:52 You know, and that we’re the strong ones
00:47:55 and we have to, you know, and Hitler, by the way,
00:47:57 just adopts this hook line and sinker.
00:48:00 I mean, there are a whole series of thinkers
00:48:03 at the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th century
00:48:05 who he cites in Mein Kampf, you know,
00:48:06 which is written in the early 1920s,
00:48:09 that, you know, basically pervades this racial thinking.
00:48:15 So nationalism changes.
00:48:16 So nationalism in and of itself is not bad.
00:48:19 I mean, it’s not bad, you know,
00:48:21 to share culture and language and, you know,
00:48:25 folkways and a sense of common belonging.
00:48:29 There’s nothing bad about it inherently.
00:48:32 But then what happens is it becomes, you know,
00:48:35 frequently is used and becomes, especially on fascism,
00:48:39 becomes dangerous.
00:48:42 And it’s especially dangerous
00:48:44 when the two conflicting groups share geographic location.
00:48:48 That’s right.
00:48:49 So like with Jews, you know, I come, you know,
00:48:54 I’m a Russian Jew and it’s always interesting.
00:48:58 I take pride in, you know, I love the tradition
00:49:05 of the Soviet Union, of Russia.
00:49:07 I love America.
00:49:08 So I love these countries.
00:49:10 They have beautiful tradition in literature and science
00:49:13 and art and all those kinds of things.
00:49:15 But it’s funny that people, not often,
00:49:19 but sometimes correct me that I’m not Russian.
00:49:24 I’m a Jew.
00:49:24 And it’s a, it’s a, it’s a nice reminder.
00:49:29 Yes.
00:49:30 That that is always there,
00:49:34 that desire to create these groups.
00:49:37 And then when they’re living in the same place
00:49:39 for that division between groups,
00:49:42 that hate between groups can explode.
00:49:45 And I just, I wonder why is that there?
00:49:49 Why does, why does the human heart tend so easily
00:49:53 towards this kind of hate?
00:49:58 You know, that’s a big question in and of itself.
00:50:02 You know, the human heart is full of everything, right?
00:50:04 It’s full of hate.
00:50:05 It’s full of love.
00:50:06 It’s full of indifference.
00:50:07 It’s full of apathy.
00:50:09 It’s full of energy.
00:50:10 So, I mean, hate is something, you know, that,
00:50:17 I mean, I think, and, you know,
00:50:22 along with hate, you know, the ability to really hurt
00:50:25 and injure people is something that’s within all of us.
00:50:28 You know, it’s within all of us.
00:50:30 And it’s just something that’s part of who we are
00:50:35 and part of our society.
00:50:37 So, you know, we’re shaped by our society
00:50:39 and our society can do with us often what it wishes.
00:50:44 You know, that’s why it’s so much nicer to live in a
00:50:47 more or less beneficent society
00:50:49 like that of a democracy in the West
00:50:52 than to live in the Soviet Union, right?
00:50:55 I mean, because, you know, you have more or less
00:50:59 the freedom to do what you wish
00:51:01 and not to be forced into situations
00:51:04 in which you would have to then do nasty to other people.
00:51:09 You know, some societies, as we talked about,
00:51:12 you know, are more have proclivities towards,
00:51:16 you know, asking of its people to do things
00:51:19 they don’t want to do and forcing them to do so.
00:51:24 So, you know, freedom is a wonderful thing.
00:51:27 To be able to choose not to do evil is a great thing,
00:51:30 you know, whereas in some societies, you know,
00:51:33 you feel in some ways for not so much for the NKVD bosses,
00:51:39 but for the guys on the ground, you know, in the 1930s
00:51:41 or not so much for the Nazi bosses,
00:51:44 but for the guys, you know, in the police battalion
00:51:50 that were told, go shoot those Jews, you know?
00:51:53 And you do it, not necessarily because
00:51:57 they force you to do it, but because your social,
00:52:02 you know, your social situation, you know, encourages you to
00:52:07 and you don’t have the courage not to.
00:52:09 Yeah, I was just, as I often do,
00:52:12 rereading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
00:52:15 and he said something, I just, I often pull out sort of lines.
00:52:22 The mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard
00:52:25 or a prisoner tells us almost nothing.
00:52:28 Human kindness can be found in all groups,
00:52:31 even those which as a whole, it would be easy to condemn.
00:52:36 So that’s speaking to, you feel for those people
00:52:41 at the lowest level implementing the orders of those above.
00:52:49 Right.
00:52:51 And also you worry yourself what will happen
00:52:54 if you were given those same orders, you know?
00:52:56 I mean, what would you do?
00:52:59 You know, what kind of reaction would you have
00:53:01 in a similar situation?
00:53:03 And you know, you don’t know.
00:53:07 I could see myself in World War II
00:53:10 while fighting for almost any country that I was born in.
00:53:17 There’s a love of community, there’s a love of country
00:53:20 that’s just, at least to me it comes naturally,
00:53:23 just love of community and countries wanting such community.
00:53:27 And I could see fighting for that country,
00:53:29 especially when you’re sold a story that you’re fighting evil
00:53:33 and I’m sure every single country
00:53:35 was sold that story effectively.
00:53:38 And then when you’re in the military
00:53:41 and you have a gun in your hand
00:53:42 or you’re in the police force and you’re ordered,
00:53:47 go to this place and commit violence,
00:53:53 it’s hard to know what you would do.
00:53:55 It’s a mix of fear, it’s a mix of,
00:53:59 maybe you convince yourself, you know,
00:54:01 what can one person really do?
00:54:03 And over time, it’s again, that slippery slope.
00:54:05 Because you could see all the people who protest,
00:54:09 who revolt, they’re ineffective.
00:54:13 So like, if you actually want to practically help somehow,
00:54:17 you’re going to convince yourself that you can’t,
00:54:19 one person can’t possibly help.
00:54:22 And then you have a family, so you want to make,
00:54:24 you know, you want to protect your family.
00:54:25 You tell all these stories and over time,
00:54:28 it, you naturally convince yourself to dehumanize the other.
00:54:32 Yeah, I think about this a lot,
00:54:38 mostly because I worry that I wouldn’t be a good German.
00:54:42 Yeah, no, no, that’s right, that’s right.
00:54:44 And one of the, you know, one of my tasks as a teacher,
00:54:48 right, our students, and I have, you know,
00:54:52 classes on genocide, I have one now.
00:54:55 And another one, by the way, on Stalin.
00:54:58 But the one on genocide, you know,
00:55:01 one of my tasks is to try to get the students to understand
00:55:05 this is not about weird people who live far away
00:55:09 in time and in place, but it’s about them, you know?
00:55:12 And that, you know, that’s a hard lesson,
00:55:15 but it’s an important one, you know,
00:55:17 that this is in all of us, you know, it’s in all of us.
00:55:20 And there’s nothing, you know,
00:55:22 and you just try to gird yourself up, you know,
00:55:25 to try to figure out ways that maybe you won’t be complicit.
00:55:29 And that you learn how to stand by your principles,
00:55:33 but it’s very hard, it’s extremely difficult.
00:55:36 And you can’t, the other interesting thing about it
00:55:38 is it’s not predictable.
00:55:40 Now, there’s, they’ve done a lot of studies of Poles,
00:55:42 for example, who during the war saved Jews, you know?
00:55:45 Well, who are the Poles who saved Jews
00:55:47 versus those who turned them in?
00:55:50 It’s completely unpredictable.
00:55:51 You know, sometimes it’s the worst anti Semites
00:55:53 who protect them because they don’t believe
00:55:55 they should be killed, right?
00:55:57 And sometimes, you know, it’s not predictable.
00:56:01 It’s not as if the humanists among us, you know,
00:56:04 are the ones who, you know, consistently show up,
00:56:08 you know, and experience danger, in other words,
00:56:13 and are ready to take on danger
00:56:16 to defend, you know, your fellow human beings.
00:56:18 Not necessarily.
00:56:19 I mean, sometimes simple people do it,
00:56:21 and sometimes they do it for really simple reasons.
00:56:24 And sometimes, people you would expect to do it don’t.
00:56:29 And you’ve got that mix, and it’s just not predictable.
00:56:33 One thing I’ve learned in this age of social media
00:56:37 is it feels like the people with integrity
00:56:39 and the ones who would do the right thing
00:56:41 are the quiet ones.
00:56:44 In terms of humanists, in terms of activists,
00:56:46 there’s so many points to be gained
00:56:50 of declaring that you would do the right thing.
00:56:53 It’s the simple, quiet folks.
00:56:58 Because I’ve seen quite, on a small,
00:57:01 obviously much smaller scale,
00:57:03 just shows of integrity and character.
00:57:05 When there was sacrifice to be made and it was done quietly.
00:57:09 Now, sort of the small heroes, those are,
00:57:13 you’re right, it’s surprising, but they’re often quiet.
00:57:17 That’s why I’m distrustful of people
00:57:18 who kind of proclaim that they would do the right thing.
00:57:21 Right, right.
00:57:23 And there are different kinds of integrity, too.
00:57:25 I mean, I edited a memoir of a Polish underground fighter,
00:57:34 member of the underground who was in Majdanek
00:57:37 in the concentration camp at Majdanek.
00:57:38 You know, and it was just an interesting mix
00:57:41 of different kinds of integrity.
00:57:43 You know, on the one hand,
00:57:45 it really bothered him deeply
00:57:50 when Jews were killed or sent to camp
00:57:52 or that sort of thing.
00:57:53 On the other hand, he was something of an anti Semite.
00:57:56 You know, he would, you know,
00:57:59 sometimes if Jews were his friends, he would help them.
00:58:02 And if they weren’t, sometimes he was really mean to them.
00:58:06 You know, and you could, in their various levels,
00:58:08 you know, a concentration camp is a terrible social experiment
00:58:13 in some ways, right?
00:58:15 But you learn a lot from how people behave.
00:58:19 And what you see is that, you know,
00:58:21 people behave sometimes extraordinarily well
00:58:23 in some situations and extraordinarily poorly in others.
00:58:26 And it’s mixed and you can’t predict it.
00:58:28 And it’s hard to find consistency.
00:58:32 I mean, that’s the other thing.
00:58:33 It’s, you know, I think we claim too much consistency
00:58:37 for the people we study
00:58:38 and the people we think about in the past.
00:58:40 You know, they’re not consistent any more than we are
00:58:42 consistent, right?
00:58:45 Well, let me ask you about human nature here on both sides.
00:58:48 So first, what have you learned about human nature
00:58:53 from studying genocide?
00:58:54 Why do humans commit genocide?
00:58:56 What lessons, first of all, why is a difficult question,
00:59:01 but what insights do you have into humans
00:59:04 that genocide is something that happens in the world?
00:59:07 That’s a really big and difficult question, right?
00:59:10 And it has to be parsed, I think,
00:59:13 into different kinds of questions.
00:59:16 You know, why does genocide happen?
00:59:19 You know, which the answer there is frequently political,
00:59:24 meaning, you know, why Hitler ended up killing the Jews.
00:59:28 Well, it had a lot to do with the political history
00:59:32 of Germany and wartime history of Germany, right?
00:59:35 In the 30s, and, you know, it’s traceable to then.
00:59:40 No, like you mentioned it yourself,
00:59:42 you can’t imagine Hitler in the mid 20s
00:59:46 turning into anything of the kind of dictator
00:59:49 he ended up being and the kind of murderer,
00:59:53 mass murderer he ended up being.
00:59:55 So, and the same thing goes, by the way,
00:59:58 for Stalin and Soviet Union and Pol Pot.
01:00:01 I mean, these are all essentially political movements
01:00:04 where the polity state is seized, you know,
01:00:08 by a ideological or, you know, party, single party movement
01:00:14 and then is moved in directions
01:00:15 where mass killing takes place.
01:00:18 The other question, you know,
01:00:20 let’s separate that question out.
01:00:22 The other question is why do ordinary people participate?
01:00:26 Because the fact of the matter is,
01:00:31 just ordering genocide is not enough.
01:00:33 Just saying, you know, go get them is not enough.
01:00:36 There have to be people who will cooperate
01:00:39 and who will do their jobs, you know,
01:00:41 both at the kind of mezzo level,
01:00:43 the middle level of a bureaucracy,
01:00:45 but also at the everyday level.
01:00:47 You know, people who have to pull the triggers
01:00:48 and that kind of thing and, you know,
01:00:50 force people into the gas chamber
01:00:52 and grab people, you know, in Kiev in September 1941
01:00:56 at Babin Yar and push them, you know, towards the ravine
01:01:00 where the machine gunners are gonna shoot them down.
01:01:03 You know, and those are all different questions.
01:01:06 The question of, you know, especially the lower level people
01:01:11 who actually do the killing is a question
01:01:14 which I think we’ve been talking about,
01:01:15 which is that within all of us,
01:01:19 you know, is the capability of being murderers
01:01:21 and mass murderers.
01:01:22 I mean, to participate in mass murder.
01:01:25 I won’t call them laws of social psychology,
01:01:27 but the character of social psychology.
01:01:31 You know, we will do it in most cases.
01:01:33 I mean, one of the shocking things that I learned
01:01:35 just a few years ago studying the Holocaust
01:01:39 is that you could pull out.
01:01:41 In other words, if they order a police battalion
01:01:44 to go shoot Jews, you didn’t have to do it.
01:01:48 You could pull out.
01:01:49 They weren’t gonna, they never killed anybody.
01:01:51 They never executed anybody.
01:01:53 They never even punished people for saying,
01:01:54 no, I’m not gonna do that.
01:01:56 So people are doing it voluntarily.
01:01:58 They may not want to do it.
01:02:01 You know, they give them booze to try to, you know,
01:02:03 numb the pain of murder,
01:02:06 because they know there is pain.
01:02:08 I mean, people experience pain when they murder people,
01:02:11 but they don’t pull out.
01:02:13 And so it’s the character of who we are in the society,
01:02:16 in groups, and we’re very, very influenced.
01:02:20 I mean, we’re highly influenced by the groups
01:02:22 in which we operate.
01:02:24 And, you know, who we talk to,
01:02:28 and who our friends are within that group,
01:02:30 and who is the head of the group.
01:02:32 And I mean, you see this even,
01:02:34 I mean, you see it in any group, you know,
01:02:36 whether it’s in the academy, right, at Stanford,
01:02:39 or whether it’s, you know, in a labor union,
01:02:42 or whether it’s in a church group in Tennessee,
01:02:44 or wherever, you know, people pay attention to each other,
01:02:49 and they are unwilling, frequently, to say no.
01:02:54 This is wrong.
01:02:56 Even though all of you think it’s right, it’s wrong.
01:02:58 I mean, you just don’t do that, usually,
01:03:00 especially in societies that are authoritarian,
01:03:06 or totalitarian, right?
01:03:08 Because it’s harder, because there’s a backup to it, right?
01:03:10 There’s the NKVD there, or there’s the Gestapo there,
01:03:13 and there are other people there.
01:03:14 So you just, you know, they may not be forcing you to do it,
01:03:18 but your social being, plus this danger in the distance,
01:03:26 you know, you do it.
01:03:28 But then, if you go up the hierarchy,
01:03:31 at the very top, there’s a dictator.
01:03:33 Presumably, you know, you go to, like, middle management
01:03:36 to the bureaucracy.
01:03:39 The higher you get up there,
01:03:41 the more power you have to change the direction
01:03:44 of the Titanic.
01:03:45 Right, right, right.
01:03:46 But nobody seems to do it.
01:03:49 Right, or what happens, and it does happen.
01:03:52 It happens in the German army.
01:03:54 I mean, it happens in the case of the Armenian genocide,
01:03:57 where we know there are governors who said,
01:03:59 no, I’m not gonna kill Armenians.
01:04:01 What kind of business is this?
01:04:02 They’re just removed.
01:04:04 They’re removed, and you find a replacement very easily.
01:04:07 So, you know, you do see people who stand up.
01:04:10 And again, it’s not really predictable who it will be.
01:04:13 I would maintain.
01:04:14 I mean, I haven’t done the study of the Armenian governors
01:04:18 who said no.
01:04:19 I mean, the Turkish governors who said no
01:04:21 to the Armenian genocide.
01:04:23 But, you know, there are people who do step aside
01:04:28 every once in a while in the middle level.
01:04:31 And again, they’re German generals who say,
01:04:32 wait a minute, what is this business in Poland
01:04:34 when they start to kill Jews or in Belorussia?
01:04:37 And, you know, they’re just pushed aside.
01:04:40 You know, if they don’t do their job, they’re pushed aside.
01:04:42 Or they end up doing it.
01:04:44 And they usually do end up doing it.
01:04:47 What about on the victim side?
01:04:49 So, I mentioned man’s search for meaning.
01:04:52 What can we learn about human nature,
01:04:55 the human mind from the victims of genocide?
01:04:59 So, Viktor Frankl talked about the ability
01:05:02 to discover meaning and beauty, even in suffering.
01:05:07 Is there something to be said about, you know,
01:05:10 in your studying of genocide
01:05:11 that you’ve learned about human nature?
01:05:15 Well, again, I don’t, I have to say,
01:05:19 I come out of the study of genocide
01:05:21 with a very pessimistic view of human nature.
01:05:24 A very pessimistic view.
01:05:25 Even on the victim side?
01:05:26 Even on the victim side.
01:05:28 I mean, the victims will eat their children, right?
01:05:33 Ukrainian case, they have no choice.
01:05:36 You know, the victims will rob each other.
01:05:38 The victims will form hierarchies within victimhood.
01:05:44 So, you see, let me give you an example.
01:05:46 Again, I told you I was working on Majdanek.
01:05:50 And there’s, in Majdanek, at a certain point in 42,
01:05:57 a group of Slovak Jews were arrested
01:06:02 and sent to Majdanek.
01:06:04 Those Slovak Jews were a group,
01:06:08 somehow they stuck together, they were very competent,
01:06:11 they were, you know, many of them were businessmen,
01:06:14 they knew each other,
01:06:16 and for a variety of different reasons within the camp.
01:06:19 And again, this shows you the diversity of the camps
01:06:22 and also, you know, these images of black and white
01:06:24 in the camps are not very useful.
01:06:26 They ruled the camp.
01:06:29 I mean, they basically had all the important jobs
01:06:31 in the camp, including jobs like beating other Jews,
01:06:35 and persecuting other Jews, and persecuting other peoples,
01:06:41 which they did.
01:06:43 And this Polish guy who I mentioned to you,
01:06:46 who wrote this memoir, hated them
01:06:48 because of what they were doing to the Poles, right?
01:06:53 And he, you know, he’s incensed
01:06:57 because aren’t these supposed to be the Untermenschen?
01:07:01 He says, and look what they’re doing,
01:07:02 they’re treating us, you know, like dirt.
01:07:06 And they do, they treat them like dirt.
01:07:08 So, you know, in this kind of work on Majdanek,
01:07:11 there’s certainly parts of it that, you know,
01:07:16 were inspiring, you know, people helping each other,
01:07:20 people trying to feed each other,
01:07:23 people giving warmth to each other.
01:07:24 You know, there’s some very heroic Polish women
01:07:30 who end up having a radio show called Radio Majdanek,
01:07:33 which they put on every night in the women’s camp,
01:07:36 which is, you know, to raise people’s spirits.
01:07:39 And they, you know, sing songs
01:07:41 and do all this kind of stuff, you know,
01:07:43 to try to keep themselves from, you know,
01:07:47 the horrors that they’re experiencing around them.
01:07:51 And so you do see that, and you do see,
01:07:54 you know, human beings acting in support of each other.
01:08:00 But, you know, I mean, Primo Levi is one of my favorite
01:08:06 writers about the Holocaust and about the camps.
01:08:10 And, you know, I don’t think Primo Levi saw anything.
01:08:15 You know, I mean, he had pals, you know,
01:08:17 who he helped and who helped him.
01:08:20 I mean, but he describes this kind of, you know,
01:08:25 terrible inhuman environment,
01:08:27 which no one can escape, really, no one can escape.
01:08:30 He ends up committing suicide too, I think,
01:08:32 because of his sense of, we don’t know exactly why,
01:08:37 but probably because of his sense
01:08:39 of what happened in the camp.
01:08:41 I mean, later he goes back to Italy,
01:08:42 becomes a writer and that sort of thing.
01:08:44 So I don’t, I don’t, especially in the concentration camps,
01:08:49 it’s really hard to find places like Wickel Frankel
01:08:52 where you can say, you know,
01:08:54 I am moved in a positive way, you know, by what happened.
01:09:02 There were cases, there’s no question.
01:09:04 People hung together, they tried to help each other,
01:09:06 but, you know, they were totally, totally caught
01:09:11 in this web of genocide.
01:09:15 See, so there are stories, but the thing is, I have this
01:09:19 sense, maybe it’s a hope, that within most,
01:09:22 if not every human heart, there’s a kind of, like,
01:09:26 flame of compassion and kindness and love that waits,
01:09:34 that longs to connect with others,
01:09:37 that ultimately en masse overpowers everything else.
01:09:41 If you just look at the story of human history,
01:09:43 the resistance to violence and mass murder and genocide
01:09:50 feels like a force that’s there.
01:09:54 And it feels like a force that’s more powerful
01:09:57 than whatever the dark momentum that leads to genocide is.
01:10:04 It feels like that’s more powerful, it’s just quiet.
01:10:08 It’s hard to tell the story of that little flame
01:10:10 that burns within all of our hearts,
01:10:14 that longing to connect to other human beings.
01:10:16 And there’s something also about human nature
01:10:18 and us as storytellers, that we’re not very good
01:10:21 at telling the stories of that little flame.
01:10:24 We’re much better at telling the stories of atrocities.
01:10:27 No, you know, I think maybe I fundamentally
01:10:30 disagree with you, I think maybe I fundamentally,
01:10:32 I don’t disagree that there is that flame.
01:10:36 I just think it’s just too easily doused.
01:10:38 And I think it’s too easily goes out in a lot of people.
01:10:43 And I mean, like I say, I come away from this work,
01:10:49 a pessimist.
01:10:50 You know, there is this work by a Harvard psychologist,
01:10:54 now I’m forgetting his name.
01:10:55 Stephen Pinker.
01:10:56 Yes, yes, Stephen Pinker, that shows over time, you know,
01:11:01 and you know, initially I was quite skeptical of the work,
01:11:03 but in the end, I thought he was quite convincing
01:11:05 that over time, the incidence of homicide, you know,
01:11:12 goes down, the incidence of rape goes down,
01:11:14 the incidence of genocide, except for the big blip,
01:11:18 you know, in the middle of the 20th century goes down.
01:11:22 Not markedly, but it goes down generally,
01:11:24 that you know, more than norms, international norms
01:11:27 are changing how we think about this and stuff like that.
01:11:30 I thought he was pretty convincing about that.
01:11:33 But think about, you know, we’re modern people.
01:11:37 I mean, we’ve advanced so fast in so many different areas.
01:11:41 I mean, we should have eliminated this a long time ago,
01:11:45 a long time ago.
01:11:47 You know, how is it that, you know,
01:11:50 we’re still facing this business of genocide in Myanmar,
01:11:54 in Xinjiang, in, you know, Tigray, in Ethiopia,
01:11:59 you know, the potentials of genocide there.
01:12:02 And all over the world, you know, we still have this thing
01:12:06 that we cannot handle, that we can’t deal with.
01:12:10 And, you know, again, you know, electric cars and planes
01:12:14 that fly from here to, you know, Beijing.
01:12:18 Think about the differences between 250 years ago
01:12:21 or 300 years ago and today, but the differences in genocide
01:12:25 are not all that great.
01:12:26 I mean, the incidence has gone down.
01:12:28 I think Pinker has demonstrated, I mean,
01:12:31 there are problems with his methodology,
01:12:32 but on the whole, I’m with him on that book.
01:12:35 I thought in the end, it was quite well done.
01:12:38 So, you know, I do not, I have to say,
01:12:44 I’m not an optimist about what this human flame can do.
01:12:48 And, you know, I once, someone once said to me,
01:12:53 when I posed a similar kind of question to a seminar,
01:12:56 a friend of mine at Berkeley once said,
01:12:57 remember original sin, Norman, well, I don’t, you know,
01:13:01 that’s very Catholic and I don’t really think
01:13:05 in terms of original sin, but in some ways, you know,
01:13:09 her point is we carry this with us, you know,
01:13:11 we carry with us a really potentially nasty mean streak
01:13:20 that can do harm to other people.
01:13:22 Well, we carry the capacity to love too.
01:13:24 Yes, we do, yes, we do.
01:13:26 That’s part of the deal.
01:13:28 You have a bias in that you have studied
01:13:32 some of the darker aspects of human nature
01:13:34 and human history.
01:13:36 So it is difficult from the trenches, from the muck,
01:13:42 to see a possible sort of way out through love.
01:13:46 But it’s not obvious that that’s not the case.
01:13:50 You mentioned electric cars and rockets and airplanes.
01:13:54 To me, the more powerful thing is Wikipedia, the internet.
01:13:58 Only 50% of the world currently has access to the internet,
01:14:02 but that’s growing in information and knowledge and wisdom,
01:14:05 especially among women in the world.
01:14:08 As that grows, I think it becomes a lot more difficult
01:14:12 if love wins, it becomes a lot more difficult
01:14:15 for somebody like Hitler to take power,
01:14:16 for genocide to occur, because people think,
01:14:20 and the masses, I think, the people have power
01:14:23 when they’re able to think,
01:14:26 when they can see the full kind of…
01:14:30 First of all, when they can study your work,
01:14:34 they can know about the fact that genocide happens,
01:14:36 how it occurs, how the promises of great charismatic leaders
01:14:40 lead to great, destructive mass genocide.
01:14:44 And just even studying the fact that the Holocaust happened
01:14:48 for a large number of people is a powerful preventer
01:14:53 of future genocide.
01:14:55 One of the lessons of history is just knowing
01:14:58 that this can happen, learning how it happens,
01:15:01 that normal human beings, leaders that give big promises,
01:15:07 can also become evil and destructive.
01:15:09 The fact, knowing that that can happen
01:15:12 is a powerful preventer of that,
01:15:13 and then you kind of wake up from this haze
01:15:16 of believing everything you hear,
01:15:19 and you learn to just, in your small, local way,
01:15:25 to put more love out there in the world.
01:15:28 I believe it’s possible, it’s not too good,
01:15:31 sort of to push back, it’s not so obvious to me
01:15:35 that in the end, I think in the end, love wins.
01:15:40 That’s my intuition, I’ve had to put money on it.
01:15:43 I have a sense that this genocide thing
01:15:46 is more and more going to be an artifact of the past.
01:15:51 Well, I certainly hope you’re right.
01:15:53 I mean, I certainly hope you’re right.
01:15:54 And it could be you are, we don’t know.
01:16:00 But the evidence is different.
01:16:04 The evidence is different.
01:16:05 And the capacity of human beings to do evil
01:16:10 to other human beings is repeatedly demonstrated.
01:16:17 Whether it’s in massacres in Mexico,
01:16:20 or ISIS and the Yazidi Kurds,
01:16:25 or you can just go on and on.
01:16:27 Syria, I mean, look what, I mean,
01:16:29 Syria used to be a country, and now it’s been a mass grave,
01:16:35 and people then have left in the millions
01:16:39 for other places.
01:16:41 And you know, I’m not saying, you know, I’m not saying,
01:16:46 I mean, the Turks have done nice things for the Syrians,
01:16:48 and the Germans welcomed in a million or so,
01:16:51 and actually reasonably absorbed them.
01:16:53 I mean, I’m not saying bad things only happen in the world.
01:16:57 They’re good and bad things that happen,
01:16:59 you’re absolutely right.
01:17:02 But I don’t think we’re on the path
01:17:04 to eliminating these bad things,
01:17:08 really bad things from happening.
01:17:10 I just don’t think we are.
01:17:11 And I don’t think there’s any,
01:17:12 I don’t think the facts demonstrate it.
01:17:15 I mean, I hope, I hope you’re right.
01:17:17 But I think otherwise, it’s just an article of faith.
01:17:22 Well.
01:17:23 You know, which is perfectly fine.
01:17:25 It’s better to have that article of faith
01:17:27 than to have an article of faith which says,
01:17:29 you know, things should get bad, or things like that.
01:17:32 Well, it’s not just fine.
01:17:33 It’s the only way if you want to build a better future.
01:17:36 So optimism is a prerequisite
01:17:38 for engineering a better future.
01:17:40 So like, okay, so a historian
01:17:43 has to see clearly into the past.
01:17:46 An engineer has to imagine a future
01:17:51 that’s different from the past,
01:17:54 that’s better than the past.
01:17:55 Because without that,
01:17:57 they’re not going to be able to build a better future.
01:17:59 So there’s a kind of saying,
01:18:01 like you have to consider the facts.
01:18:02 Well, at every single moment in history,
01:18:05 if you allow yourself to be too grounded
01:18:10 by the facts of the past,
01:18:11 you’re not going to create the future.
01:18:12 So that’s kind of the tension that we’re living with.
01:18:15 To have a chance, we have to imagine
01:18:16 that the better future is possible.
01:18:19 But one of the ways to do that is to study history.
01:18:23 Which engineers don’t do enough of.
01:18:25 They do not.
01:18:26 Which is a real problem.
01:18:29 It’s a real problem.
01:18:30 Or basically a lot of disciplines in science
01:18:33 and so on don’t do enough of.
01:18:36 Can you tell the story of China from 1958 to 1962,
01:18:41 what was called the Great Leap Forward,
01:18:44 orchestrated by Chairman Mao Zedong
01:18:47 that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people
01:18:49 making it arguably the largest famine in human history?
01:18:55 Yes.
01:18:55 I mean, it was a terrible set of events
01:18:59 that led to the death.
01:19:02 People will dispute the numbers.
01:19:07 15 million, 17 million, 14 million,
01:19:11 20 million people died in the Great Leap.
01:19:15 Many people say 30, 40, 50 million.
01:19:17 Some people will go that high too.
01:19:18 That’s right, that’s right.
01:19:21 Essentially, Mao and the Communist Party leadership,
01:19:25 but it was mostly Mao’s doing,
01:19:28 decided he wanted to move the country into communism.
01:19:33 And part of the idea of that
01:19:35 was rivalry with the Soviet Union.
01:19:39 Mao was a good Stalinist,
01:19:41 or at least felt like Stalin
01:19:43 was the right kind of communist leader to have,
01:19:46 and he didn’t like Khrushchev at all,
01:19:48 and he didn’t like what he thought were Khrushchev’s reforms
01:19:51 and also Khrushchev’s pretensions
01:19:54 to moving the Soviet Union into communism.
01:19:57 So Khrushchev started talking about giving more power
01:19:59 to the party, less power to the state,
01:20:01 and if you have more power to the party versus the state,
01:20:04 then you’re moving into communism quicker.
01:20:07 So what Mao decided to do was to engage in this vast program
01:20:12 of building what were called people’s communes.
01:20:16 And these communes were enormous conglomerations
01:20:22 of essentially collective farms,
01:20:25 and what would happen on those communes
01:20:28 is there would be places for people to eat,
01:20:31 and there would be places for the kids to be raised
01:20:34 in essentially kind of separate homes,
01:20:38 and they would be schooled.
01:20:39 Everybody would turn over their metal,
01:20:42 which was one of the,
01:20:43 actually it turned out to be a terribly negative phenomenon,
01:20:46 their metal pots and pans to be melted to then make steel.
01:20:51 Every of these big communes would all have little steel plants
01:20:55 and they would build steel
01:20:57 and the whole countryside would be transformed.
01:21:01 Well, like many of these sort of,
01:21:03 I mean a true megalomaniac project,
01:21:07 like some of Stalin’s projects too.
01:21:10 And this particular project then,
01:21:12 the people had no choice.
01:21:15 They were forced to do this.
01:21:18 It was incredibly dysfunctional for Chinese agriculture
01:21:25 and ended up creating, as you mentioned, a terrible famine
01:21:32 that everybody understood was a famine as a result of this.
01:21:36 I mean, there were also some problems of nature
01:21:40 at the same time and some flooding and bad weather
01:21:42 and that sort of thing, but it was really a manmade famine.
01:21:46 And Mao said at one point, who cares if millions die?
01:21:52 It just doesn’t matter.
01:21:53 We’ve got millions more left.
01:21:55 I mean, he would periodically say things like this
01:21:57 that showed that like Stalin, he had total indifference
01:22:03 to the fact that people were dying in large numbers.
01:22:06 It led again to cannibalism
01:22:08 and to terrible wastage all over the country
01:22:13 and millions of people died
01:22:15 and there was just no stopping it.
01:22:18 There were people in the party
01:22:19 who began to kind of edge towards telling Mao
01:22:22 this wasn’t a great idea and that he should back off,
01:22:26 but he wouldn’t back off.
01:22:28 And the result was catastrophe in the countryside
01:22:32 and all these people dying.
01:22:33 And then compounding the problem was the political elite,
01:22:38 which then if peasants would object
01:22:41 or if certain people would say,
01:22:43 no, they’d beat the hell out of them.
01:22:45 They would beat people who didn’t do
01:22:47 what they wanted them to do.
01:22:49 So it was really, really a horrific set of events
01:22:54 on the Chinese countryside.
01:22:59 I mean, and people wrote about it.
01:23:02 I mean, we learned about it.
01:23:04 There were people who were keeping track
01:23:05 of what was going on and eventually wrote books about it.
01:23:09 So we have, I mean, we have pretty good documentation,
01:23:13 not so much on the numbers.
01:23:14 Numbers are always a difficult problem.
01:23:17 I’m facing this problem, by the way,
01:23:19 this is a little bit separate with the Holodomor,
01:23:23 where Ukrainians are now claiming
01:23:25 11.5 million people died in Holodomor.
01:23:27 And most people assume it’s somewhere
01:23:29 in the neighborhood of four million, 4.5 million maybe.
01:23:33 So you have wildly different numbers that come out.
01:23:36 Then we have different kinds of numbers,
01:23:37 as you mentioned too, with the Great Leap Forward.
01:23:41 So it was a huge catastrophe for China
01:23:45 and now only backed off when he had to.
01:23:47 And then revived a little bit
01:23:50 with the Red Guards Movement later on
01:23:53 when he was upset that the bureaucracy
01:23:57 was resisting him a little bit
01:24:00 when it came to the Great Leap.
01:24:01 But he had to back off.
01:24:03 It was such a terrible catastrophe.
01:24:05 So one of the things about numbers
01:24:07 is that you usually talk about deaths,
01:24:10 but with the famine, with starvation,
01:24:14 the thing I often think about
01:24:16 that’s impossible to put into numbers
01:24:18 is the number of people
01:24:21 and the degree to which they were suffering.
01:24:24 You know, the number of days spent in suffering.
01:24:28 Oh yeah, oh yeah.
01:24:30 And so, I mean, death is,
01:24:36 death is just one of the consequences of suffering.
01:24:39 To me, it feels like one, two, three years or months
01:24:43 and then years of not having anything to eat is worse.
01:24:51 And those aren’t put into numbers often.
01:24:55 That’s right.
01:24:56 And the effect on people long term,
01:24:57 you know, in terms of their mental health,
01:24:59 in terms of their physical health,
01:25:02 their ability to work, all those kinds of things.
01:25:05 I mean, Ukrainians are working on,
01:25:07 there are people working on this subject now.
01:25:09 You know, the longterm effect of the hunger famine on them.
01:25:13 And I’m sure there’s a similar kind of longterm effect
01:25:16 on Chinese peasantry of what happened.
01:25:18 You know, I mean, you’re destroying.
01:25:20 Multigenerational.
01:25:21 Yes, multigenerational.
01:25:22 That’s right, that’s right.
01:25:23 And you know, it’s a really, you’re absolutely right.
01:25:26 This is a terrible, terrible way to die.
01:25:29 And it lasts a long time.
01:25:31 And sometimes you don’t die, you survive,
01:25:34 but you know, in the kind of shape
01:25:37 where you can’t do anything.
01:25:39 I mean, you can’t function.
01:25:42 Now your brain’s been injured, you know.
01:25:44 I know it’s a really, these famines are really horrible.
01:25:49 You’re right.
01:25:50 So when you talk about genocide,
01:25:50 it’s often talking about murder.
01:25:52 Where do you place North Korea in this discussion?
01:25:55 We kind of mentioned it.
01:25:56 So in the, what is it?
01:25:58 The Arduous March of the 1990s,
01:26:03 where it was mass starvation.
01:26:08 Many people describe mass starvation
01:26:10 going on now in North Korea.
01:26:13 When you think about genocide,
01:26:14 when you think about atrocities going on in the world today,
01:26:18 where do you place North Korea?
01:26:20 So take a step back.
01:26:22 When the, there were all these courts
01:26:24 that were set up for Bosnia and for Rwanda
01:26:28 and for other genocides in the 1990s.
01:26:34 And then the decision was made
01:26:37 by the international community, UN basically,
01:26:39 to set up the International Criminal Court,
01:26:43 which would then try genocide in the more modern period
01:26:47 and the more contemporary period.
01:26:49 And the ICC lists three crimes basically.
01:26:54 The genocide crimes against humanity and war crimes.
01:27:03 And subsumed to crimes against humanity
01:27:07 are a lot of the kinds of things
01:27:08 you’re talking about with North Korea.
01:27:10 I mean, it’s torture, it’s artificial,
01:27:13 sometimes artificial famine or famine,
01:27:16 that is not necessary, right?
01:27:21 Not necessary to have it.
01:27:22 And there are other kinds of, you know,
01:27:26 mass rape and stuff like that.
01:27:28 There are other kinds of things that fit
01:27:31 into the crimes against humanity.
01:27:33 And that’s sort of where I think about North Korea
01:27:36 as committing crimes against humanity, not genocide.
01:27:39 And again, remember, genocide is meant to be,
01:27:44 I mean, some people, there’s a disagreement
01:27:46 among scholars and jurists about this.
01:27:48 Some people think of genocide as the crime of crimes,
01:27:51 the worst of the three that I just mentioned.
01:27:55 But some think of them as co equal.
01:27:56 And the ICC, the International Criminal Court,
01:28:00 is dealing with them more or less as co equal,
01:28:03 even though we tend to think of genocide as the worst.
01:28:06 So I mean, what I’m trying to say is that,
01:28:08 you know, I don’t wanna split hairs.
01:28:11 I think it’s sort of morally and ethically unseemly,
01:28:15 you know, the split hairs about what is genocide,
01:28:18 what is the crime against humanity.
01:28:20 You know, this is for lawyers, not for historians.
01:28:22 But terminology wise.
01:28:24 Yeah, yeah, you know, you don’t wanna get into that.
01:28:28 Because it, I mean, it happened with Darfur a little bit,
01:28:32 where the Bush administration had declared
01:28:35 that Darfur was a genocide.
01:28:37 And the UN said, no, no, it wasn’t genocide,
01:28:41 it was a crime against humanity.
01:28:43 And then, you know, that confused things
01:28:45 versus clarified them.
01:28:47 I mean, we damn well knew what was happening.
01:28:49 People were being killed and being attacked.
01:28:52 And so, you know, on the one hand,
01:28:55 I think the whole concept and the way of thinking
01:28:59 about history using genocide as an important part
01:29:04 of human history is crucial.
01:29:08 On the other hand, I don’t like to, you know,
01:29:12 get involved in the hair splitting,
01:29:13 what’s genocide and what’s not.
01:29:15 So that, you know, North Korea, I tend to think of,
01:29:18 like I said, as committing crimes against humanity
01:29:22 and, you know, forcibly incarcerating people,
01:29:25 torturing them, that kind of thing.
01:29:28 You know, routinely incarcerating, depriving them
01:29:30 of certain kinds of human rights
01:29:33 can be considered a crime against humanity.
01:29:35 But I don’t think of it in the same way
01:29:37 I think about genocide, which is an attack
01:29:39 on a group of people.
01:29:40 Let me just leave it at that.
01:29:42 What in this, if we think about, if it’s okay,
01:29:45 can we loosely use the term genocide here,
01:29:48 just let’s not play games with terminology.
01:29:50 Just bad crimes against humanity.
01:29:56 Of particular interest are the ones
01:29:58 that are going on today still,
01:30:01 because it raises the question to us,
01:30:04 what do people outside of this,
01:30:07 what role do they have to play?
01:30:09 So what role does the United States,
01:30:12 or what role do I, as a human being who has food today,
01:30:18 who has shelter, who has a comfortable life,
01:30:21 what role do I have when I think about North Korea,
01:30:26 when I think about Syria,
01:30:27 when I think about maybe the Uighur population in China?
01:30:33 Well, I mean, the role is the same role I have,
01:30:36 which is to teach and to learn
01:30:38 and to get the message out that this is happening,
01:30:43 because the more people who understand it,
01:30:45 the more likely it is that the United States government
01:30:48 will try to do something about it,
01:30:53 within the context of who we are and where we live, right?
01:30:56 And so, I write books, you do shows,
01:31:02 or maybe you write books too, I don’t know.
01:31:04 I do not write books, but I tweet.
01:31:08 Okay, that’s good too.
01:31:09 Ineloquently, but that’s not the,
01:31:11 I guess that’s not the, yes, so certainly this is true.
01:31:14 And in terms of a voice, in terms of words,
01:31:17 in terms of books, you are, I would say,
01:31:19 a rare example of somebody
01:31:21 that has powerful reach with words.
01:31:25 But I was also referring to actions.
01:31:28 In the United States government, what are the options here?
01:31:31 So, war has costs,
01:31:35 and war seems to be, as you have described,
01:31:39 sort of potentially increase the atrocity, not decrease it.
01:31:44 If there’s anything that challenges my hope for the future
01:31:48 is the fact that sometimes we’re not powerless to help,
01:31:52 but very close to powerless to help,
01:31:55 because trying to help can often lead to,
01:32:00 in the near term, more negative effects than positive effects.
01:32:04 That’s exactly right.
01:32:05 I mean, the unintended consequences of what we do
01:32:10 can frequently be as bad, if not worse,
01:32:13 than trying to relieve the difficulties
01:32:17 that people are having.
01:32:17 So I think you’re caught a little bit,
01:32:21 but it’s also true, I think, that we can be more forceful.
01:32:25 I think we can be more forceful without necessarily war.
01:32:29 There is this idea of the so called responsibility
01:32:33 to protect, and this was an idea that came up
01:32:37 after Kosovo, which was what, 1999,
01:32:42 and when the Serbs looked like they were going to engage
01:32:48 in a genocidal program in Kosovo,
01:32:50 and it was basically a program of ethnic cleansing,
01:32:53 but it could have gone bad and gotten worse,
01:32:56 not just driving people out, but beginning to kill them.
01:32:59 And the United States and Britain and others intervened.
01:33:05 And Russians were there too, as you probably recall.
01:33:08 And I think correctly, people have analyzed this
01:33:13 as a case in which genocide was prevented or stopped.
01:33:19 In other words, the Serbs were stopped in their tracks.
01:33:22 I mean, some bad things did happen.
01:33:23 We bombed Belgrade and the Chinese embassy
01:33:25 and things like that.
01:33:27 But it was stopped, and following upon that,
01:33:32 then there was a kind of international consensus
01:33:35 that we needed to do something.
01:33:36 I mean, because of Rwanda, Bosnia,
01:33:39 and the positive example of Kosovo, right?
01:33:42 That genocide did not happen in Kosovo.
01:33:46 I think that argument has been substantiated.
01:33:50 Anyway, and this notion of the,
01:33:55 or this doctrine or whatever,
01:33:58 of the responsibility to protect them
01:34:00 was adopted by the UN in 2005, unanimously.
01:34:06 And what it says is there’s a hierarchy of measures
01:34:11 that should be, well, let me take a step back.
01:34:14 It starts with the principle that sovereignty of a country
01:34:21 is not, you don’t earn it just by being there
01:34:24 and being your own country.
01:34:27 You have to earn it by protecting your people.
01:34:30 So every, this was all agreed
01:34:32 with all the nations of the UN agreed,
01:34:35 Chinese and Russians too,
01:34:37 that sovereignty is there because you protect your people
01:34:43 against various depredations, right?
01:34:46 Including genocide, crimes against humanity,
01:34:49 forced imprisonment, torture, and that sort of thing.
01:34:52 If you violate that justification for your sovereignty,
01:34:59 that you’re protecting your people,
01:35:01 that you’re not protecting them,
01:35:03 the international community has the obligation
01:35:06 to do something about it, all right?
01:35:09 Now, then they have a kind of hierarchy
01:35:11 of things you can do, you know, starting with,
01:35:15 I mean, I’m not quoting exactly,
01:35:17 but, you know, starting with kind of push and pull,
01:35:19 you know, trying to convince people,
01:35:20 don’t do that, you know, to Myanmar,
01:35:23 don’t do that to the Rohingya people, right?
01:35:27 Then it goes down the list, you know,
01:35:29 and you get to sanctions or threatening sanctions
01:35:32 and then sanctions, you know, like we have against Russia,
01:35:36 but you go down the list, right?
01:35:38 You go down the list and eventually
01:35:42 you get to military intervention at the bottom,
01:35:44 which they say is the last thing, you know,
01:35:46 and you really don’t wanna do that.
01:35:50 And not only do you not wanna do it,
01:35:52 but it, just as you said, just as you pointed out,
01:35:54 it can have unintended consequences, right?
01:35:58 And we’ll do everything we can short,
01:36:01 you know, of military intervention,
01:36:03 but, you know, if necessary,
01:36:06 that can be undertaken as well.
01:36:09 And so the responsibility to predict, I think,
01:36:11 is, you know, it was not implementable.
01:36:16 Oh, one of the things it says in this last category, right?
01:36:20 The military intervention is that the intervention
01:36:23 cannot create more damage than it relieves, right?
01:36:29 And so for Syria, we came to the conclusion,
01:36:34 you know, that, I mean, the international community
01:36:36 in some ways said this in so many words,
01:36:39 even though the Russians were there, obviously,
01:36:41 we ended up being there and that sort of thing,
01:36:43 but the international community basically said,
01:36:45 you know, there’s no way you can intervene in Syria.
01:36:48 You know, there’s just no way without causing more damage,
01:36:52 you know, than you would relieve.
01:36:54 So, you know, in some senses,
01:36:56 that’s what the international community is saying
01:36:58 about, you know, Xinjiang and the Uighurs too.
01:37:02 You know, I mean, you can’t even imagine
01:37:05 what hell would break loose
01:37:07 if there was some kind of military trouble, you know,
01:37:10 to threaten the Chinese with.
01:37:12 But you can go down that list
01:37:16 with the, you know, the military leadership of Myanmar,
01:37:19 and you can go down that list
01:37:21 with the Chinese Communist Party,
01:37:23 and you can go down the list, you know,
01:37:25 with others who are threatening, you know, with Ethiopia
01:37:31 and what it’s doing in Tigray.
01:37:33 And, you know, you can go down that list and start pushing.
01:37:37 I think what happened,
01:37:39 you know, there was more of a willingness in the 90s,
01:37:44 and in, you know, right at the turn of the century,
01:37:48 you know, to do these kinds of things.
01:37:50 And then, you know, when Trump got elected and, you know,
01:37:53 he basically said, you know, America first
01:37:55 and out of the world,
01:37:56 we’re not gonna do any of this kind of stuff.
01:37:58 And now Biden has the problem
01:38:00 of trying to rebuild consensus
01:38:02 on how you deal with these kinds of things.
01:38:06 I think it’s not impossible.
01:38:08 I mean, here I tend to be maybe more of an optimist than you.
01:38:12 You know, I think it’s not impossible
01:38:14 that the international community can, you know,
01:38:16 muster some internal fortitude
01:38:20 and push harder, short of war, you know,
01:38:25 to get the Chinese and to get the, again, Myanmar,
01:38:30 and to get others to kind of back off
01:38:34 of violations of people’s rights
01:38:36 the way they are routinely doing it.
01:38:38 So that’s in the space of geopolitics.
01:38:39 That’s the space of politicians and UN and so on.
01:38:42 The interesting thing about China,
01:38:44 and this is a difficult topic,
01:38:47 but there’s so many financial interests
01:38:53 that not many voices with power and with money
01:38:59 speak up, speak out against China
01:39:03 because it’s a very interesting effect
01:39:06 because it costs a lot for an individual to speak up
01:39:12 because you’re going to suffer.
01:39:13 I mean, China just cuts off the market.
01:39:16 Like if you have a product, if you have a company
01:39:19 and you say something negative, China just says, okay,
01:39:22 well then they knock you out of the market.
01:39:25 And so any person that speaks up,
01:39:27 they get shut down immediately financially.
01:39:29 It’s a huge cost, sometimes millions or billions of dollars.
01:39:33 And so what happens is everybody of consequences,
01:39:36 sort of financially, everybody with a giant platform
01:39:39 is extremely hesitant to speak out.
01:39:41 It’s a very, it’s a different kind of hesitation
01:39:45 that’s financial in nature.
01:39:46 I don’t know if that was always the case.
01:39:48 It seems like in history, people were quiet
01:39:52 because of fear, because of a threat of violence.
01:39:55 Here, there’s almost like a self interested
01:39:59 preservation of financial, of wealth.
01:40:04 And I don’t know what to do that.
01:40:06 I mean, I don’t know if you can say something there,
01:40:09 like the genocide going on
01:40:14 because people are financially self interested.
01:40:18 Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think the analysis is correct.
01:40:21 And it’s not only, but it’s not only corporations,
01:40:26 but it’s the American government
01:40:28 that represents the American people
01:40:30 that also feels compelled not to challenge the Chinese
01:40:37 on human rights issues.
01:40:39 But the interesting thing is it’s not just,
01:40:41 you know, I know a lot of people from China
01:40:44 and first of all, amazing human beings
01:40:47 and a lot of brilliant people in China,
01:40:49 they also don’t want to speak out
01:40:50 and not because they’re sort of quote unquote,
01:40:52 like silenced, but more because they’re going
01:40:56 to also lose financially.
01:40:58 They have a lot of businesses in China.
01:41:00 They, you know, they’re running,
01:41:02 in fact, the Chinese government and the country
01:41:06 has a very interesting structure
01:41:08 because it has a lot of elements that enable capitalism
01:41:11 within a certain framework.
01:41:13 So you have a lot of very successful companies
01:41:16 and they operate successfully.
01:41:18 And then the leaders of those companies,
01:41:19 many of whom have either been on this podcast,
01:41:24 or want to be on this podcast,
01:41:25 they really don’t want to say anything negative
01:41:28 about the government.
01:41:29 And the nature of the fear I sense
01:41:32 is not the kind of fear you would have in Nazi Germany.
01:41:37 It’s a very kind of, it’s a mellow,
01:41:40 like why would I speak out when it has a negative effect
01:41:44 on my company, on my family, in terms of finance,
01:41:47 strictly financially.
01:41:50 And that’s difficult.
01:41:53 That’s a different problem to solve.
01:41:56 That feels solvable.
01:41:57 It feels like it’s a money problem.
01:42:00 If you can control the flow of money
01:42:03 where the government has less power
01:42:05 to control the flow of money,
01:42:06 it feels like that’s solvable.
01:42:08 And that’s where capitalism is good.
01:42:10 That’s where a free market is good.
01:42:11 So it’s like, that’s where a lot of people
01:42:13 in the cryptocurrency space,
01:42:14 I don’t know if you follow them,
01:42:15 they kind of say, okay, take the monetary system,
01:42:19 the power to control money away from governments.
01:42:22 Make it a distributed,
01:42:23 like allow technology to help you with that.
01:42:26 That’s a hopeful message there.
01:42:28 In fact, a lot of people argue
01:42:29 that kind of Bitcoin and these cryptocurrencies
01:42:31 can help deal with some of these authoritarian regimes
01:42:38 that lead to violations of basic human rights.
01:42:41 If you can control, if you can give the power
01:42:44 to control the money to the people,
01:42:46 you can take that away from governments.
01:42:47 That’s another source of hope
01:42:49 where technology might be able to do something good.
01:42:52 That’s something different about the 21st century
01:42:54 than the 20th is there’s technology
01:42:57 in the hands of billions of people.
01:42:59 I mean, I have to say,
01:43:01 I think you’re a naive when it comes to technology.
01:43:04 I mean, I don’t, I’m not someone who understands technology.
01:43:07 So it’s wrong of me to argue with you
01:43:11 because I don’t really spend much time with it.
01:43:13 I don’t really like it very much.
01:43:15 And I’m not, I’m neither a fan nor a connoisseur.
01:43:21 So I just don’t really know.
01:43:23 But what human history has shown basically,
01:43:27 and that’s a big statement.
01:43:28 I don’t wanna pretend I can tell you
01:43:31 what human history has shown.
01:43:32 But technology, atom bomb,
01:43:37 I mean, that’s a perfect example of technology.
01:43:39 What happens when you discover new things?
01:43:42 It’s a perfect example.
01:43:43 What’s going on with Facebook now?
01:43:45 It’s an absolutely perfect example.
01:43:47 And I once went to a lecture by Eric Schmidt
01:43:52 about the future and about all the things
01:43:54 that were gonna happen and all these wonderful things
01:43:57 like you wouldn’t have to translate yourself anything,
01:43:59 you wouldn’t have to read a book,
01:44:02 you wouldn’t have to drive a car,
01:44:04 you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to do that.
01:44:05 What kind of life is that?
01:44:07 So my view of technology is it’s subsumed
01:44:13 to the political, social and moral needs of our day
01:44:18 and should be subsumed to that day.
01:44:20 It’s not gonna solve anything by itself.
01:44:22 It’s gonna be you and me that solve things.
01:44:25 If they’re solved, there are political system
01:44:27 that solve things.
01:44:28 Technology is neutral on one level.
01:44:31 It is simply a human, I mean, they’re talking now
01:44:35 about how artificial intelligence is gonna do this
01:44:38 and is gonna do that.
01:44:39 I’m not so sure there’s anything necessarily positive
01:44:43 or negative about it except it does obviously
01:44:46 make work easier and things like that.
01:44:48 I mean, I like email and I like word processing
01:44:53 and all that stuff is great,
01:44:56 but actually solving human relations in and of itself
01:45:04 or international relations or conflict among human beings.
01:45:11 I mean, I see technology as causing as many problems
01:45:14 as it solves and maybe even more.
01:45:18 You know, the kind.
01:45:19 Maybe.
01:45:20 Maybe even more. Maybe.
01:45:20 Yeah.
01:45:21 The question is, so like you said, technology is neutral.
01:45:25 I agree with this.
01:45:26 Technology is a toolkit, is a tool set that enables humans
01:45:32 to have wider reach and more power, the printing press.
01:45:36 The rare reason I can read your books is I would argue,
01:45:41 so first of all, the printing press and then the internet.
01:45:45 Wikipedia, I think, has immeasurable effect on humanity.
01:45:52 Technology is a double edged sword.
01:45:53 It allows bad people to do bad things
01:45:57 and good people to do good things.
01:45:58 It ultimately boils down to the people
01:46:02 and whether you believe the capacity for good
01:46:05 outweighs the capacity of bad.
01:46:07 And so you said that I’m naive.
01:46:09 It is true.
01:46:10 I’m naively optimistic.
01:46:12 I would say you’re naively cynical about technology.
01:46:16 Here we have one overdressed naive optimist
01:46:20 and one brilliant, but nevertheless,
01:46:23 technologically naive cynic and we don’t know.
01:46:27 We don’t know whether the capacity for good
01:46:30 or the capacity for evil wins out in the end.
01:46:34 And like we’ve been talking about,
01:46:37 the trajectory of human history seems to pivot
01:46:39 in a lot of random seeming moments.
01:46:43 So we don’t know.
01:46:45 But as a builder of technology, I remain optimistic.
01:46:51 And I should say kind of when you are optimistic,
01:46:56 it is often easy to sound naive.
01:47:02 And I’m not sure what to make of that small effect.
01:47:06 Not to linger on specific words,
01:47:07 but I’ve noticed that people who kind of are cynical
01:47:13 about the world somehow sound more intelligent.
01:47:18 No, no.
01:47:19 The issue is how can you be realistic about the world?
01:47:23 It’s not optimistic or pessimistic.
01:47:25 It’s not cynical.
01:47:27 The question is how can you be a realist, right?
01:47:29 Yes, that’s a good question.
01:47:31 Realism depends on a combination of knowledge and wisdom
01:47:39 and good instincts and that sort of thing.
01:47:42 And that’s what we strive for, is a kind of realism.
01:47:47 We both strive for that kind of realism.
01:47:49 But I mean, here’s an example I would give you.
01:47:53 What about, again, we’ve got this environmental issue,
01:47:56 and technology has created it.
01:47:59 It’s created it.
01:48:01 I mean, the growth of technology,
01:48:04 I mean, we all like to be heated well in our homes,
01:48:06 and we wanna have cars that run quickly and fast on gas.
01:48:11 I mean, we’re all consumers and we all profit from this.
01:48:16 I don’t, not everybody profits from it,
01:48:20 but we wanna be comfortable.
01:48:23 And technology has provided us with a comfortable life.
01:48:25 And it’s also provided us with this incredible danger,
01:48:29 which it’s not solving, at least not now.
01:48:32 And it may solve, but it may, it’s only,
01:48:34 my view is, you know what’s gonna happen?
01:48:37 A horrible catastrophe.
01:48:39 It’s the only way, it’s the only way
01:48:42 we will direct ourselves
01:48:44 to actually trying to do something about it.
01:48:48 We don’t have the wisdom and the realism
01:48:53 and the sense of purpose, you know, what’s her name?
01:48:59 Greta goes blah, blah, blah, something like that
01:49:01 in her last talk about the environmental summit
01:49:08 in Glasgow or whatever it was.
01:49:11 And, you know, we just don’t have it
01:49:15 unless we’re hit upside the head really, really hard.
01:49:19 And then maybe, you know, the business with nuclear weapons,
01:49:25 you know, I think somehow we got hit upside the head
01:49:27 and we realized, oh man, you know,
01:49:30 this could really do it to the whole world.
01:49:32 And so we started, you know, serious arms control stuff.
01:49:36 And, you know, but up to that point, you know,
01:49:41 I mean, there was just something about, you know,
01:49:43 Khrushchev’s big bomb, his big hydrogen bomb,
01:49:46 which he exploded in the times,
01:49:48 I think it was the anniversary or something like that.
01:49:50 You know, I mean, just think what we could have done
01:49:52 to each other.
01:49:53 Well, that’s the double edged sword of technology.
01:49:55 Yeah, I agree, it’s a double edged sword.
01:49:57 There’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of people
01:49:59 that argue that nuclear weapons is the reason
01:50:01 we haven’t had a World War III.
01:50:03 So nuclear weapons, the mutually assured destruction
01:50:06 leads to a kind of like,
01:50:08 we’ve reached a certain level of destructiveness
01:50:11 with our weapons where we were able to catch ourselves,
01:50:15 not to create, like you said, hit really hard.
01:50:20 This is the interesting question about kind of hard,
01:50:25 hard and really hard upside the head.
01:50:28 With the environment, I would argue,
01:50:31 see, we can’t know the future,
01:50:33 but I would argue as the pressure builds,
01:50:36 there’s already, because of this created urgency,
01:50:41 the amount of innovation that I’ve seen
01:50:44 that sometimes is unrelated to the environment,
01:50:47 but kind of sparked by this urgency,
01:50:49 it’s been humongous, including the work of Elon Musk,
01:50:52 including the work of just,
01:50:54 you could argue that the SpaceX
01:51:00 and the new exploration of space is kind of sparked
01:51:03 by this environmental like urgency.
01:51:06 I mean, connected to Tesla and everything they’re doing
01:51:07 with electric vehicles and so on.
01:51:09 There’s a huge amount of innovation
01:51:11 in the space that’s happening.
01:51:12 I could see the effect of climate change
01:51:16 resulting in more positive innovation
01:51:19 that improves the quality of life across the world
01:51:22 than the actual catastrophic events that we’re describing,
01:51:26 which we cannot even currently predict.
01:51:28 It’s not like there’s going to be,
01:51:29 there’s going to be more extreme weather events.
01:51:31 What does that even mean?
01:51:32 There’s going to be a gradual increase
01:51:35 of the level of water.
01:51:38 What does that even mean in terms of catastrophic events?
01:51:40 It’s going to be pretty gradual.
01:51:42 There’s going to be migration.
01:51:43 We can’t predict what that means.
01:51:45 And in response to that,
01:51:47 there’s going to be a huge amount of innovators born today
01:51:52 that have dreams and that will build devices and inventions
01:51:56 and from space to vehicles to in the software world
01:52:01 that enable education across the world,
01:52:03 all those kinds of things that will on mass, on average,
01:52:07 increase the quality of life on average across the world.
01:52:11 So it’s not at all obvious that these,
01:52:14 the things that the technologies
01:52:16 that are creating climate change, global warming,
01:52:19 are going to have a negative, net negative effect.
01:52:23 We don’t know this.
01:52:24 And I’m kind of inspired by the dreamers,
01:52:28 the engineers, the innovators and the entrepreneurs
01:52:32 that build, that wake up in the morning,
01:52:36 see problems in the world and dream
01:52:38 that they’re going to be the ones who solve those problems.
01:52:40 That’s the human spirit.
01:52:42 And that I’m not exactly,
01:52:44 it is true that we need those deadlines.
01:52:46 We need to be freaking out about stuff.
01:52:48 And the reason we need to study history
01:52:52 and the worst of human history is then we can say,
01:52:55 oh shit, this too can happen.
01:52:57 It’s a slap in the face.
01:52:59 It’s a wake up call that if you’re,
01:53:01 if you get complacent, if you get lazy,
01:53:03 this is going to happen.
01:53:04 And that, listen, there’s a lot of really intelligent people,
01:53:08 ambitious people, dreamers.
01:53:10 Skilled dreamers that build solutions
01:53:14 that make sure this stuff doesn’t happen anymore.
01:53:17 So there’s, I think there’s reason to be optimistic
01:53:19 about technology, not in a naive way.
01:53:21 There’s an argument to be made in a realistic way
01:53:25 that like with technology, we can build a better future.
01:53:29 And then Facebook is a lesson in the way Facebook
01:53:33 has been done is a lesson how not to do it.
01:53:37 And that lesson serves as a guide
01:53:42 of how to do it better, how to do it right,
01:53:44 how to do it in a positive way.
01:53:46 And the same, every single sort of failed technology
01:53:49 contains within it the lessons of how to do it better.
01:53:53 And I mean, without that,
01:53:56 what’s the source of hope for human civilization?
01:54:00 You know, that, I mean, by way of question,
01:54:05 you have truly studied some of the darkest moments
01:54:09 in human history.
01:54:11 Put on your optimist hat.
01:54:14 Where?
01:54:15 That one.
01:54:16 Yes.
01:54:16 There are glimmers of it.
01:54:19 Yes, what is your source of hope
01:54:22 for the future of human civilization?
01:54:26 Well, I think it resides in, you know,
01:54:31 some of what you’ve been saying,
01:54:32 which is the, in the persistence of this civilization
01:54:37 over time, despite, you know, the incredible setbacks,
01:54:43 you know, two enormous world wars, you know,
01:54:45 the nuclear standoff, the, you know,
01:54:50 the horrible things we’re experiencing now
01:54:52 with climate change and migration and stuff like that,
01:54:56 that despite these things, you know,
01:54:58 we are persisting and we are continuing.
01:55:02 And like you say, we’re continuing to invent
01:55:04 and we’re continuing to try to solve these problems.
01:55:07 And, you know, we’re continuing to love as well as hate.
01:55:11 And, you know, that, you know, I’m basically,
01:55:17 I mean, I have children and grandchildren
01:55:20 and I think they’re gonna be just fine.
01:55:23 You know, I’m not a doom and gloomer, you know,
01:55:27 I’m not a Cassandra saying the world is coming to an end.
01:55:30 I’m not like that at all, you know,
01:55:33 I think that, you know, things will persist.
01:55:38 Another, by the way, source of tremendous optimism
01:55:41 on my part, the kids I teach, you know,
01:55:45 I teach some unbelievably fantastic young people,
01:55:49 you know, who are sort of like you say,
01:55:51 they’re dreamers and they’re problem solvers
01:55:54 and they’re, I mean, they have enormously humane values
01:56:01 and ways of thinking about the world
01:56:02 and they wanna do good.
01:56:05 You know, if you take the kind of,
01:56:08 I mean, this has probably been true all the way along,
01:56:11 but I mean, the percentage of do gooders,
01:56:14 you know, is really enormously large.
01:56:16 Now, whether they end up working
01:56:18 for some kind of shark law firm or something,
01:56:20 you know, or, you know, that kind of thing,
01:56:24 or whether they end up human rights lawyers
01:56:26 is they all wanna be, right?
01:56:28 You know, is a different kind of question,
01:56:33 but certainly, you know, these young people are talented,
01:56:38 they’re smart, they have wonderful values,
01:56:41 they’re energetic, they work hard, you know,
01:56:44 they’re focused and of course, it’s not just Stanford.
01:56:48 I mean, it’s all over the country,
01:56:50 you know, you have young people
01:56:52 who really wanna contribute and they wanna contribute.
01:56:55 I mean, it’s true some of them end up,
01:56:58 you know, working to get rich.
01:57:02 I mean, that’s inevitable, right?
01:57:03 But the percentages are actually rather small,
01:57:07 at least at this age, you know,
01:57:08 maybe when they get a mortgage and a family
01:57:10 and that sort of thing, you know,
01:57:13 financial wellbeing will be more important to them.
01:57:16 But right now, you know, you catch this young generation
01:57:19 and they’re fantastic, they’re fantastic.
01:57:22 And they’re not what they’re often portrayed as being,
01:57:26 you know, kind of silly and naive and knee jerk leftists
01:57:30 and that, they’re not at all like that.
01:57:33 You know, they’re really fine young people.
01:57:36 So that’s a source of optimism to me too.
01:57:40 What advice would you give to those young people today,
01:57:43 maybe in high school, in college, at Stanford,
01:57:47 maybe to your grandchildren about how to have a career
01:57:52 they can be proud of, have a life they can be proud of?
01:57:55 Pursue careers that are in the public interest,
01:57:58 you know, in one fashion or another
01:58:00 and not just in their interests.
01:58:03 And that would be, I mean, it’s not bad to pursue a career
01:58:07 in your own interests.
01:58:08 I mean, as long as it’s something that’s useful
01:58:11 and positive for their families or whatever.
01:58:16 But yeah, so I mean, I try to advise kids
01:58:19 to find themselves somehow, you know, find who they wanna be
01:58:24 and what they wanna be and try to pursue it.
01:58:27 And the NGO world is growing, as you know,
01:58:30 and a lot of young people are kind of throwing themselves
01:58:34 into it and, you know, human rights watch
01:58:39 and that kind of stuff.
01:58:41 And, you know, they wanna do that kind of work
01:58:43 and it’s very admirable.
01:58:46 I tend to think that even if you’re not working
01:58:50 in human rights, there’s a certain way in which
01:58:53 if you live with integrity, I believe that all of us
01:59:01 or many of us have a bunch of moments in our lives
01:59:05 when we’re posed with a decision.
01:59:07 It’s a quiet one.
01:59:09 Maybe it’ll never be written about or talked about.
01:59:12 But you get to choose whether you, there’s a choice
01:59:17 that is difficult to make, it may require sacrifice,
01:59:22 but it’s the choice that the best version
01:59:27 of that person would make.
01:59:29 That’s the best way I can sort of say
01:59:31 how to act with integrity.
01:59:32 It’s the very thing that would resist the early days
01:59:35 in Nazi Germany.
01:59:36 It sounds dramatic to say, but those little actions.
01:59:40 And I feel like the best you can do
01:59:43 to avoid genocide on scale is for all of us
01:59:47 to live in that way, within those moments,
01:59:51 unrelated potentially to human rights, to anything else,
01:59:55 is to take those actions.
01:59:57 Like I believe that all of us know the right thing to do.
02:00:00 I know that’s right.
02:00:01 I think that’s right.
02:00:02 You put it very well.
02:00:04 I couldn’t have done it better myself.
02:00:06 No, no, I agree.
02:00:07 I agree completely that there are, to live with truth,
02:00:13 which is what Václav Havel used to say,
02:00:17 this famous Czech dissident talked about living in truth,
02:00:21 but also to live with integrity.
02:00:24 And that’s really super important.
02:00:27 Well, let me ask you about love.
02:00:29 What role does love play in this whole thing
02:00:31 in the human condition?
02:00:33 In all of the study of genocide,
02:00:35 it does seem that hardship in moments
02:00:39 brings out the best in human nature
02:00:41 and the best in human nature is expressed through love.
02:00:44 Well, as I already mentioned to you,
02:00:46 I think hardship is not a good thing for,
02:00:52 you know, it’s not the best thing for love.
02:00:53 I mean, it’s better to not have to suffer
02:00:57 and not have to, yes, I think it is.
02:01:00 I think it’s, you know, as I mentioned to you,
02:01:05 you know, studying concentration camps,
02:01:08 you know, this is not a place for love.
02:01:10 It happens, it happens,
02:01:13 but it’s not really a place for love.
02:01:15 It’s a place for rape.
02:01:16 It’s a place for torture.
02:01:19 It’s a place for killing.
02:01:20 And it’s a place for inhuman action one to another,
02:01:25 you know, and also, as I said,
02:01:27 among those who are suffering,
02:01:30 not just between those who are,
02:01:33 and then there are whole gradations,
02:01:34 you know, the same thing in the gulag.
02:01:36 You know, there are gradations all the way
02:01:38 from the criminal prisoners
02:01:41 who beat the hell out of the political prisoners,
02:01:42 you know, who then have others below them
02:01:44 who they beat down, you know,
02:01:46 so everybody’s being the hell out of everybody else.
02:01:48 So I would not idealize in any way suffering as,
02:01:53 you know, a source of beauty and love.
02:01:57 I wouldn’t do that at all.
02:01:58 I think it’s a whole lot better
02:02:00 for people to be relatively prosperous.
02:02:03 I’m not saying super prosperous,
02:02:04 but to be able to feed themselves
02:02:06 and to be able to feed their families
02:02:08 and house their families and take care of themselves,
02:02:14 you know, to foster loving relations between people.
02:02:21 And, you know, I think it’s no accident
02:02:24 that, you know, poor families have much worse records
02:02:31 when it comes to crime and things like that, you know,
02:02:34 and also to wife beating and to child abuse
02:02:39 and stuff like that.
02:02:40 I mean, you just, you don’t want to be poor and indigent
02:02:46 and not have a roof over your head, be homeless.
02:02:49 I mean, it doesn’t mean, again, you know,
02:02:51 homeless people are mean people.
02:02:53 That’s not what I’m trying to say.
02:02:54 What I’m trying to say is that, you know,
02:02:56 what we want to try to foster in this country
02:02:59 and around the world, and one of the reasons, you know,
02:03:03 I mean, I’m very critical of the Chinese in a lot of ways,
02:03:07 but I mean, we have to remember they pulled that country
02:03:09 out of horrible poverty, right?
02:03:11 And I mean, there’s still poor people in the countryside.
02:03:14 There’s still problems, you know,
02:03:16 with want and need among the Chinese people.
02:03:21 But, you know, there were millions and millions of Chinese
02:03:24 who were living at the bare minimum of life,
02:03:26 which is no way to live, you know,
02:03:28 and no way, again, to foster love and compassion
02:03:31 and getting along.
02:03:33 So I want to be clear, I don’t speak for history, right?
02:03:37 I’m giving you, there used to be historians,
02:03:41 you know, in the 19th century who really thought
02:03:43 they were speaking for history, you know?
02:03:45 I don’t think that way at all.
02:03:47 I mean, I understand I’m a subjective human being
02:03:49 with my own points of view and my own opinions, but.
02:03:54 I’m trying to remember this in this conversation
02:03:56 that you’re, despite the fact that you’re brilliant
02:03:58 and you’ve written brilliant books,
02:04:00 that you’re just human with an opinion.
02:04:04 That’s it, yeah, no, no, that’s absolutely true.
02:04:07 And I tell my students that too.
02:04:09 I mean, I make sure they understand
02:04:11 this is not history speaking, you know,
02:04:12 this is me and Norman and I’m, you know,
02:04:15 and this is what it’s about.
02:04:18 I mean, I spent a long time studying history
02:04:21 and have enjoyed it enormously.
02:04:24 But, you know, I’m an individual with my points of view.
02:04:29 And one of them is that I’ve developed over time,
02:04:34 is that, you know, human want is a real tragedy for people
02:04:40 and it hurts people and it also causes upheavals
02:04:44 and difficulties and stuff.
02:04:46 So I feel for people, you know, I feel for people in Syria,
02:04:49 I feel for people in, you know, in Ethiopia, in Tigray,
02:04:54 you know, when they don’t have enough to eat.
02:04:56 And, you know, what that does, I mean,
02:04:58 it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, right?
02:05:00 And it doesn’t mean they don’t love their kids.
02:05:03 But it does mean that it’s harder, you know, to do that.
02:05:06 And to, and…
02:05:08 I’m not so sure, it’s obvious to me that it’s harder.
02:05:11 It’s, there’s suffering, there is suffering.
02:05:13 But the numbers, we’ve been talking about deaths,
02:05:16 we’ve been talking about suffering,
02:05:17 but the numbers we’re not quantifying.
02:05:19 The history that you haven’t perhaps been looking at
02:05:22 is all the times that people have fallen in love,
02:05:24 deeply with friends, with romantic love,
02:05:27 the positive emotion that people have felt.
02:05:31 And I’m not so sure that amidst the suffering,
02:05:34 those moments of beauty and love can be discovered.
02:05:36 And if we look at the numbers,
02:05:38 I’m not so sure the story is obvious.
02:05:41 That, you know, I mean, again,
02:05:43 I suppose you may disagree with Viktor Frankl.
02:05:46 I may too, maybe depending on the day.
02:05:49 I mean, he says that if there’s meaning to this life at all,
02:05:52 there’s meaning to the suffering too,
02:05:53 because suffering is part of life.
02:05:56 There’s something about accepting the ups and downs,
02:06:01 even when the downs go very low.
02:06:03 And within all of it, finding a source of meaning.
02:06:07 I mean, he’s arguing from the perspective of psychology,
02:06:09 but just this life is an incredible gift,
02:06:13 almost no matter what.
02:06:15 And I’m not, it’s easy to look at suffering
02:06:20 and think if we just escape the suffering,
02:06:22 it will all be better, but we all die.
02:06:28 There’s beauty in the whole thing.
02:06:30 And it is true that it’s just,
02:06:34 from all the stories I’ve read,
02:06:35 especially in famine and starvation, it’s just horrible.
02:06:39 It is horrible suffering.
02:06:41 But I also just want to say that there’s love amidst it,
02:06:45 and we can’t forget that.
02:06:47 No, no, I don’t forget it, I don’t forget it.
02:06:50 And I think it’s from the stories.
02:06:52 Now, I don’t want to make that compromise or that trade,
02:06:56 but the intensity of friendship in war,
02:06:59 the intensity of love in war is very high.
02:07:04 So I’m not sure what to make of these calculations,
02:07:07 but if you look at the stories,
02:07:08 some of the people I’m closest with,
02:07:10 and I’ve never experienced anything
02:07:12 even close to any of this,
02:07:14 but some of the people I’m closest with
02:07:15 is people I’ve gone through difficult times with.
02:07:18 There’s something about that.
02:07:20 They’re a society or a group where things are easy.
02:07:24 The intensity of the connection between human beings
02:07:27 is not as strong.
02:07:29 I don’t know what to do with that calculus
02:07:31 because I too agree with you.
02:07:32 I want to have as little suffering in the world as possible,
02:07:37 but we have to remember about the love
02:07:39 and the depth of human connection
02:07:40 and find the right balance there.
02:07:44 No, there’s something to what you’re saying.
02:07:46 There’s clearly something to what you’re saying.
02:07:48 I was just thinking about the Soviet Union
02:07:50 when I lived there and people on the streets
02:07:53 were so mean to one another and they never smiled.
02:07:56 You grew up there?
02:07:57 No, but you were, you’re too young to.
02:07:58 No, no, I remember well.
02:08:00 I came here when I was 13, yeah.
02:08:01 Okay, so anyway, I remember living there
02:08:04 and just how hard people were on each other on the streets.
02:08:07 And when you got inside people’s apartments,
02:08:09 when they started to trust you,
02:08:11 the friendships were so intense and so wonderful.
02:08:15 So in that sense, I mean, they did live a hard life,
02:08:19 but there wasn’t a food on the table
02:08:21 and there was a roof over their heads.
02:08:23 There’s a certain line.
02:08:24 There’s a certain, there are lines.
02:08:25 I don’t think there’s one line,
02:08:27 but it’s kind of a shading.
02:08:29 And the other story I was thinking of as you were talking
02:08:32 was not a story, it’s a history,
02:08:36 a book by a friend of mine
02:08:38 who wrote about love in the camps,
02:08:43 in the refugee camps for Jews in Germany after the war.
02:08:48 So these were Jews who had come mostly from Poland
02:08:51 and some survived the camps,
02:08:54 came from awful circumstances.
02:08:56 And then they were put in these camps,
02:08:58 which were not joyful places.
02:09:00 I mean, they were guarded sometimes by Germans even,
02:09:03 but they’re basically under the British control
02:09:06 and they were trying to get to Israel,
02:09:08 trying to get to Palestine right after the war.
02:09:11 And how many pairs there were, how many people coupled up.
02:09:16 But remember, this is after being in the concentration camp.
02:09:18 It’s not being in the concentration camp.
02:09:20 And it’s also being free to, more or less free,
02:09:26 to express their emotions and to be human beings
02:09:30 after this horrible thing which they suffered.
02:09:34 So I wonder whether there’s, as you say,
02:09:36 some kind of calculus there where the level of suffering
02:09:41 is such that it’s just too much for humans to bear.
02:09:47 And which I would suggest,
02:09:51 I mean, I haven’t studied this myself.
02:09:52 I’m just giving you my point of view,
02:09:54 my off the cuff remarks here.
02:09:57 But it was very inspiring to read about these couples
02:10:00 who had met right in these camps
02:10:01 and started to couple up and get married.
02:10:06 And tried to find their way to Palestine,
02:10:09 which was a difficult thing to do then.
02:10:11 When did you live in Russia and the Soviet Union?
02:10:14 What’s your memory of the time?
02:10:16 Well, so a number of different times.
02:10:18 So I went there, I first went there in 69, 70.
02:10:22 Wow. A long time ago.
02:10:23 And then I lived in Leningrad mostly,
02:10:28 but also in Moscow in 1975.
02:10:31 So it was detente time.
02:10:33 But it was also a time of political uncertainty
02:10:39 and also hardship for Russians themselves,
02:10:44 standing in long lines.
02:10:46 I mean, you must remember this for food
02:10:47 and for getting anything was almost impossible.
02:10:51 It was a time when Jews were trying to get out.
02:10:56 In fact, I just talked to a friend of mine from those days
02:10:59 who I helped get out and get to Boston
02:11:01 and the lovely people who had managed to have a good life
02:11:06 in the United States after they left.
02:11:08 But it wasn’t an easy time.
02:11:10 It wasn’t an easy time at all.
02:11:11 I remember people set fire to their doors
02:11:13 and their daughter was persecuted in school
02:11:18 once they declared that they wanted to immigrate
02:11:21 and that sort of thing.
02:11:22 So it was a very, it was a lot of antisemitism.
02:11:27 So it was a tough time.
02:11:28 Dissidents hung out with some dissidents
02:11:32 and one guy was actually killed.
02:11:35 We think by the, nobody knows exactly by the KGB,
02:11:38 but his art studio was,
02:11:40 he had a separate studio in Leningrad,
02:11:43 St. Petersburg today, just a small studio
02:11:48 where he did his art and somebody set it on fire.
02:11:51 And we think it was KGB, but you never really know.
02:11:56 And he died in that fire.
02:11:57 So it was not, it was a tough time.
02:12:01 And you knew you were followed,
02:12:04 you knew you were being reported on
02:12:06 as a foreign scholar as I was.
02:12:08 There was a formal exchange between the United States
02:12:12 and the Soviet Union and they let me work in the archives,
02:12:16 but then Ivanov got to work in the physics lab
02:12:22 at Rochester or something like that.
02:12:24 So it was an exchange which sent historians
02:12:29 and literary people and some social scientists to Russia
02:12:33 and they sent all scientists here to grab what they could
02:12:36 from MIT and those places.
02:12:39 How’s your Russian?
02:12:41 Do you have any knowledge of Russian language
02:12:44 that has helped you to understand?
02:12:46 Oh yeah, yeah.
02:12:47 I mean, I can read it fine.
02:12:50 And the speaking comes and goes,
02:12:52 depending on whether I’m there or I’ve been there recently
02:12:55 or if I spend some time there,
02:12:57 because I really need, you know,
02:12:58 I have Russian friends who speak just Russian.
02:13:00 So, you know, when I’m there, I then, you know,
02:13:04 I can communicate pretty well.
02:13:05 Well, I can’t really write it unfortunately.
02:13:08 I mean, I can, but it’s not very good,
02:13:11 but I get along fine in Russia.
02:13:13 What’s your fondest memory of the Soviet Union, of Russia?
02:13:17 It’s friends.
02:13:18 Friends?
02:13:19 It’s friends, it’s friends.
02:13:20 Was it vodka involved or is it just vodka involved?
02:13:25 Little bit, you know, I’m not much of a drinker.
02:13:27 So I would, you know, they’d just make fun of me
02:13:29 and I’d make fun of myself and that was easy enough.
02:13:32 I don’t really like, you know, a heavy drink.
02:13:35 I’ve done a lot of that, not a lot.
02:13:37 I’d done some of that, but I never really enjoyed it
02:13:40 and would get sick and stuff.
02:13:42 But no, it’s friends.
02:13:45 You know, one friend I made in the dormitory, you know,
02:13:49 it was a dormitory for foreigners,
02:13:51 but also Siberians who had come, you know,
02:13:56 to Leningrad to study.
02:13:58 And so I met a couple of guys
02:14:00 and one in particular from Omsk became a wonderful friend.
02:14:04 And we talked and talked and talked outside.
02:14:06 You know, we would go walk outside
02:14:08 because we both knew they were, you know,
02:14:10 people were listening and stuff.
02:14:12 And he would say, well, this is, he was an historian,
02:14:15 you know, and so we would talk history.
02:14:16 And he’d say, well, this was the case, wasn’t it?
02:14:18 I said, no, I’m sorry, Sasha, it wasn’t the case.
02:14:21 It was, you know,
02:14:23 we think Stalin actually had a role in killing Kirov.
02:14:26 I mean, we’re not sure, but he said, no.
02:14:28 I said, yeah.
02:14:29 You know, so, you know, we had these conversations
02:14:32 and he was, what I would,
02:14:36 I don’t know if he would agree with me or not.
02:14:38 I mean, we’re still friends.
02:14:39 So he was a naive, maybe he’ll listen to the blog
02:14:43 or I’ll send it to him or something.
02:14:45 He was a kind of naive Marxist, Leninist.
02:14:48 And he thought I was, you know, I was, you know,
02:14:51 I had this capitalist ideology.
02:14:52 He’d say, what ideology you have?
02:14:54 And I said, I don’t have an ideology.
02:14:56 You know, I try to just put together kind of reason
02:14:59 and facts and accurate stories
02:15:02 and try to tell them in that way.
02:15:03 No, no, no, no, you must, you know, you’re a bourgeois,
02:15:06 you know, this or that.
02:15:07 I said, no, I’m really not.
02:15:09 And so we would have these talks
02:15:11 and these kinds of arguments.
02:15:13 And then, I mean, sure enough, you know,
02:15:16 we corresponded for a while
02:15:19 and then he had to stop corresponding
02:15:20 because he became a kind of local official in Omsk.
02:15:25 And he sort of migrated more and more to being a Democrat.
02:15:29 And he was then in the, you know,
02:15:31 democratic movement under Gorbachev
02:15:34 and, you know, in the council of people’s deputies,
02:15:38 which they set up, which was, you know,
02:15:41 elected as a Democrat from Omsk
02:15:45 and had a political career through the Yeltsin period.
02:15:49 And once Putin came along, you know, it was over.
02:15:53 He didn’t like Putin and, you know,
02:15:56 and Putin didn’t like the Yeltsin people, right?
02:15:59 Who were, tried to be, some of them tried to be Democrats.
02:16:02 And Sasha was one who really did.
02:16:04 He just published his memoirs in Russian, by the way,
02:16:06 which are very good, I think.
02:16:08 I think I’ve been hearing it.
02:16:11 Komanderovkifovlast, that’s what it’s called.
02:16:15 It’s hard to translate in English, Komanderovkifovlast.
02:16:19 But I mean, I translated it full points once for him.
02:16:22 This is so beautiful.
02:16:23 Like the, do you find that the translation is a problem
02:16:26 or no?
02:16:27 It’s such a different language.
02:16:28 Yes, translation is very difficult.
02:16:30 With the Russian language, I mean,
02:16:31 it’s the only language I know deeply except English.
02:16:35 And it seems like so much is lost of the pain,
02:16:38 the poetry, the beauty of the people.
02:16:40 And translators are to be treasured and good ones,
02:16:44 to be, I mean, those who do the translations,
02:16:47 when you read things in translation,
02:16:50 sometimes they’re quite beautiful,
02:16:52 whether it’s Russian or Polish or German or anything French.
02:16:55 Yeah, I’m actually traveling to Paris
02:16:57 to talk to the famous translators that Dostoevsky told story.
02:17:02 And I’m just gonna do a several conversations with them
02:17:04 about like, you could just sometimes just grab
02:17:06 a single sentence and just talk about the translation
02:17:09 in that sense, that’s, and also, as you said,
02:17:14 I would love to be a fly on the wall
02:17:16 with some of those friends that you had
02:17:17 because the perspective on history, nonacademic,
02:17:21 sort of without just as human beings is so different
02:17:26 from the United States versus Russia.
02:17:28 When you talk about the way the World War II is perceived
02:17:30 and all those kinds of things, it’s fascinating.
02:17:35 History also has, in it, opinion and perspective.
02:17:39 And so sometimes stripping that away is really difficult.
02:17:41 And then I guess that is your job and at its highest form,
02:17:44 that is what you do as a historian.
02:17:47 Well, Norman,
02:17:48 Spasibo bashoi shto sivonya samaya katorini.
02:17:52 I really appreciate your valuable time.
02:17:54 It’s truly an honor to talk to you
02:17:55 and thank you for taking us through a trip,
02:18:00 through some of the worst parts of human history
02:18:02 and talking about hope and love at the end.
02:18:06 So I really appreciate your time today.
02:18:08 Okay, thank you.
02:18:08 Thank you.
02:18:09 Thank you for having me.
02:18:11 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:18:12 with Norman Namark.
02:18:14 To support this podcast,
02:18:15 please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:18:17 And now let me leave you with some words from Stalin.
02:18:21 A single death is a tragedy.
02:18:23 A million deaths is a statistic.
02:18:26 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.