Jonathan Littell, Anne Applebaum, Niall Ferguson about Holocaust and Gulag. Nightcap at YES 2019

good evening it seems a little in Congress to say the least to come from a conference about happiness from a dinner in which the president has returned to the stage with his fellow comedians and have a conversation about the Holocaust and the Gulag humanity's dark side the only thing I can say to justify this incongruity is that this is the antithesis of happiness it is I think hard to imagine more extreme human misery and suffering than occurred in this part of the world in the 1930s and in the 1940s and I'm extremely excited to be joined on this stage by two of the world's most influential and most talented writers who have tackled this extraordinarily difficult subjects Anne Applebaum known I suppose to some for her journalism but I think increasingly better known for her books Gulag which came out in 2003 won a Pulitzer Prize is a brilliant account of the Soviet prison camp system but you should also read our and Curtin a brilliant book about the imposition of communism on Eastern Europe after the war and of course everybody in this country knows I'm sure her book read famine Stalin's war on the Ukraine which won the Lionel Gerber Prize last year full disclosure Ann and I have known one another for so long that we won't get into the details whereas by contrast my other guest is someone I only just met Jonathan littell but someone I've wanted to meet for some time like and he is a Yale educated writer but unlike an he's classified as an author of fiction as a novelist and as a franco-american his first well his most famous novel I should say the kindly ones is I think widely regarded as one of the most impressive literary realizations of World War 2 and the Holocaust ever published it won all the big French literary prizes the pre gonca the Prix de l'académie française and it is riveting work I am going to lead this conversation and I thought that the best way to start would be to ask each of them to reflect on their different methodologies because to put it crudely in publishing terms I have nonfiction on one side and fiction on the other history on one side and literature on the other and yet in practice when one writes on this or any subject an imaginative leap is required an imaginative leap into the most horrific circumstances imaginable so and let me begin with with you I want to talk not so much about what happened as about how you were able to write about it and what problems if any you faced in in writing about the horrific events that that you described in all three of the books I've mentioned that would be a good starting point for me well first of all thank you Thank You Neil for beginning framing this so so elegantly I too was wondering how we were going to get from happiness to unhappiness without stopping anywhere in the middle but I guess there was maybe the whole way in between so the only thing I can say I first encountered this prop this exact problem you described which is how to imagine a horrific circumstance that I myself don't remember in other words you know obviously when I started thinking about the gulag this what was my first history book and working on it I had read many of the great memoirists obviously I read Solzhenitsyn I read Evgeny Ginsberg I read the survivors then I began branching out I read really a wide range of even actually before I did any historical research I read people describing what had happened to them and one of the things I realized was that because I am NOT a survivor and it was not my story that the way in which I was going to be able to tell it was I was going to have to use as many of their voices as possible and so when I wrote glog and then actually again when I wrote read famine my book about Ukraine every opportunity I had to put the situation in someone else's voice I tried to do that I mean in it you know you almost need a kind of humility okay I don't remember this I wasn't there you know I can sketch out the frame of it I can give you the dates and I can I can I can locate it in time and I can explain I can try to begin to explain how it happened but I can't tell you the experience of it and so I spent a lot of time thinking about whose voice is to use how to find them how to use and so if you read any of my books you'll find quite a lot of individual stories and I reckoned that the way to be most fair to the history was to use as big a range of stories as possible and so I always tried to the extent that I could there's a very very limited number for example of gulag prisoners memoirs there's one or two but not much although you can get some of their point of view from the archives I tried to show a range of views and have a range of voices so that so that so that it was so the story was described from different angles and that and that was the way to make it most fair to the to the to the circumstances I mean I found that as I was writing it I had to be almost clinical and kind of you have to be incredibly chilly almost I'm I've been very interesting here how Jonathan dealt with this because my attitude was okay I have to back myself away from how I feel about this story and I have to you know create this mosaic using people's voices and I you know this isn't my story and I'm not allowed to start crying while I'm writing it so it is you know it is you know they are the ones who are important I'm showcasing them and this is not about my emotions or how I feel about it and so I you know I would sit in my room and I would look out the window and it would be a nice day and I would you know try and be absolutely as cold as possible saying no this story works in this paragraph and this one doesn't work in another and I really did try I mean occasionally I found both actually when writing gulag and then later when writing Iron Curtain I did have nightmares about some of the things that I was reading but while I was working I always you know tried not to become too involved we'll just imagine that that's heavy artillery falling on on our bunker shall we I I I'm sure it will subside in a in a moment even the heaviest bombardment stops I I can completely relate to that don't you know there's a war on because part of what the historian does is seek the quotations that can tell the story seek the documents whether it's diaries or letters that allow you to get the reader into the first-hand experience as far as it's been documented and as historian part of your task is just to construct a scrapbook with an intelligible narrative I I have a question for you before overwrites and jonathan which is how did you feel that you conveyed the perpetrators thinking because I sensed that some how to to articulate the experience of the victims is more straightforward if harrowing than to convey the thinking of the perpetrators did you did you struggle with that I did I did struggle with it I mean in in again again in all of my books I spent you know there's a chapter in the gulag book on the guards and there's a there's a law there's this long section in the Ukraine book about the perpetrators of the famine who were they how do you get into their minds as well and I did seek their memoirs and I did seek what they had written and they of course wrote the archives you know so I have from their point of view in both of those circumstances as well as in in the other books I have their version of what was happening and very often of course in the you know since we're talking about the Soviet Union it was coached it was kind of couched in ideological language so there would be a Marxist explanation for why we need to make this or that decision and actually one of the conclusions I came to was that Marxism was very important for them because it was a it was the thing that justified what they were doing so it actually wasn't onion it wasn't you know it wasn't fake it was real it was a it was an important piece of what enabled them to do what they did but you know I spent a lot of time thinking about them what was their motive what was the structure that enabled them how what kind of jobs were they doing when you write about gulag guards for example you know lots of them were very unhappy these were bad jobs you know this wasn't something somebody chose to do many of them had a kind of you know they were being punished by being sent to Siberia just as much as the prisoners were so I tried to write about how they would have seen it at the time but of course it's harder than writing about the victims not least because they wrote less okay Jonathan I got a confession to make I I was a failed novelist once I attempted to write maybe that's maybe everybody here as a failed novelist and and only a very few succeed but I tried to write fiction and ultimately gave it up because I simply could not feel comfortable in imagined heads I wanted to be in real heads essentially doing an archaeology of lived experience with with the documents that survived so when I when I picked up the kindly ones and realized that you had essentially put yourself in their head of an imaginary SS officer my first reaction was don't do this please don't do this you should not go there so help me understand your motive and your method complicated question well I was very interested by what you said because in a way my book is practically diametrically opposed to yours I mean I don't you focus on victims I focus on perpetrators you have a polyphonic book mine is completely mono vocal if you can call it that and so for me obviously it's a very personal experience I mean there are many elements I mean for instance I grew up during the Vietnam War which is very present in my household when I was a child a small child and I just think they remember it's a very small boy five six being absolutely terrorized that the idea that when I reached 18 I would be drafted and sent to Vietnam obviously had no sense of time you know I didn't realize what that meant in terms of time but there was a constant question to my parents like when I turn 18 what's gonna happen am I gonna go to Vietnam and kill people so unlike my father who grew up as a child during World War two in a very safe place in America as a Jew who always imaginably projected himself as a potential victim I from a very early age imagine illipe rejected myself as a perpetrator because my biggest fear was being sent to Vietnam not to I wasn't afraid of being shot I was afraid of having to kill people or being forced through perpetrate violence in that way and my father would very nicely answer don't worry if it's still going on when you're 18 we'll send you to Sweden and everything will be fine so okay and then the vagaries of life were such that when I was about 26 I started working humanitarian aids I started with Bosnia for about two years then I did Chechnya Afghanistan and back serve other countries and back to Chechnya so I had quite a long seven year experience of conflicts and the interesting thing when you're doing humanitarian aids as opposed to journalism first of all you stay there for the duration it's very long time in war which is a very different experience I also worked as a journalist much later but journalists you go in you spend a couple of very intense weeks very dangerous weeks and then you go out humanitarian aid you live there so you know Boston I stood there for two years it was just like not endless two-thirds of the war and as part of my work obviously on a pretty much daily basis I was dealing with perpetrators because that's the people who you negotiate with it's the people who you who are your business interlocutors for access so in sorry what I was doing with Serbs in Chechnya I was doing with Russians and also rebels and so forth and so forth and you're always talking to these people again in a very different way that journalists talk to them I have had the occasion several times of being in meetings together with journalists with guys I knew and with journalists they're completely different with journalists they're like representing themselves they're playing a role of who they imagined themselves to be with us it's just business it's just like when you want to go through are we gonna let you through it's like totally like just stupid basic discussions about access about quantities about money about whatever so you get to know them in this very kind of daily ordinary normal way sometimes there were long periods of time and so I had this kind of experience of daily functioning with these kind of people sometimes you know fairly important ones generals Colonels whatever in different situations and I guess all this kind of you know when I started this project it all just kind of came together and I modernized it then of course it was another level which is I want to avoid Mike my counter model was always the Visconti film and Damned which I felt was just far too psychosexual personal and interpretation I want to stay very close to the actual facts I said I had to avoid this kind of what I considered an error although now I've come back to it but it's a different thing so you know massive research very grounded in the history but still when it comes to actually writing it it's just projecting yourself from your own experience into what I as a young naive idealistic guy would have been if I'd grown up in Germany in the 20s and 30s and put all that idealism and all that enthusiasm at the service of something that turned out to be an extremely flawed idea but which at least my narrator when he starts doesn't realize I mean he sees quite enthusiastic values he's a true believer and then and so I just tried to modernize it in that way drawing on all sorts of stuff and also drawing on all my literary reading and all my historical reading and whatever and just and because it's literature you know I don't care I just steal stuff everywhere I'm sort of a literary baby of William Burroughs so I'm absolutely not afraid to steal anything that I like so I just you know anything that look good I grabbed it and I just put it in so the book is a whole mix it's my own experience it's the historical record it's literary memories it's it's dreams it's everything I just like I don't really make a distinction between those levels of reality I think they're all equally valid things people told me stories that I transposed a lot of stuff comes from my own stories or stories that people told me from from my peer at the 90s in completely different conflicts I would take African stories and transpose them I would work in this way a lot the Nazi meetings obviously I was I spent god years of my life in UN coordination meetings and a lot of my Nazi meetings or I mean all my friends laughs they like John as a UN meeting yeah a human meeting I even used software that we use for calculating ratios for people in the field you know for when we create ratios for feeding people I use that same software to calculate durations for Auschwitz so I ran through the rations I could find in the historical record to get the calculations for protein lipids glucids calories and so forth so it's an imaginative project whether it works it don't work doesn't work it's not for me to say but I that's what I set out to do and I did it and I don't wrong with that let me turn back to Anne and ask a question I often ask myself dear historians read historical novels why well I mean I do read historical novels I'm sure you do too so I gave up really I gave up really I haven't read his book because you can't in your brain maintain a partition between historical evidence that is authentic and the imagined narrative but I often read so whenever I'm writing a book I spend a lot of time looking for and reading novels about that period I mean the how people imagined themselves in a particular moment and then even to some degree how people later on imagine what had happened is really important in the novels of the Gulag for example are hugely important if you want to understand what happened in the gulag so Salama was a famous gulag novelist whether he really whether what happened in his books really happened exactly as he said it or whether he was exaggerating or you know we don't really know but you know the essence of what he writes you know in the feelings that he's describing are very very useful for explaining how people felt when they were inside a camp I mean if you want to get inside the heads of people how it looked to them at the time then actually yeah it's really really useful to have someone imagine it rule I came up with was you could read novels by people who'd been there but not by people who hadn't so this hit me when I was researching a book called the pity of war about world war one and I'd read Sassoon and I'd read the literature but I was also reading Pat Barker's ghost Road trilogy written long after the fact by a woman who clearly had not been anywhere near the Western Front and I stopped reading the trilogy because I realized it was contaminating my understanding of the men in the trenches because her sensibility was that of the late 20th century and it was you could tell and it was as I was reading those novels that I decided I've got to stop reading this stuff because it's kind of contaminating my understanding of the contemporary experience and I you know I it kind of makes me feel uneasy I started dipping into your novel today and I'm thinking god this is so readable do I do I keep going or do I stick to my rule of no historical fiction unless by contemporaries because in some ways the way to read your book is not as a book about the Holocaust at all it's a book about the experience of your generation of Americans grappling with questions of violence inspired by Vietnam through Bosnia and and then I kind of can read it I kind of can read it as a novel about that generation I'm not sure I dare read it as a novel about the Holocaust for me it's just a case study you know I don't have any particular special interests in the Holocaust as opposed to every other type of violence I've worked in dozens of wars so that gets me is the case study is it all the same is all are all genocides fundamentally the same well there's a beautiful sense by Margaret eosin ah at the beginning of a very short book she wrote about the phicorp war in Lithuania around 1919 1920 when she's like totally gay so coming upon the terrible sega's on guruve Carla so wars are like potatoes and rye they have a local taste and when you go to a lot of wars of course each war has a very local taste Syria is very different from South Sudan for example just but if you function analytically and you look at mechanisms then it gets much simpler because the mechanisms although the I would say the contents defer like for instance you know and if we're talking contents let's say no air and dink tribal conflict in in South Sudan is obviously completely different from Chechens and Russian and Chechnya for example but still those are just contents what people put into the reason that they think they're fighting for it the actual basic processes of violence are the same and what interests me is violence fundamentally so in that sense I don't have a hang-up about I'm not using this in a negative way but just saying for me the problem you're opposing about sticking to the historical record and it's not a proper because I'm not a historian and I'm not trying to do historical research I've written non-fiction books about situations I've been to like Syria and Chechnya fine and I've written novels but the thing I'm looking for is the same thing which is what is the nature of violence in terms of those who perpetrate it that's the question I'm interested in and so the Nazis for me were just a way to go as far as possible into that question in a certain direction so for a historian if my Vintage it's really sort of strange to hear someone make that argument because i was a graduate student in the days of the germans onderweg and the historical sites when the uniqueness of the Holocaust was a central tenet of German academic life and you got into deep trouble if you even went so far as to compare the gulag with the concentration camps of the Third Reich that's that's a political question not an analytical question well I wonder if that that's right because there does seem to me to be a simple scale question here that there's no getting away from the sheer massive scale of both Stalin's and Hitler's crimes and how do you think so I had this obviously I mean this this is one of the things I had to confront when writing the book my book gulag actually begins with a kind of introduction and the introduction does various different things one of one of the things it does is it begins by talking about why we in the West remember the crimes of communism and the crimes of Nazism so differently what are the cultural reasons for that what are the historical reasons and then I also did something which I wasn't originally planning to do which is I compared the gulag camps and the Nazi camps and I talked about why they were the same and why they were different and one of the reasons I did that was because my publisher said if you don't do that then your reviewers will do it for you so just do it before they do it but actually the process of doing that and thinking about it because I actually grieve very much with what you just said the the mental processes the the tendency of humans to move in a direction of mass murder you know the things that trigger and instigate violence really are often very similar in different places and at different times although the structures and the politics can be very different and the culture can be very different I mean I I would agree that and there was one of the reasons why I think it's very interesting and worthy to compare these crimes even if you know I actually this discussion of whether the Holocaust or the gulag was worse I really hate because sooner or later people start counting numbers and you know it all depends who you were and where you were at which moment you know whether it seemed better or worse to you whether you were in West Ukraine or eastern Poland or you know Lithuania and whether you were Jewish or or an anti-communist or you know so I don't think that I don't think that's a very interesting conversation but I do think it's very interesting to compare them because actually by comparing them you learn things about Stalin you know you when you when you think about Stalin and Hitler together the things they have in common and this and the reasons why they're different also I don't know understand the gulag better if you say why it wasn't like the Nazi I mean for example the gulag did not have gas ovens and there was not a mass killing system because that wasn't the purpose of the gulag the gulag was justified by the people who built it as a sort of you know these are labor camps that are helping us build the Soviet Union and making it a great place in other words it a you know we're building the future by using these useless people these enemies of the people were deploying their prison labor to make our society better and understanding that it's a very it's very important for how people justified it to themselves and to one another and that's part of how the bureaucracy worked and when you understand that that's a it's a kind of insight into Stalinism Hitler's justification was quite different so I think all these comparisons are useful and informative and you learn things from them Jonathan in the literature on the Holocaust because I could actually bounce back on what go ahead because I'm a big fan of the comparative method but as a method you know it's comparative method doesn't mean saying things are different are the same it means looking at systems and functions and processes and trying to model eyes one against the other to try to pull out in psychoanalysis for instance there's a distinction which for me is super important at many levels which is the distinction between processes and contents and for me everything which is the nature of ideology is what they call contents what's interesting for me is the processes the underlying processes actually of a slight disagreement with you about what you said about the gulag because the Stalinist regime also perpetrated in Max's mass extermination is not in the camps not in the camps in a different way but that's that's the nature of just content that's just they did it differently I obviously when I was working on my book thought about this at great length and the whole problem for me was asking the right question it wasn't so much about the answers about the right question and the way I ended up formulating the question which i think is in my opinion the right way to formulate it is why if you look at the end of world war 1 1918 there aren't that many countries in the world not like now you know they're I don't know how many exactly but there may be eight great powers and then another dozen actual countries and everything else is colonies so we're looking at a much smaller group of Nations of which the great majority with a few exceptions like Spain and Portugal actually participate in World War one and so one way you can formulate the question is that why after 1918 did certain societies feel it was right and justified to exterminate or imprison entire categories of people in the name of social good and other societies felt no this is going a little bit too far and if you look at the question that way the answer is actually extremely simple the society the decide it was okay to do it other societies that lost World War one and I count Russia among the losers because they got completely laminated in 1917 and the Revolution in the Civil War and Germany in Austria I count also Austria among the perpetrators most of the personnel of the camps was actually both significantly higher percentage of the camp personnel was Austrian compared to the general population so Austria's definitely heavily implicated whereas the French and the British who committed horrendous colonial massacres at the time horrendous I mean Amritsar is just one that's famous but there were you know massive killings in French and British colonies all through 19th century in the early 20th century including the French repression of the reef revolt in 46 after world war two and so forth still it was punctual they would never go so far as to say okay this entire category of people has to be wiped out so already you have the fact that certain societies are reasoning in terms of categories of people and this is where they put different contents the Germans analyze in terms of race the Russians analyze in terms of class but still that they have the same notion of categories of people where it doesn't matter what the individual biography of an individual within that category is as long as he's part of that category he is treated as a member of that category and then they classify some need to be wiped out completely some need to be wiped out partially some need to be put to work for the greater good of society in horrendous conditions and they model eyes these demographics and they reason demographically there's actually for instance a fantastic German planning document for the invasion of the Soviet Union created by civil servants and demographers in the Goering ministry called the Green Book in which they actually do very scientific analysis about land surface the whole objective their sort of fantasy vision of the post-war order would be that civil union would be an agrarian colony creating a Ukraine in particularly Ukraine in particular more yeah of course because of the black lands the gadget they would they would be making a surplus agricultural for Germany so they calculated how many people we need as slaves per square kilometer of land in order to generate to feed them but to generate a surplus and you know very precise scientific calculations and they arrived at a figure of we need to get rid of 35 million Soviets to achieve this objective it's a scientific demographic calculation so this is how they actually reason there's actually a guy called I think wenzler who wrote a dissident opinion who said no your calculations are mistaken actually we need to eliminate 51 million not 35 but you know they were they were arguing about numbers it's just categories and and the Soviets function in the same way it's categories first it's the cool accent it's the Ukrainians then it's the the right-wing deviation is the left-wing deviation is and so forth and so forth or worse then we get to the ethnic cleansing star in world war ii the Chechens that you're kissed and so forth and so for the co mooks the tatars it's always categories and you just you don't necessarily have to kill a category depends with the level of risk my personal belief is that the only reason they were so obsessed with killing the jews is because that's what the boss wanted and since the boss wants it okay then we have to do it but there were lots of arguments within the bureaucracy obviously spare want to put the jews to work so he was resisting killing him he wanted him as a labor force if you look at what the the the negotiations inside the system it's a very great counter example as the negotiations about the roaming the the gypsy people himmler was personally obsessed with the exterminating the roaming he really wanted to kill them all that was his like idea but other parts of the bureaucracy were completely unconvinced that this was necessary and since Hitler didn't care they just argued it out among themselves and so there's like sporadic intervention some groups get wiped out some groups get deported some groups get temporarily deported and then wiped out it's like completely random in terms of the internal negotiations within bureaucracy but there's no plan there's no North Pole like there is for the Jews the only reason the Jews became such a North Pole for the entire bureaucracy is because that's what the boss wanted and therefore the whole bureaucracy was structured in such a way that as Herschel writes it had to work towards the will of the Fuhrer and that was the objective if the boss didn't care everybody just argued it out I haven't read enough of the novel to know how far your central protagonist Maximilian is ideological because there's this big question about the perpetrators that goes back to Gould Hagen versus browning were there deep rooted feelings of anti-semitism that extended through the German population which is gold Harvin's contention or was Browning right that the perpetrators are actually not that ideological and have to drink a hell of a lot of schnapps to kill all the women and children that they kill thee this is the the classic reserve Police Battalion 101 debate so is Maximilian ideological or is he just first of all speaking from my personal experience I think old Hagen is full of and browning is completely right this I am 100% convinced of it's just the way it works it's it's a it's a no brainer as they say Goldhagen is an ideological writer and he's just got it wrong my character is a bit specific he's an intellectual he's an idealist he's actually a utopia who actually really believes in the positive aspects of the Nazi project which everybody forgets there actually was a hole just like communism it was a utopia it's it Nazi means National Socialist it's also in a way a communist project although a national one it's communism in one country socialism in one country a lot of these lawyer intellectual I mean it's the whole Vernor best group the Ollendorff group I mean these guys who and all end up in the Gestapo and all ended up committing atrocious crimes started out as real idealists they really believed in a very positive way and then they got sucked into it and of course they couldn't go out so my character that was just a personal decision for this narrative is his like once he's in it he's in it for the for the run he doesn't agree with most of what's going on and the second half of the book he's actually close to span and I was trying to fight for keeping Jews alive as long as they can work but for him I reasoned about anti-semitism I've also studied a lot of medieval history and the way I thought about it he says it was actually way you think about Christianity in the Middle Ages it's just the common level of discourse that's the sort of the basis of discourse is the Welton shine you don't even talk about it and within that everything is possible because it's just it's just it's just obvious like the ground like the air you know I mean once you have a system once you're able to discount a part of your citizenry as not citizens I mean for whatever reason whether because they're Jews or because they're enemies of the people or because they're gypsies whatever reason you know then and you're able to disqualify them and not treat them as human and not give them you know rights then almost anything can happen to them I mean it's actually the argument of Tim Snyder's book the not blood lands but black earth which which is a which is a very interesting argument about why you know that actually one of the things that saved people during the war was the existence of a state or the existence of bureaucracy and when you had when you had multiple invasions and governments wiped out and you know people lost their citizenship and they didn't belong anywhere and no one had to worry about them this is when they were wiped out when you don't when people don't count so I have one last question before I think we should maybe take a couple from the floor and then I know you have to go surely the most striking difference between the two stories is that the intellectuals of Imperial Russia had been largely destroyed in successive waves so that by nineteen is the Soviet Union is isn't is really does not run on the basis of an intelligence here the intelligence he has largely been destroyed there's new intelligence right but it's which is which is a technical one this is different but the contrast with the the Nazi story is very striking because there were few institutions more committed and earlier committed to National Socialism than the German universities and in the Nazi case it is it's in fact highly educated people who make the running and you've alluded to some of them in your remarks the Hitler's of course not the highly educated individual he's a sort of his ideas are a smorgasbord of ideas lifted from rather amateurish reading but the people who work towards the Fuehrer who ultimately designed the gas ovens and make a schvitz possible or theorize about how you can reconstruct the whole Eurasian landmass have doctorates I mean they were there were excellent engineers and there were you know a brilliant bureaucrats and the Bolsheviks had spent you know all that those decades when they were sitting in zora's prison camps or in coffee shops in Vienna you know they were reading and arguing and thinking him and they they count as intellectuals I mean they're just a you know they're they're particularly breed of intellectual and also it's difficult to make a comparison on this specific point simply because the people you're alluding to were actually physically wiped out in Russia and therefore it's hard to say what role they could have played within the system if they'd been allowed to play a role within this is amiss tweren't the reason i asked this question is simply that it is a troubling reality that all intellectuals have to grapple with particularly when they're singing the praises of education as a prophylactic against wickedness but education was at a very high level in germany at the end of the 1920s the german universities were generally regarded as the best in the world which the russian ones definitely weren't at that point and yet and yet the most sophisticated industrialized genocide emanates from this highly advanced society and really that seems to me the central problem that hasn't probably been resolved all the academic historical literature as I once had a discussion with a district commissioner in South Sudan in a place called wasn't Qadhafi was canal the guy had been educated in Stanford he was a PhD no a master sorry he's master's from Stanford he'd worked for eight years for UNDP so for South Sudanese he was an incredibly highly educated guy he spoke perfect English he lived for many years in America and he'd come back with the whole independence thing to serve his country blah blah blah and he was a Dinka from a sub clan from that area and we're having this conversation about the problems is sort of the build-up to the civil war of town 13 which I liked a bit earlier but when I was sort of already brewing and he started explain to ya this is gonna be a wonderful country it's gonna be beautiful we just have one promise than we're and then we are gonna have to go and I'm like but they're not just gonna go I mean what do you mean they're gonna go you know we're not stupid I mean we're not gonna do the same mistakes as Rhonda of course this is 2011 so many years after one's genocide of course we're not gonna do same thing your honor but I assure you they're gonna leave and then it'll be a beautiful country once they're gone as is looking at this guy going are you just laying down a program for genocide in front of me and the guy actually leaned over and said have you been done everything I said and I yeah I did actually why you would think that education is the preventative against genocide I mean why does education by itself I mean the acquisition of knowledge I mean without some kind of morality without some idea of human rights you know is of course can lead in all kinds of directions I mean the Bolshevik you know the the 1920s in the Soviet Union in Ukraine actually as well as Russia was an era of people were fanatically educating themselves they were getting degrees they were all kinds of and it was also a very optimistic moment for a lot of people they were moving up the social scale they were you know they came from the countryside into the cities to study and people were obsessed with education and remained so all the way through right until they started drinking too much in the 1970s but well I hesitate to go any further with this train of thought while time is so short perhaps we could take a couple of questions before we call it a night it that there's a hand that's gone up right there we do we have any roving microphones lyokha can you get our microphones well I think the microphone will help the people behind you at least if you can just hang on yeah if all three of the books is I feel it'll be like a fox in the zoo because huh well my family's from The Pale of Settlement half of that was killed by the Nazis and other half was killed by by the Communists and that half participated in the revolution dissolved they might but the question I have is actually at all three of you we all know the Hun ardent the banality of evil expression but if we're looking at your books in in your in your school Okwe especially the Iron Curtain there is no banality of evil Oh everyone every perpetrated there is not that is not well has nothing to do with morality when we look at your empire I understand that you well there were some pages in the Imperial history which which you described in your book and there is nothing to do with em with the banality of evil and especially if we turn to maximal an hour is not battle at all there is no banality at all be it in the in the first half of when he's going to Stalingrad or at the very end so can you explain me how discourse of the evil and terror moved from banality of evil to where we are now when we are starting to discuss how evil is not is not a banality in all three examples that you represent here who would like to go first Arendt so I think Hannah Arendt was one of the great geniuses of the 20th century but I don't think there's ever anything banal about evil I mean I I think famously she was even wrong about Eichmann whom she saw as a kind of bureaucrat but was in fact a fanatic you know I mean and anyway it's an odd expression I mean there are people they're you know they're different kinds of evil right they're people who invent the genocide there are people who go along with it because they're scared not to there are people who go along with it because they come to believe in it there are people who go along with it because they're too lazy not to I mean you know I mean there's many motives for being many reasons and many kind of psychological explanations for being a perpetrator as there are types of human personality I mean they're there all kinds of people involved so I think I think that was just a you know an unfortunate you know one of her few mistakes I think it's just a misunderstanding of what she meant I mean she was trying to get past a model which exists at the time she was writing in the 60s of its what I was talking with for interiorly the Visconti model the sort of the the the drooling demon Sasori Yago model the the very ancient model in Western society of the demon as someone exceptional which you know Hitler one could argue was indeed a very peculiar person maybe Stalin was very peculiar person and she was trying to say these particular people get nowhere if they don't have an entire apparatus in the system of completely normal people behind them so what the word she should have used is normality more than banality because normality is but now I think that's what she was trying to get at within bureaucracies within governments within enterprises come within any field of activity you obviously have more energetic dynamic motivated people than others Ashwin was one of those incredibly talented middle managers I mean that's what he was and he was super committed to the cause but if he'd been a middle manager at Apple or in Victor Pinscher company he would have done the same thing for whatever the goals of that company were he had absolutely no initiative in terms of what the objectives were he just want to be the best at fulfilling those objectives that were set for him and for that he was incredibly dynamic but that's also incredibly but now there's a lot of people like that I think that's what Hannah Arendt was trying to get at that these people do not think they do not reason they do not ask themselves why am i doing what I'm doing they're just part of a collective and that's the objective the collective and then either you're just a lazy bastard and you just go with it or your dynamic bastard and you try to be one of the best and rise and are very ambitious but you don't set the objectives you just you follow them I think that's what she was maybe didn't formulate it in the best possible way I also agree with you there she's one with great analysts of this century but I think she figured something out with Iceman which she didn't formulate quite in the precise way and led to a lot of misunderstandings but but she was actually right about what he fundamentally was bureaucrats can be I mean look at rum so a guy like Rumsfeld for example rum still is a bureaucrat to the bone to the tip of his toes and this guy started a war for nothing himself with janie with two other guys but he's still just nothing but a bureaucrat that's what he is and that's the kind of guys who were around Hitler in the Nazi apparatus people who think they have an idea and who are really really really good at executing it tending normal pair Don Rumsfeld Simon but in terms of the final results okay it's not quite the same thing but the current Murray knows a lot to that gentleman I I'm still too much of a uniqueness of the Holocaust guy to go along with that kind of analogy but let me let me take one more question as the Zachary karabell is at the back and is showing interest in a microphone can we get one to him dear and it's just an interest in the microphone not actually in the pan or the question so look obviously human beings are and should be fascinated by the roots of evil and what produces it we just saw Robin Wright one of the most popular shows on Netflix now it's called mine hunter about trying to figure out the roots of serial killers and all of it but for all of you and you just alluded to it Neal when looking at the past to try to understand and even the more recent present with South Sudan where do you and how do you draw the line between what's possible all these things show what is at the worst of humanity possible and what is probable right and there's always that tension of the awareness of what happened in the past or the awareness of what we were all internally capable of you know and that's why human beings are fascinated by killers versus whether or not those circumstances are probable in the President and I'm just wondering for each of you how you how you kind of grapple with that neo you said there's a uniqueness to it which would suggest that you know what's possible may not be replicable but I do think that's important when in a contemporary world there's a lot of looking at the past particularly the 20th century past as a potential roadmap for the future and whether or not you know that that is overdoing what is possible by conflating it with what is probable well I think that's perhaps a good point on which to end the discussion because there's been a great deal of in my view somewhat casual writing recently about parallels between our own time and the 1930s I wish I had a Bitcoin for every article along those lines I've had to read in the last three years and I certainly think it's a very poor historical analogy for what is going on and it leads to all kinds of I think rather febrile inferences about where we might go but rather than answer your question myself I'll let the panelists have a go yeah obviously we now know that genocide involving millions of people is it's possible even in an advanced society but is it probable and that something like that could happen again I mean yes it's probable and you know if you look around the world it is happening in various places you know the genocide of the Rohingya is taking place as we speak in Burma you know North Korea runs concentration camps which from everything I know about them are exact replicas of Stalinist camps there's not much difference even in the way they're organized and structured actually Saddam Hussein's his filing system when he was running Iraq was exactly the same when he and the way in which they kept track of people in the way the Secret Service worked was exactly the same as the one that had been used in the Soviet Union because he borrowed it wholesale right up to the way the archives were organized I know somebody's working so so yes of course these things are happening and they will happen and it's important to understand that human nature has that possibility and that that's why we you know build liberal societies and that's why we talk about human rights and so on I mean I agree with you completely about too many comparisons to the 1930s and we live in a different era and I think the threats are different and I'm not that worried about the United States becoming Nazi Germany you know just yet but you know I really think it's important for everybody who lives in particularly for those who live in democracies because we can we can become a political we can forget it it's important for everybody to remember that the the you know the the the human brain and particularly the collective human brain has this potential and it's a thing we do need to keep in mind because it is always possible and deterioration of society is always possible it has happened many times in history Jonathan a last word from you you live in in Europe and I've spent much of your life here could it happen again in Europe look I'm not going to venture predictions about Europe and I do have a slight disagreement with you about the thirties current situation comparison the one thing I'm fairly certain of is that the barriers to extreme violence are not individual there's no such thing as individual morality except in very few cases that prevents people from perpetrating extreme violence the Bears are social and collective so what's incredibly important to prevent these levels of violence is the maintenance of these barriers that prevent us from perpetrating it I mean you mentioned a couple of cases but look at Letty Ronda I mean you talk about the exceptionality of the Holocaust what's exceptional what actually defines that exceptionality is it the fact that they're Jews no it's a category is it the fact that they were targeted for what they were no so where the Tutsis in Ronda is it the method of killing okay that's pretty unique the industrial method of killing but that's just a method and one that they use machetes for the same objective and actually if you look at the rate of success the Nazis in four years managed to kill less than 50 percent of European Jewry whereas the rhondettes in three months with machete smash to kill 30 percent of the Tutsis in Ronda so you know you have to put methods in front of the success rate to to make any kind of meaningful comparison about what makes a genocide more exceptional another genocide a genocide is a genocide it's a process and it aims at eliminating categories and it becomes possible when certain social barriers break down it's what I was alluding to earlier when I was talking about the world war 1 origins of the world war 2 genocides France and England having won the war and I went to the brink of that logic and then backed off it they're like no there's certain barriers we will not pass it wasn't a question of democracy they probably formulated in terms of common decency I'll even know how they thought about themselves but there were some things they wouldn't do whereas the Germans is something that really struck me in the reading of the the German literature of the time of the 20s it's an argument that comes back all the time all the time all the time we have sacrificed the best of our blood the best of our generation the smartest the brightest have all gone to their death for our nation if we can sacrifice the best why can't we get rid of the worst that's a constant theme it comes back all the time and that's the groundwork for what happens in the thirties and that's participates in this mechanism of breaking down these these barriers you know whatever we call them and what worries me a lot about what's going on now with what's going on in England what's going on in America is that you see a similar process of breaking down barriers things that we kind of held I won't call them sacred that's to glorious a word but at least massively important are now being destroyed systematically and deliberately by one side of the political debate and the other side of the political debate in America it's Democrats and Republicans in England slightly different it's trying to uphold these barriers saying no actually guys the destruction of the Barriss is more important than you guys winning or are we winning that arguments not working anymore and what I fear very much now is that having broken down these barriers they're never going to come back we're at least not in our predictable very close future and there's a kind of snowball effect which you see I mean I've seen it at work in many words I've for instance I worked in Syria at the beginning of the conflict 112 and I'll just give it a last little example to show you what I'm talking about so I went clandestine way into homes through Lebanon blah blah blah with these very very idealistic young revolutionaries they were guys who believed in rule of law in a civil society and they were completely anti any kind of ethnic identity there were real militants I mean tough young guys who are getting killed one after the other but they weren't scared they were just doing it for the cause and it happens that I got along with one kid more than other kids this happens in columns of abu belong we just had this nice warm relationship so when I left for a couple years I kept kind of track of him two years later after the siege of Homs he had gone out completely Isis when they evacuated from Homs he became the head of propaganda of Isis for hid lib same kid and another year later he went and blew himself up in his home neighbourhoods three blocks from his mother's house killing 40 of his former neighbors who were Alois so you just see these curves happening I mean once things break they don't get fixed up people have been alluding to this all day today it's like it's very easy to break it's not easy to fix it and it's it's you know today is dangerous times in a completely obviously completely different way in the theories but what you see in the 30s that same discourse in France also I mean you know with the right-wing in France and just sort of breaking down of the norms of discourse the insults of opponents the Agra Civet II that to me feels very familiar today well this has been a fascinating discussion and of course as the moderator I get to have the last word and and so I'll conclude by observing that we haven't really touched on the case of China but my colleague at the Hoover Institution Frank Dakota has written three searing books about the Maoist experience that make it clear that it bears comparison in every almost every respect with the experience of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union and of course it's a tricky one to fit into your model since China was nominally one of the victors of World War two and yet unleash this comparable terrorists think it's a question of the damage to society and and Chinese society had been laminated by the Japanese by the time the Communist revolution came around so actually it does kind of so we have a fantastic contrast in methods here between the historian and the novelist I think it's clear that Jonathan has a remarkable capacity to get inside the head even of an SS officer of a different nationality and different generation we historians are forced to be rather more pedestrian and and ask if really the 1930s is always the the right analogy when populism in the late 19th century looks a lot more like the populism of our own time in the end the thing that makes in my view the Nazi experience unique is that almost all the other genocides happened in relatively backward places economically backward places the fact is that the Holocaust emanated from one of the most advanced industrial societies on earth really only the United States was in the same ballpark in terms of economic and other development and that's what makes it different from all the other cases that we've touched on tonight and I still don't quite know how I can reconcile in my own mind all that had been achieved by German croute or not to mention by the German VHF with what unfolded which does indeed bear comparison with many of the cases that you've alluded to but all those other cases are by the standards of the economic historian things that happen in relatively backward places we must stop there especially as I promised Jonathan to get him out of here 10 or 15 minutes ago I'd like to invite you all to join me in thanking our two brilliant speakers [Applause]

Channel: Victor Pinchuk Foundation

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Id: Ux7CGxSGj_E

Length: 63min 29sec (3809 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019