ON TYRANNY: 20 LESSONS FROM THE 20TH CENTURY

you apologize to all the men in the audience who are wearing ties I was raised in a very conservative way I never I don't wear a tie and if you a man wear a tie I feel guilty so I mean I mean you in particular sir thank you thank you I feel much better now yeah all right so this is the that stops here by the way right then - no more of that thank you so thank you thank you all for coming this this book this book has been a kind of homecoming for me a dark homecoming when it comes to the country in a way a very special homecoming for me because what I did is came with kind enough to say is I tried to channel everything that I think I know about for the darker chapters of European history into a very very brief book then people read the book which I you know wasn't counting on and then I spent much of the last semester aside and apart from my teaching duties hello to the undergraduates who are still here why you still here summer started but it's nice to see you all the same it it brought me although all around the country including back to the Midwest which is where I'm from and this is the very last time I'll be speaking about this book at least until the autumn so this is a homecoming which has now brought me back to to my home turf and I'm very glad to share it with you what I'd like to do is just share with you three basic ideas the first is a sense of what Europe might have to do with America in 2017 in other words where I'm coming from why it would be the case that a historian of the Holocaust of Stalinist terror is standing before you in spring of 2017 in the United States right like that's that it's the fact that we're all here in a way is the phenomenon that we need to explain right that historian of the Holocaust is going to speak to you about American too 17 if we had looked a year ago we predicted you know what was going to happen a year from now a year ago this particular conjuncture where we would be sitting here happy to be together but concerned about the larger country around us for these particular reasons this scenario probably wouldn't have that wouldn't occurred to it to most of us so where am i coming from i'm coming from history on tyranny is not a history book it's it's a political pamphlet it's it's a set of instructions it's a condensation of wisdom from people wiser than I who have experienced more than I have but it comes it comes from a certain kind of historical experience that is I spent the last 25 years learning languages Polish Russian Ukrainian Yiddish German French sort of whatever whatever came my way that I needed to learn in order to understand Eastern Europe and then in order to understand what I slowly understood to be the central events of East European history which are things like the Holocaust of the European Jews which took place mostly in Eastern Europe or the the famines and terrors of the Soviet Union which also mostly took place in Eastern Europe in order to do that in addition to the languages I spent my time with certain kinds of people I spent my time with those who manufactured these terrors with those who sometimes were the executioner's in these terrors the perpetrators with those who in one way or another took part or took part without realizing they were taking part which may be the most important category of all and I say spend time of course I mean I read I read what they left behind their government records their memoirs their testimonies are the perpetrators the bystanders and also and perhaps above all the victims these are the people who are real to me in some sense just as real to me as as you are to me I it's it's a it's a strangely scholarly thing to say and you can laugh but I spent more time with them than I have with you right I spent until I had children or at least I spent more time right with the dead than with the living and I spent more time to the last six months might in my adult life I spent more time out of English than in English in this sense this is also a homecoming right because I haven't had it's like the funny story about the child who doesn't speak until he's seven and right and he asks for the mustard and his parents are astonished and they say well why didn't you talk before and he said up to now everything was okay so with my speaking lots of English it's a little bit like that right no there's a reason up to now I didn't think it was necessary but now now it seems to be necessary so this is how I spent my time with these sources with these people and trying to understand these great political crimes in order to do that I had to have company not just the company of the Dead and of the sources of the sources that I was reading but also the company of the living the company of teachers teachers from Eastern Europe teachers from Central Europe the people who told me at the beginning that I would never learn all the languages that I should come back to them after I'd learned languages the skeptical people the people who had themselves not just become historians but who had lived through the historical periods but then became my subject so my doctoral dissertation was written under supervision of a great polish intellectual historian his name is yes yet lead ski there's no reason you would have heard of him if you don't happen to be an intellectual historian or historian of Poland but professor Hadley ski when when I first met him and he told me well you'll never learn polish in time to do this dissertation that was our first interaction right a sceptical gentleman who had seen much in his life when I first met him I knew that he had spent time in internment camp under communism in martial law in Poland as he became my friend over the years over the decades I learned other things about him like that for example that he belongs to the group of people that we would call Holocaust survivors that is he and his brother and his mother not his father survives the Holocaust in in german-occupied Warsaw this is rather typical the intellectuals the historians the scholars from whom I have learned came from that part of the world and lived through these things so the history for me is partly what I've read but it's also partly the friendships the friendships that I have the friendships among older people and now also the friendships with younger people so I'm not as old as I as you think I am and I'm not I'm probably not as well as I should be you know to be like pronouncing the way that I'm pronouncing but but I am old enough that I have had a generation it's funny how age jokes work differently with different demographics right I see like different levels of laughter and discomfort in different parts of the audience as I talk about that when people start to reflect upon themselves well if he's not old and if he's young then what am i wait okay so but there's an important point here about actually precisely about let's call it middle age because my friends who taught me I mean many of them have passed on some of them are still alive but I've been teaching now in one way or another for a couple of decades and which means I have students both literally my students the ones who have written dissertations with me my very first dissertation student I'm proud to say was a young woman from Ukranian gutters her to doctorate here from Yale and now about to get tenure at Hunter College in New York but I have teeth I have students not just from the US I have students from Europe from from Eastern Europe and those students then also become my friends with time just as I became friends with my teachers with time and if you think about the general the generational position of these students of these young people from Eastern Europe what have they lived through what is their life been like in 1989 we all said history was over there an alternative syllable democracy everything's going to be fine right but if you were born in about 1989 in Eastern Europe if you were born in the 1990s in Eastern Europe that generally hasn't been the story instead as you've come of age democracy the rule of law in general here for Russia or Ukraine now Poland Hungary is receding from you it's not coming to you it's receding from you which means that it might well be the case and this is the case for many of my students or from my young friends they you've grown up protesting you've grown up organizing you've grown up trying to find ways around the various kinds of authoritarianism and oligarchy and right-wing populism better emerging in your country which means that I'm also coming from there I'm coming from the experiences of those friends because just as my teachers were many of them at one time imprisoned or beaten or tortured right now it's my students who are being beaten and imprisoned and tortured and sadly in some cases killed I'm also coming from there what does this all mean well because I'm a historian of these darker parts of European history I I know that it can happen right one of the basic things about history very basic and it but but actually kind of profound if it did happen that means it could happen right it did happen that means it could happen and the things that happen that I study which are my daily life are may seem fantastical right the notion of murdering five and a half million Jews over the course of two and a half years using industrial methods on my team fantastical or the mass starvation of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s three million people dying for no reason that might seem fantastical a war in Eastern Europe between Germany the Soviet Union where tens of millions of people are going to die this might seem fantastical colonial wars in Eastern Europe which is what the Second World War that might was that might seem fantastical this is what is is what I work on not just in the grand scheme of the numbers but also in the particularity of the names wait so we if you do the history you know that these things can happen because they did and if you take the people seriously as individuals you realize that they're people like us right this is the lesson of my teachers if I can learn from my teachers then they're people like me and if you're understanding what I'm saying then you're also people like me and that means we're all people like us it can happen and it can happen to people like us right and if you try to make the move as to how you're wiser or smarter than you know my teachers or you know those even try to make the move that you're smarter or wiser than Czechoslovakian 1940s when communism arrived or that you're wiser and smarter than Germans in the 1930s the National Socialism where I try it but do it with care because it's actually not as straightforward as it might seem and it might also be that that very move that very instinctive move to say we're better it can't happen here that that very move is the thing that makes it happen here so beware before you start doing that beware before you start saying I'm a wiser person we're wiser Society and because of the students so the history can happen the teachers happen to people like us because of the students I see it's happening now right what's happening to us the United States of America and 2016-2017 it isn't just happening to us it's happening throughout the world what's happening to us in many ways is just an element of a larger event in mind there are people who work on Iran or India or Turkey who would have a different perspective and a useful one but in my in my in the part of the world I understand when we look about it is this in the in the 90s or in the first decade of the 21st century we could say history is KO'ing from the west to the east okay certain things did that hasn't been true for some time we may not have noticed but that has not been true for some time for the last several years history has been coming from the east to the west and all of these things which surprised us in which we're still coming to terms with and partially denying like the cyber war and the fake news those things are old news in other places they're only new here and the fact that we're shocked by them and surprised by them means that were just maybe a tiny bit provincial in certain ways and haven't been paying attention so anyway the point is where I'm coming from is that it can happen it happens to people like us and it's happening now it's happening now we're not in some strange dream you know we're not in some American Exceptionalist moment we're in a moment where this is happening throughout the West okay which brings me to ourselves where the first question is where am i coming from second question where have we gotten ourselves to I'm you're going to say a word about the lab the first few weeks the Trump administration I'm going to I'm going to focus on Russia which is something I a little bit about and I want I want to ask you to remember that I wrote this book it came with kind of to say I wrote this book in in December the 20 lessons were in November the book was done in know in December anybody who knows anything about publishing I mean when you're a reader it's like the book is written the moment you read it it's written that in that charming right like you read no isn't it nice like you like the author wrote it just for you and the author wrote it yesterday so you can read it today and like that's the kind of the magic of a book but from the sort of banal non-magical publishing perspective for the book to exist in your hands now I had to have written it some time ago I wrote it last year I wrote it before the inauguration I wrote it for the administration began and so if it seems to resonate with some things that are happening now that could tend to demonstrate that the use of history is is is the right way to go but the question I want to ask here is is what we've gotten ourselves into and I'm going to ask with respect to the Russian connection why the Russian connection we are going to learn all kinds of things and not everyone abusing of those people who I really respect like Masha Gessen think something else but I think we're going to find out that the connection between it the TREC connections between a Trump campaign and in various Russian actors we're deeper darker and more spectacular than we could really have imagined I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to turn out but even if I am wrong the Russia connection is very important because Russia is a model of how you run a 21st century postmodern authoritarian kleptocratic unequal regime and it is a positive model for the president the United States right it's a positive model for the present United States it's also modeled by the way of how you use tear to use terrorism the threat of terrorism reality of terrorism to stabilize inequality over the long term a positive model as the President himself has said for how you use the politics of of terror right so even if these connections turn out to me nothing which they won't um Rush's and importance is important for us because Russia Russia is a possible future Russia is a possible future that's that's the way we're heading right that's the way we're heading okay so where we gotten ourselves to let me just review 2016 in 2017 in 2016 let's think about the cyber stuff let's think about the internet let's think about the so-called hacking of the election back in 2016 when we knew that we knew that the russians hacked Hillary Clinton's email account hacked John Podesta's email account we knew that stuff and although we knew it mr. Trump said that it wasn't the Russians who did it and then he invited the Russians to do more of it in one of his sort of beautiful contradictions right they didn't do it but they should do more of it they should hack Hillary Clinton um now we know that there was much more of that and it was much more profoundly important than we understood that the main element of the Russian cyber intervention in the u.s. election had to do with gathering political data about tens of millions of Americans and then using Facebook and other platforms to target face news to people who they regarded as susceptible especially in the last weeks before the election which probably determined the outcome in critical States which were especially targeted and probably therefore the term in the outcome of the election as a whole which isn't to say that there aren't other reasons and my view good reasons why people could go for mr. Trump it isn't to say that Hillary Clinton ran a wonderful campaign either it's just to say that in a very close election that probably made the difference and this is not just me saying this these are the conclusions of America's intelligence agencies as well as although you have to read between the lines a little bit the conclusion of Facebook itself right Facebook has acknowledged that it was used in this way now let's look back in 2016 to the Russian connection with personnel which was also I mean spectacular right so I mean when I think about the way the question is posed about Russian Russian involvement in Trump's campaign like was there like was there a connection between Trump's American campaign in the Russians when I look at it I asked like no wait where was Trump's American campaign actually all right like the entire campaign you have to actually sort of show that there was an American element to it think of the fact that his campaign manager was not paid right I mean I know that there are lots of good people here who do all sorts of good civil society stuff for which you were not paid but it is not normal for a campaign manager not to be paid Paul Manafort was not paid by the Trump campaign on the other hand he was on a million dollar a year contract for several years for an oligarch close to mr. Putin to soften up American democracy for Russian influence that could be a coincidence um admit Mr Man affords and you can you could say well that job ended before the Trump campaign started that's true because mr. Manik or took up another job which was to be the main strategist for the ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who mr. Manafort helped back to power mr. Yanukovych became such an extreme autocrat and kleptocratic kleptocrat means ruled by hebes it's one of those great Greek words which is coming back like oligarch right he was such an autocrat and clefto crap that his own people ended up throwing him from power and mr. mana fort had to run away but fortunately there was a soft landing for mr. metaphor as the campaign manager of a mr. mr. Trump but these are all things we knew at the time right we knew that mr. metaphor had spent 20 years being a kind of safety net for dictators all over the world and that his last his the last case was with the Ukrainian president the pro-russian Ukrainian president we knew all that we knew that mr. Trump's first speech first foreign policy speech was written by someone who was on the payroll of a Russian gas company we knew that his main Russia advisor was someone who was on the payroll of Russian gas company we knew that mr. Flinn who was his advisor on national security affairs who would formally become his national security adviser was paid $45,000 by a Russian propaganda outlet on which he had appeared multiple times these are the things that we all knew and yet there's so much more now right now we have a Secretary of State who was given the order of friendship by Vladimir Putin which might be a kind of curiosity in a different context but in this context it's not a curiosity at all and that's and that's just the beginning right we have an attorney general the highest law enforcement official in the land who perjured himself in his own confirmation hearings under oath on precisely the question of his contacts with Russia right precisely that question and we have the senior adviser in the White House who happens to be the son-in-law of the president mr. Kirchner who also lied in order to get security clearance which if you're a normal person would be a problem right I mean if mr. sessions were a normal lawyer he'd be disbarred for perjuring himself I hope you know your lawyers can correct me he'd be disbarred for lying under oath right if mr. if we had a rule of law state that went to the top mr. Cushman could not have security clearance right now right a normal person was trying to get security clearance and left out his contacts with Russian officials would not get to Korea guards but you can see what he left them out because it turns out that his contacts with Russian officials were about establishing a secure line of communication with with Russia which is more interesting than it seems okay because the line of communication which mr. Khrushchev wanted to establish with Russia was meant to be outside of the reach of American intelligence agencies okay maybe we can understand that right everybody needs a little privacy right but the way he was going to do it was by doing it from inside Russian official channels which meant that although the American agencies might not be able to follow it the Russian agencies would very easily be able to follow all of it and why is that not a concern for mr. Kushner I can only think of one reason and that is that mr. is aware that the Russian agencies already have so much material on the Trump administration that a little bit more isn't going to make a difference one way or the other right okay that this is this is where this is where we now are oh and did I mention and you all know this but did I mention that mr. Trump fired mr. Comey who is the head of the investigation of all this work and this is easy to overlook because we get bombarded by so many things day after day but when you fire the person who's carrying out the investigation you are saying I confess right you're saying that I confess that there's really no other significance to that then when mr. Trump Nell or his friends now start musing about firing mr. Miller that's saying I confess louder for those of you who didn't hear it the first time right so this is this is where we've gotten ourselves today oh and mr. Trump's personal lawyer by the way like I wish I was making this stuff up and I you know but I'm not mr. Trump's personal lawyer is also the personal lawyer of the main Russian oligarch a man called Oleg Deripaska who is very close to mr. Putin and he was also very close to mr. manna for now that could it could possibly all be a coincidence but can we could ask the question a different way couldn't the president have a lawyer who is not also the lawyer for the other side right I mean could we not have a president when the president is denying his connections to Russia could he not find a lawyer who is not also representing the Russians right isn't that I mean there are a lot of lawyers right and they're not all representing Russian oligarchs okay I mean isn't it an interesting thing that this man who now speaks to us daily on CNN you know um mr. Kamath uh mr. Trump's personal lawyer isn't it interesting to think that only the attorney-client privilege prevents him from actually telling us both sides of the story right because he he knows them both okay so this is where we've gotten ourselves to and we can disagree about the details of all of this right I mean I'm willing to grant the possibility that you could like Rhys crammed below the words of mr. Trump's tweets and it would turn out to be a new interpretation of the 14th amendment I mean I I realize like I may be misunderstanding some things but I think it's fair to ask at this point um how did we allow ourselves to get to this place and what is it about us that made all of this possible or to put it more just as directly as I can are we really so special right our Americans really so specials America really so special after a whole year of thinking that this incipio that he will never be nominate or if he's nominated he will never win or the Republican Party will stop him or this will stop when the other thing will stop this maybe maybe those institution the the group the Congress will stop him right maybe those institutions aren't as fantastic as we thought they were and again maybe saying institutions are fantastic maybe that's part of the problem and maybe when we talk about the institution's are rescuing us maybe what we're doing is we're preventing them from from helping us so are we so special this brings me to where the book starts which is with the founding fathers who was worried about American tyranny and who thought that we weren't so special the founding fathers right we have played a horrible trick on the founding fathers which is that because of our cult of how wonderful an exception we are we have it's actually slightly diabolical what we have done the founding fathers because because of our cult of ourselves we have gone back to the founding fathers and we have made them the pantheon of our cult of American exceptionalism right which like I realize like my American is colleagues make an awful lot of money on this right I realized that like there's a reason why we like to have like this white guy and that white guy the other what guy okay but if we're going if we're going to be serious about this we should take the fountain father seriously they did not believe in American exceptionalism how could they there was no America they were worried sick about precisely tyranny which is a word they used all the time which is reason why I'm using it and the reason they were worried think about it was because they knew that historically democracies and republics failed that's what their discussions were all about they didn't know they didn't have the history that we have but they had they had ancient history and they were perfectly aware because they read Aristotle that inequality leads to demagoguery leads to the collapse of democracy they were perfectly aware of the history of ancient Rome in a way that republics tend to become empires and they set up the institutions as best as they could because they thought that we were inherently to use an old-fashioned word wicked that we were prone to tyranny and that therefore there had to be as many checks and balances as possible so that we would bounce off things we would not realize that potential and that the Republic could survive for as long as possible that's the method that I try to adopt in the book that's the American tradition that I'm trying to hold close to not the American tradition of talking about how we're great and we're outside of history University on the hill and so on which is not help I mean that that might be nice at some point but it's not helpful right now on the rather the American tradition of skepticism about human nature and the use of history so the method the book is to say just as the founding fathers looked at the history they knew let us look at the history we know or once knew or could know the history which is closer to us the history the last century or two and in that history democracy also usually fails Republic's also usually fail but in ways that are closer to us in ways that are perhaps comprehensible in a ways that perhaps would be useful for us now let me just say a word about that and then and then we'll be done or all be done and then we can talk so how can history help why does it help to look back at history why does it help in a moment where things are tottering or insecure around you to look at to look at examples where things completely break well the first thing is that history can re familiar eyes history can make things that seems striking and new and unique seem more familiar so for example the big globalization when I say globalization I mean you you probably automatically think of something new right there's never been this before like that's global it globalization had a PR campaign you know the PR campaign for globalization would be this has never happened before this is all new it's fantastic the globalization has happened before at the end of the 19th century there was the first globalization see I'm going to be a JC I've actually started saying something about history the whole lecture I've said anything about and now I'm starting right I hope I snuck it in in a way that you're still paying attention in the 19th century there was a globalization very same kind of similar pattern expansion global trade export-led growth and the same political optimism the idea that growth would lead to political enlightenment would lead to something like liberalism that was dominant in late 19th century then we had the First World War the Great Depression the Second World War which were globalization failure so we should have known in the 90s in the first decade of the 20th century the globalization although it has promised and it comes with a kind of built-in optimism also has risks and contradictions and is going to have opponents but we can then also learn from the if we choose to we can learn from the first globalization failure the danger is we go from saying everything is going to get better automatically right history is over everything is going a better automatically the risk is we go from there to saying oh wait we got surprised by one thing you know mr. Trump won an election we got surprised by one thing and now everything's going to hell right this is the joke that I made it Harvard I would never dream of making it at Yale is talking to a bunch of Harvard kids and I said well like you guys thought that everything was going to be going fantastically well and therefore you're all going to work in finance and they go ha ha and then I said and then it turned out that everything is going to go fantastically badly and so you shrug your shoulders and said I'll just work in finance uh-huh right okay oh it turns out that's not a joke you can make only at Harvard all right broad recognition among the younger generation okay so that's the worry right the worry is you go from thinking everything's going to go well to realizing oh no everything nothing can possibly go well whereas the historical truth is globalization is just like this there it's going to have challengers it's going to have opponents you can't wish it away but there's good advice which which leads me to the next thing that history is may be useful for it it broadens what we think of as possible right it helps us to see that um that where we are now like this daily horizon so like it's great to talk to you and it's great for you to talk to your friends and like it the festival of Arts and ideas is a wonderful thing in general but no matter how enlightened we are in however when we are were trapped in the horizon of what seems possible today history helps with that history helps us to see that other things are possible that we might not think are possible and that in that and here comes the important part that helps you prepare right that helps you prepare so the history that's compressed into this unbelievably short book is it is the history of the whole century you can read the book in an hour or two maybe two hours if you're so you can read it while I'm giving this lecture which has actually happened and and lead some much better Q&A by the way the point is if you read the history then you can get out ahead of the reality if you have a sense of what can come right if you recognize that you're in a bad place and you in you and you recognize this Torvill possibilities then you can get out ahead which is the purpose of the book the book is to say look we are where we are and here are things that that we can that we can possibly do right so what are these things that we can possibly do this is really my very last word and then we'll talk in the book it's not I'm not telling you what to do in the book what I'm trying to do is restore connections between us and certain sets of people from whom we won learned I'm trying to restore connections to the anti-communist dissidents I'm trying to restore connections to the intellectuals and refugees who came out of Nazi Germany on our and for example I'm trying to help us get through out of the horizon of the everyday I'm trying to get us out of this trap where we get bombarded with bad news and we sympathize we empathize with our friends but we're not sure what to do and then the next day is the same and you get enough days like that and then everything normalizes and then it's too late and then you're done and then you have an authoritarian regime and then your children don't know what freedom arc is right so what I'm trying to do is restore connections to thinkers in the past I'm trying to open another dimension so that we don't have to confront this thing that we're in all of what you want this thing that we're in just on our own that we can confront it with the help of others people who are wiser than we were we are and people who confronted things that are more dramatic than what we have to confront I'm trying to channel that I'm trying to bring it to the present Jen or cut a channel so that you can we can go back into the past and then we can see ourselves in the present and then we can step forward into the future right you can think about the future how you might be doing something that you're not doing now and how that might make the Republic in the civil society we live in a better republic in a better civil society than the ones that we are living in now okay so what are some of the lessons we'll eat most of them for for the discussion are probably some of you have read them before but I'm going to just I'm going to mention a couple the first is and it flows from everything that I've said the first is don't obey in advance don't obey in advance if there's anything that historians of Nazi Germany agree upon and they don't they we don't actually agree on everything it's kind of a contentious little corner of history actually but one of the things that in all earnestness we do tend to agree upon is the significance of consent in 1933 when we imagine a Hitler or or a Stalin it only does that when I say Hitler by the way when it when we imagine a Hitler or Stalin we imagine that they come striding on stage right as sort of fully fully fully empowered super villains capable of doing anything that's not how it happens at all in the case of Hitler there was of course an election in the background which is party one there was a legal appointment to power and then there were other things but what was necessary for Hitler and what is almost always necessary because there are almost never pure revolutions is consent consent doesn't have to be by voting or by marching or but consent can be just not doing anything looking away saying that it's normal saying that it can't happen here saying that the institutions are going to save us and doing nothing that's consent that's the kind of consent that authoritarian regimes need they need some active participation but mostly they need that kind of consent and so the hardest thing and the crucial thing the thing that enables all of the other forms of disobedience is not to obey in advance and it's harder than it sounds I caught both of you on at the same time the it's harder than it sounds because it sounds easy but it's actually the hardest one why this is hard because psychologically as human beings this is what we do we look around for cues to who has authority and then we react right so I knew I was you know I was introduced so I knew I was supposed to give up the talk so here I am now you you know that you're supposed to sit and not fit and not yawn by the Union if you you know what you're supposed to do and and you generally do it in 99 percent of time knots appropriate and so it's hard it's physically hard to say wait this is not normal the apparent rules do not apply but that's a precondition for being free it's a precondition for being a citizen in fact you have to feel that that discomfort when you say ways this is not there's something not right here and I'm going to now just be a stick maude until I figure out what I'm going to do for myself so that's number one don't obey in advance numbered so if you reach my number one is so important if you don't get that one right then psychologically you're done for because if you don't if you don't disobey in advance then you normalize you normalize the world beyond you which means normalizing yourself it means adjusting to what's coming from the outside world and psychologically that is extremely hard to undo later and politically to make matters worse here comes the point about time historians love points about time if authority and regime changes are to be resisted they have to be resisted in the first six to eighteen months basically if they are not then you lose the chance to do anything so that the devastating psychological political connection is when you say well it can't happen here or well I'll do something tomorrow or well my friends aren't doing anything yet and then the time passes and the tragedy is you have then lost time that you cannot get back right so that's why I lesson number one is lesson number one um lesson number two is is his support institutions and I mean I wrote this again I was the the lesson I wrote in November I wrote it before Americans started to say the institutions are going to save us but I knew we were going to say that I knew we were going to say that and and it's so important to understand that the institutions are not I know you understand this but that the institutions are not robots they're not machines they don't act on their own they're very responsive to political atmosphere they're very responsible to fix responses the things that are done or not done out in the larger society so it's very important that we take the court seriously it's very important that we pay attention to the legislature even if it's not doing the things that it ought to be doing right I mean in the way the founders set up the Constitution Article one is the legislature that's supposed to be the major check on the executive that's not happening but it needs so what does that mean it means it needs our help it needs our help just like the courts in their own way need our help and the other institutions the per to institutions the lawyers the doctors the civil servants whatever it might be the teachers if people think of themselves as having having moral obligations to their professions that will also stop a lot of things from happening I would now give you a very drastic example excuse me but as I told you at the beginning this is where I live mentally if if you think about a schvitz at Auschwitz you had doctors who were violating their professional ethics by performing experiments at Auschwitz you had civil servants who are violating the normal norms of their behavior in order to have outfits you had to have many many many lawyers making many many many arguments about exceptional circumstances in order to have outfits you had to have businessmen who are willing to use slave labor in order to make a profit right group after group after group behaves in a way which violates basic standards of ethics I really that's a drastic example but the but the positive implication is if lawyers and doctors and civil servants just hold steady it just hold on to some notion of what's normal and good that can slow things down a lot and the other institutions are the kind of institutions interacting right now the non-governmental organizations we talk about freedom of association which is very important when freedom of association goes then we're all in trouble but free it isn't just a matter of freedom of association freedom is Association it's very difficult to be a free person and this is one of the lessons of precisely the anti-communist dissidents of the 70s and 80s it's very difficult to be a free person on your own if the government can get you or if anybody can get you into a situation where you're mostly by yourself let's say in front of a computer screen mostly by yourself you're not going to want to resist and you're not going to be able to resist freedom of association being taking part in the groups getting outside being with people you know and you don't know means that when the time comes you have certain capacity certain abilities certain clinicians that you're not going to have otherwise it means that you're building up a layer which is between the lonely individual and the government the romantic American Hollywood idea of resistance we know whether it's like Wonder Woman or a transformer movie or whatever it's always which I just want to say I haven't seen either of those or at least at least I haven't seen the Transformers one um what what Wonder Woman was actually pretty good it was kind of good actually okay for the genre for the genre so um in the American idea in the America your freedom it's that it's always that lone person against you know the overwhelming power of the government and I'm here to tell you that in that situation in real life the lone person always gets completely hammered or the lone person never actually makes that stand because when you're alone you don't make stands so even if you're not sure why you're doing it what the March is actually doing or whether like making coffee for one more neighborhood group is really going to make a difference it does it makes it makes it makes a huge huge difference number ten is truth why is truth so important we were once in a time and I remember this time very well because I went to college during this time and this time still continues or once in time when you could say okay you know what is what's truth what's truth is they're really truth I am really happy to have that seminar right I'm trained up in philosophy too like we can do that but in politics the notion that we get the notion that there's some kind of factual world out there is actually a precondition for everything we take for granted who understands this maybe we don't understand this maybe we're going to spend 2017 saying hey what is true you know maybe Trump's tweets or just as valid as the New England Journal of Medicine right maybe we're going to do that maybe we're going to do not you personally but you know maybe that's cool maybe that's fine maybe that shows you're like cynical and great like hey like doesn't have access to his own truth like isn't it just my narrative and your narrative isn't it just a story isn't life just a story my point is that in politics that way lies doom and who understands that the authoritarians understand that the fascists denied everyday empirical true in order to affirm the myth of an organic unity of the people right not all people but the people the Communists denied your everyday experience in truth or rather they sacrificed it to what they saw is the one truth the Utopia in the future which justifies doing whatever in the present modern authoritarians don't have these visions but they still go after the truth and they go after it according to a three-part scheme which is so widespread it might as well literally be a handbook the first part is you fill the public space without any conscience you fill the public space with lies and contradictions and you don't acknowledge that there is such a thing as a liar contradiction you don't acknowledge true standards at all that's step one step two is you then say it's the journalist to lie there the professional liars not me the fake news peddlers them and then step three is if you win everybody says well maybe he's right what is truth who knows you have your story I have my story I'm just going to watch Netflix and I'm just gonna watch Netflix is basically what Putin has tattooed on his thigh right I'm going to watch Netflix is how Russian style I'm sorry Netflix don't sue me I'm going to watch Netflix is basically how Russian style authoritarianism works people spending huge amounts of time in front of the screen not believing that any of it is true but preferring this is modern nationalism post mark preferring their own countries untruth to the untruth of other countries right that's what it comes down to in the end when you achieve the state of doubt you end up creating this weird kind of nationalism which if you haven't noticed it in the United States you're not getting out enough a weird kind of nationalism where people say well it's not true the press is not true the journalists aren't true the media the media the media and yet you prefer your own untruth you prefer your own untruth right that's what modern right-wing authoritarianism looks like and that's where we're moving anyway that's how truth is important very very last one want to say something about is patriotism this is number 19 it's towards the end in the more drastic part of the book and it's it's making the distinction between nationalism which is part of what I've just been talking about that that the inclination to say what people want to hear and finding the means to do so and do not denying that there's any kind of truth versus patriotism so this is this is what I wanted to say about patriotism this is lesson 19 it's in the middle of it a nationalist encourages us to be our worst and then tells us that we are the best a nationalist quote although endlessly brooding on power victory defeat revenge wrote Orwell tends to be quote uninterested in what happens in the real world nationalism is relativist since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others as the novelist Daniel quiche put it nationalism quote has no universal values aesthetic or ethical a patriot by contrast once the nation to live up to its ideals which means asking us to be our best selves a patriot must be concerned with the real world which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained a patriot has universal values standards by which he judges his nation always wishing it well and wishing that it would do better democracy failed in Europe in the 1920's 1930's 1940's and it is failing not only in much of Europe in many parts of the world today it is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures a nationalist will say it can't happen here which is the first step toward disaster a patriot says that it could happen here but that we will stop it thank [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: International Festival of Arts & Ideas

Views: 22,350

Rating: 4.7272725 out of 5

Keywords: tim snyder, on tyranny, tyrant, trump, yale, international festival of arts & ideas, new haven, 20 lessons, facebook, timothy snyder

Id: _4T9aGYoONU

Length: 47min 43sec (2863 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2017