Racism, Antisemitism and the Radical Right - Keynote, Timothy Snyder

so i'm maury samuels and i'm director of the yale program for the study of anti-semitism one of the co-hosts of this conference with steve pitty and it's my great pleasure uh today to introduce our second keynote speaker my colleague timothy snyder and i should say that we're incredibly grateful to tim for literally getting off a plane i think from iceland uh in order to come here today so thank you i'm going to be very brief because i know we're running late and you all want to hear tim so he's the richard c levin professor of history at yale university and a permanent fellow at the institute for human sciences in vienna he received his doctorate from the university of oxford in 1997 where he was a british marshall scholar and he joined the yale faculty in 2001. his work is distinguished by his command of languages he speaks five and reads ten and by the way he integrates multiple national contexts into historical discussion and debate particularly of the holocaust among his publications are eight single authored award-winning books all of which have been translated into multiple languages and in the interest of time i'll just mention the last three bloodlands europe between hitler and stalin from 2010 black earth the holocaust is history and warning from 2015 and most recently on tyranny 20 lessons from the 20th century 2017 which has made it onto the new york times bestseller list bloodlands won 12 awards including the emerson prize in the humanities and the hana aren't prize in political thought it has been translated into 33 languages was named to 12 book of the year lists and was a bestseller in six countries tim is also the co-editor of two books uh wall around the west state borders and immigration controls in europe and north america and stalin in europe terror war and domination and he collaborated with tony judd on thinking the 20th century from 2012. in addition to this amazing outpouring of scholarly publishing he has somehow found time to write for the new york review of books foreign affairs the times literary supplement the nation the new republic as well as for the new york times the international herald tribune the wall street journal and other newspapers he was the recipient of an inaugural andrew carnegie follow a fellowship in 2015 and received the hovel foundation prize the same year most recently he was named a guggenheim fellow he's a member of the committee on conscience of the united states holocaust memorial museum is the faculty advisor for the fortune off collection of holocaust testimonies at yale and sits on the advisory councils of the evo institute for jewish research and other organizations the title of his keynote address today is on tyranny please join me in welcoming tim snyder [Music] thank you very much maureen most of the lectures i've given the last six months have been to non-academic publics which has convinced me all the more that space matters and physicality matters which is to say if you feel like moving closer you will in fact understand more of what i say and we will in fact have a better conversation i'm going to admire the first person who actually stands up and moves closer that's going to be you sir all right thank you well done well done well done um so i'm going to be i'm going to begin with with with two confessions the first of them mori has already made for me which is that i did indeed just come back from iceland which means that i i haven't heard the arguments that you've made unless you made them in the last 20 minutes so i i risk saying something that you have said worse um i risk filling in gaps that that aren't gaps so all i can promise to you is is a kind of general conceptual argument which i hope you will find useful as you consider the specific claims that have been our have been have been our topic the last couple of days the second confession is i'm a historian that's the second confession so what i have to offer will have to will have to be limited to the way that historian might think about the present moment which is something as moira was kind of suggest i've been i've been trying to do so let me start let me start with iceland i'm going to take five minutes and i'm going to work iceland out of my system and and at the end of it we'll all we'll all be together i think on on the same on the same page it is it's very striking to spend 24 hours in a country which was uh which was set up by vikings a thousand years ago at the same time that one is trying to teach a class about how vikings set up another country a thousand years ago is there anyone here who's actually in history 263 right now no okay veterans no all right um so i the the the age of the vikings is where i begin my east european history class as as you will as you will all remember i'm giving you just a moment of what is going to seem like recreation from your harsher subjects as you'll remember the age of the vikings involved scandinavians spreading out from what's now ukraine to what's now iceland and and even further and it's very odd for me as i one day to be teaching about ukraine the next day to be in iceland realizing that the same runes the same languages are being used in the same place at the same time by by pretty much the same people that the vikings who got to iceland and success on their boats left those same runes on the nippero river um to commemorate uh vikings who died trying to go down those those those southern rapids it's it's really striking to think that these these pagans converted at about the same time at about the year one thousand in in iceland um from the norwegians there was no choice in kiev same vikings same people but many many choices in kiev they're actually just judaism and islam about and christianity is visibly divided so the fact that the vikings in in kiev end up being eastern christians is is in large measure a matter of chance it's striking to to to contrast the cultures um that the vikings or the post vikings the the icelanders in the 13th and 14th centuries could write 40 sagas which frankly like beat the hell out of pretty much any comparable literature in europe it's an extraordinary thing and then to compare that to what are already being built as the byzantine the eastern christian cathedrals and monasteries of kiev again similar starting points but now we're branching out into very different cultures and to very different agricultures which can seem like just chance or can seem like the center of everything depending on how you're looking if you if you drive around iceland what you see are volcanic mountains which were stripped by the human settlers and are still largely stripped only one percent of isi of iceland is now forested and that's a result of human settlement and it's we still have not recovered eight centuries eight centuries on whereas those vikings who settled in ukraine happened to find themselves amidst black earth amid some of the most fertile soil in the world which is still some of the most fertile soil in the world and so whereas the vikings in iceland scratched out in existence and prospered for a couple of centuries the vikings in in in kiev stop selling slaves and instead started to exploit the labor of the people around them and built up a civilization which was known as ruse these are the things that i was thinking driving around iceland yesterday and flying back to iceland today i'm just barely scratching the surface of this thing which is called history but what i want to try to suggest is that history is a way of processing events in the present and it's a way which contrasts more clearly than it might seem with other ways that we might use the past so while i'm in iceland i'm also hearing of a friend who just by chance as a child learned to write in rooms right because that's the kind of person she happens to be and has now stopped writing in runes because she's realized that american nazis are making runes their favorite way of writing right um as i'm in iceland i'm also thinking of the history of ancient ruse that settlement in kiev by vikings roughly a thousand years ago which has become a highly racialized um and and highly abstract uh imaginary beginning point of the history of of russia there are ways of thinking about the past which i'm going to call the politics of eternity which seem like they have to do with history they they invoke they refer to points in the past but they're not interested in the combinations the comparisons the chronologies which i tried to suggest so briefly when i was talking about iceland a moment ago of course there's another way of thinking about the past um which is native to the united states of america and which is pretty widespread in which i would call the the politics of inevitability which says that there's no particular reason to know these details about the past at all since we know what the present is going we know what the future is going to be anyway the details the details cease to matter what i want to try to do in the next half an hour or so before before we talk is to compare these ways of thinking about the past and suggest that i like the word conjuncture which which i think brendan used in last compare the ways that these thinking about the past arrive arrive and arise in our conjuncture and what they might mean for race and what they might and what they might mean for the way we think about the way we think about um the way we think about community we've come to think about community okay so let me say a word about the politics of inevitability then a word about the politics of eternity and then at the very end i'll say something about about this whole tyranny business so by the politics of inevitability i mean a certain kind of timescape and and this should start to sound familiar the more that i talk about it because many of us live in it at least some of the time um i would i would go so far i would go so far as to say that most people in this country live in it most of the time the politics or at least they did until november of 2016. um the the politics of inevitability says something like this um time moves forward in a line or maybe time is like a cone where things just get better as time moves on um the present uh the present is is is worse than the future than is better than the past we we know which way things are going um and and it's the future really which confirms meaning on confers me on the present right so if there's some kind of crisis in the present that's fine because we know that it's the birth pangs of something or other this way of seeing the the the future the present the past this way of experiencing time is something that unites systems that might seem to be different it's true for example of both leninism and um what was called neoliberalism now i'm going to promise only to use the word neoliberalism once in this presentation which i think is a rule that we should all follow okay so i've now used the word neoliberalism once that's my one time if i use it again you could you should you can feel free to boo in his so um so what what what leninism would say would be something like this or just marxism that nature lisa technology leads to conflict which leads to revolution which leads to some good thing right neoliberalism might say something like nature lisa technology which leads to competition which leads to technical solutions which leads to some to some good thing right the stripped down american version would be nature means markets means democracy means means we're all happy so that's what that's what the politics of inevitability looks like what i want to suggest is that we were living in that um we were living in that many of us uh until about 2000 until about 2016. now um there there is there is of course okay there's also a european version which i'm going to talk about a little bit later but the there's a european version which is really which is really interesting which is which is just as wrong um and how much i make fun of whom depends on which side of the atlantic i i am so what's wrong what's wrong with the american version we know what's wrong with the american version there's no point particularly dwelling on it um we know that there's a contradiction in believing that markets automatically generate democracy we just experimented that by allowing endless money into politics in 2006 right um we we know that the shock of the financial crisis of 2008 had rather significant consequences and we're aware i'm sure you've been discussing in various ways and i'm going to return to it the way that the resulting inequality affects democracy let me let me state let me pause for just a minute on the european version so there's there's a there's the american politics of inequality there's a politics of inevitability there's also a european version which is slightly you know as european things are it's slightly more subtle so it's going to take me it's getting about 15 more seconds to explain it the the the history of europe the story of the history of europe um in in the 19th and 20th centuries the main drama history of the europe is the transition from from empire to integration okay that's history in the sense of what actually happened now is what i'm talking about the transition from empire to integration that's the main story of what actually happened the the accompany myth or fairy tale is the story of the nation-state the nation-state is there so that we don't see what actually happened which is the big transition from empire to to integration the story that europeans tell which is cool and appealing and makes americans feel guilty is that there was there was something called the second world war europeans learned from the second world war that war is bad europeans are smarter than americans because americans haven't learned that yet right that and and therefore european union that's the story now the only thing the only thing wrong with that story is everything um europeans did not learn from the second world war that war was a bad thing european if that so if think about that proposition just for a second like we've heard it so many times that it's like second nature but it's not it there's no all the evidence is it is the other way the europeans who suffered most from the second world war were in order the jews the biela russians the ukrainians uh the polls and the russians please try to convince me that those people learned from the second world war that war was a bad thing right uh you just you cannot construct um from a history of political theory in those countries the conclusion that pacifism arose right in in jewish polish ukrainian russian and beyond russian political thought after the second world war um what actually happened is more subtle and more interesting and it breaks the line between european and global history and therefore has some chance of being true and that is this what actually happened is that europeans learned from losing colonial wars that maybe wars were a bad thing so what the second world war is is the transposition of colonial war inside europe the main action in the second world war in europe is the german invasion of the soviet union which is a colonial war the point of the german invasion of the soviet union is to destroy the soviet union and to control the aforementioned black earth of ukraine that is the colonial aim and it is the central aim of the german war on the eastern front which is the front of the war that matters right and since the germans the ones who start the war it's their aims that matter so the german invasion of soviet the soviet union 1941 is the last major european colonial offensive it just so happens to take place inside europe which we find confusing or some of us at least find confusing the germans you know jump to 1945 you'll know how this ends they lose the war now we tend to then we tend to then bracket that into some kind of special experience of a second world war but it's not that is in fact the first major european defeat in a colonial war right and it is followed by many others the reasons why germans begin the process of european integration first is that they are first to lose and in an incontrovertible and unappealable fashion a colonial war so they then begin a process of integration with their west european neighbors which is then taken up by who by other european powers who are busy losing colonial wars right the the dutch the dutch the french the british the the portuguese the spanish what happens is that european powers maritime empires lose their maritime empires and as they lose their maritime empires they find a soft landing in europe the story that they tell themselves and most importantly and tellingly and fatally their children is that there was a nation the whole time the english the british whatever the french the portuguese the spanish and that nation chose chose europe that's the fatal mistake and that's the politics of inevitability because it suggests that there was a nation the whole time which it wasn't and it also suggests that there was a nation state at some point in this country's history now that there was a nation state at some point in the history of europe is an axiom which is so deeply felt and believed that and i've tried this a number of times you can shock pretty much any i'm going to use the word elite once now you can shock pretty much any elite european audience at any such in any circumstance by claiming that there was no european nation state in the modern period but then as soon as and the interesting thing is as soon as they think about it for 15 seconds they tend to agree right but the fact is that it's never called into question the story that actually takes place is empires break up and join the integration process but the story that's told in school is there was a nation the whole time there was a nation state at some point and the nation state made a decision but here's the thing the nation state never existed and this is where um let's call it populism this is where populism i like i call it sado populism but i'll go into why later this is this is where populism sees its weakness and makes its move because everybody thinks there was a nation state in the past which means that populists can say why don't we just go back to that nation state right why don't and and no one literally no one replies because that never existed you can't go back to it so in this way and this is the arc of an argument a large organ i'm trying to make the politics of inevitability the sense that things always go on that are heading towards some kind of better future always opens the way to the politics of eternity it always always has there's always that there's always um there's always a gap in the shield there's always an achilles there's always an achilles heel no um okay think about this my glasses in there so um the the the the particular way um and i'm sure you all have noticed this and perhaps talk about it the particular way that the european politics of inevitability works is that it seeks after a nostalgia for for the 1930s it's the 1930s where one imagines that there once was a european nation state um in a fuzzy way of course and and i think it's worth noting that 1930s have become a kind of universal object of nostalgia okay this brings me to the politics of eternity now let me talk in a kind of abstract way about the relationship between the politics of inevitability the idea that everything is going to go well that we know the rules of history that history is over because we know what's going to come the relationship with that and the politics of eternity the timescape of the politics of eternity is different it's about repetition it's about cycles right it's about things that happen over and over and over again and if you look hard there's actually only one thing that ever happens over and over again and the one thing that happens over and over again is that um the perverted aggressive outsider tries to penetrate the ineffable virtue of us and that happens over and over and over again and it's like the politics of inevitability that in that you don't have to know the details right you don't actually have to have any historical facts to recognize that pattern that once you know that that's the pattern that those are the cycles it's pretty easy to interpret whatever anyone might happen to say in in terms of that in terms of that pattern so history is history is a kind of permanent it's a kind of permanent siege now the politics of eternity is also like the politics of inevitability in that the present doesn't have any meaning on its own right and this for me is like the really interesting let's not call it a paradox because that word is almost never truly applied we've always called irony um this is the really interesting irony when we say history we think we think okay what we think the past irrelevant you know wins dinner but but in fact it's only history that takes the present seriously other ways of thinking about the past are there to abolish the present so if you're if you believe in the politics of eternity if you believe that what happens in the present has meaning with respect to some coming future then the present doesn't really exist if you believe in the politics of eternity if you believe the same thing is happening over and over again then again the present the present doesn't really exist um likewise the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity do something similar do something similar to the idea of reform if you believe you know if you believe in the magic of markets or whatever class conflict if you believe in some mechanism of the politics of inevitability you don't really need to care about reform right you don't have to contemplate seriously what reform would entail because better things are more or less going to come regardless of what you do likewise if you believe in the politics of eternity if you believe that history is a cycle that the nation is constantly under siege reform becomes unthinkable because how can you talk about reform when the enemy is constantly at the gate and if you take the same argument one step further you see that both of these ways of thinking do the same thing to the idea an idea an important idea whereas he with which mr seymour closed the idea of responsibility because if we know the way things are going to turn out then you don't have to bear responsibility likewise if you know the the cycle of history and you're in the middle of it you don't have to bear responsibility and you know while while we're on the subject both of them do away with morality because if you know the good thing already and the good thing is in the future then whatever brings about whatever hastens that good alternative is good the politics of the attorney works the same way you already know the bad thing the bad thing is the enemy which is eternally encircling and who is always coming back and thereby by default the definition of good is defending yourself and the community against the enemy so there's no need to think about to think about what's good so these my my point here is that these these forms of thinking about time inevitability eternity right you know let's let's say if you want capitalism and socialism over here and uh populism in the modern sense right i don't mean populism and fascism over here they seem to be different and they are okay they are they are of course different but in one in these particular respects and the way they handle time there there's some straight time responsibility morality there are some striking similarities and there there are more than similarities there's the particular ways in which one of them opens the way to the other one which is what i which is what i see and feel in our conjuncture now i mean what i see and feel is the politics of inevitability giving way to the politics of eternity the politics of inevitability weakening fischer's opening and the politics of eternity emerging and and strengthening a lot of the events that we observe and chronicle um and pace and pay attention to i think could be could be could be understood in in these terms let me let me give this a shot with russia okay so um let me give this a shot with russia now i'm the last person who would say that the particularities of the rise of the russian right or its influence in the united states are of no interest um anton shkapletsov works on these things they're fascinating i've learned from him but what i want to try to suggest is that there's a pattern beneath these details and that the reason why russia is so interesting or so important is that russia is a pioneer in passing from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity what is world historically unique about contemporary russia is that it has made it which means its population its leaders the people have the wealth and people who don't have made this transition from inevitability to eternity twice in one lifetime twice in one lifetime in the 1970s when communism in russia ceased to be about the future and started to become about the past which is a long story but the 1970s brezhnev says so the whole story of communism right is that there's a future right i mean this is the heartening story of communism there's a future of justice where you can imagine man is going to return to his nature in the 1970s brezhnev says no actually i mean you know you can't quote jack nicholson because the movie hasn't come out yet but brezhnev basically says this is as good as it gets um he calls the the radical inequality um and the crankiness of 1970s soviet socialism really existing socialism so he basically abolishes the future in communism and instead and this is clever and it's important um for the future instead he replaces that with a vision with a nostalgic vision of the second world war right now why is that important because it's a shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity and it means that the west is the enemy for a different reason the west is no longer a temporary enemy which will be our friend in the future after the revolution the west is now a permanent enemy because the west is always attacking russia like it did in 1941. so that's the version of communism with which the present elite and population i said elite twice okay that which was the present leadership and population of russia was educated i mean for me the 1970s the crucial decade that's time number one right and that's really interesting i mean just to know that putin and lukashenko came through that kind of education where you could be both leninist and nostalgic is i think very important but in addition to that russians passed through a moment of the 1990s when the politics of inevitability failed a second time which was the failure of the capitalist version right because it did not turn out i'm making a short story short it did not turn out that um that completely liberated markets brought about beautiful democratic institutions and happiness for everyone right that did not happen in russia in in the 1990s and so both versions of the politics of inevitability for simplification the communist one in the capitalist one failed in rapid succession in in the mature lifetime of the same generation the one that's now the one that's now in power and this shift from um inevitability to eternity also has a logic which one can perhaps see is better in russia or maybe this way we can see it better in ourselves if we first look at russia at least if we're american because i mean as americans cannot look at themselves that's a different story but we have to look somewhere else to see ourselves so the interesting thing about russia is that you can see a mechanism by which the politics of inevitability get to it gives away the politics of eternity in russia which is precisely which is precisely radical economic inequality it's not when i say that the capitalist politics of inevitability fails that's really abstract right when i say that markets don't lead to democracy we all know that that's the case you know we know that the elections in russia are ritualized and faked and so on but there's something deeper here which is the way people feel about it when people feel that they're doing worse off or that only a few people are doing much better than they are stories of progress no longer make sense that happens in russia just a tiny bit before it happens in the united states and that's why you know russia makes this turn to the politics of eternity slightly before we do right which which i think you have to have in the background before you start talking about russia and the united states happy as i am to talk about that now russia is also the pioneer in extracting ideologies from the 1930s and bringing them back to us other people fool around in this steve bannon fools around this the poles fall around in this the hungarians fool around with this farage fools around with this making the pen pulls around with this but the ones who have done it really seriously are the russian leadership vladimir putin is the only head of state to my knowledge in the 21st century who has actually taken a major fascist thinker of the 1930s and ensconced him as the state philosopher the man's name is yvonne eileen and ivanolin is is an eternity politician par par excellence okay so that brings us that brings us to to russia now it's easy and cool and fun to talk about how um russia elected donald trump which they did right i mean the infowar the infowar and the cyber war which they were just practicing on ukraine in 2014 when nobody was paying any attention was then brought to a much higher level of perfection by the time they were working it out on us in 2016. unfortunately for us we had no sense that the story of russian ukraine was about us it was about exotic people who maybe spoke exotic languages but we weren't sure which right but we knew it had something to do with runes um because we know this is really important because we saw the the because we saw you praying entirely in terms of culture right and we saw it as a distant exotic culture if you're inside the politics of inevitability you see these weird conflicts as a result of cultural backwardness and you ask yourself questions like oh what language do they speak are there two ukraines or they're one ukraine it must be all about their backward culture and that cyrillic or whatever it is that they use those runes glagolitic we're not sure um so we nobody in america has a first approximation i'll say nobody nobody in america treated the events of ukraine in 2014 as having anything to do with american politics but they turned out to have everything to do with american politics that though you know that that's half the story half the story is is the techniques that russia had already developed inside russia to manage inequality which would then apply to the us but the other half of the story is our is our vulnerability the really critical thing the really critical thing about the united states is the way that we become like russia right the reason why russian politics of eternity work in the united states is not just that they're smarter than we are which they are um they have more experience with the politics of eternity which they do that they have their cool fascist hegelian philosophers you know which they do that's all interesting but the important thing is that our society that's my american art our society is coming to look like russian society in terms of the disposition of wealth and therefore the reasons why people think that each that that politics and this goes back to the last panel that politics is nothing more than a cycle of things happen over and over again is that they actually do not have the experience of social advance and they don't believe their children are going to have it other either and when you don't have the experience of social advance the story of the politics of inevitability of progress ceases to resonate ceases to make sense and so russian propaganda may have been very clever and it was um and they may have targeted very well which they did but there was a big fat rich target in the united states and the reason it was so big and rich and fat was because the united states looks more and more like like like like russia okay so in that way you know our timescape was bending right the politics inevitability was bending it was falling down it was starting to circle itself right gravity makes things orbit the gravity of poverty the gravity of misery it makes things orbit we fall we fall into a cycle right as the russians have fallen into a cycle the gravity of poverty the gravity the gravity of misery okay then europe so how does this apply to europe what's the politics of eternity in europe in in in practice it it's it's also the case that um russia has something to do with european disintegration but it's the same story they know what they're doing in their applying techniques but the reason why the techniques work is that the soft spot is real in the case of europe um the russians support the scottish referendum for independence they support brexit although even they are surprised when that one turns out um they they support the far right in germany they fund marine le pen nacional they support elements of the extreme right as well as the extreme right left pretty much pretty much everywhere they practice certain kinds of of metapolitics giving space to radical figures in in in their press and they project a certain kind of idea of europe um where europe is at where their version of europe is all about innocence um innocence that russia is innocent for example russia is innocent of homosexuality which is not a factual claim of course but russia's innocent since 2013 russia has been um projecting a eurasian ideal according to which russia is the center of a kind of innocent european civilization and europe is the center of an aggressive european civilization and the reason why this works in russia is that it it's it's is the notion that we the innocent ones are under attack the reason why it works is the politics of inevitability is if you can't reform the state because the people who engineered the radical inequality are the same people who control the state right and that makes reform not only impossible but literally unthinkable then you have to change the conversation of politics from from interests or social advance to to virtue and enmity and once you have done that it can't just be domestic policy it has to be foreign policy as well so russia really is interested and this makes perfect sense by the way in the from their point of view in this integration of the european union um now the the way though that that that russian policy can apply to europe or have some traction in europe again has to do with the soft spot and i think i've already explained why um if if you're thinking about i mean there are people who know much more about this than me but if you're thinking about brexit like brexit is actually not a concept right like there's a there's not there i there there will not be brexit why will not be brexit you ask because there will either not be an exit there won't be britain right i mean the whole the whole notion of a british exit i think is almost unthinkable either they won't go at all which is my personal opinion but if they do go they will very quickly not be britain now why does that does that sound surprising the reason why i don't think they'll be a britain is that there's never been a britain so why should there ever be a britain no why should there ever be why should there be a britain there has never been a britain there was a british empire for a really long time and then since the early 70s there has been the participation of britain in a larger european process of integration but what there has never been is a britain so why should there be right and there's even less reason to think that there should be one since the architects of brexit are not thinking about this in the radical conceptual terms that they would have to what they're thinking is we just have to sort out some technical details with the european union and then there will be britain but there has never been a britain so why should there be a britain right i do not believe there will i do not believe they'll be read anyway the whole idea of brexit contains two categories which are not nearly as solid as they seem to be right this is all just another way of making the same point i was trying to make before the soft spot the one that populists modern populist contemporary politics populists exploit in domestic politics is the common belief that there was a nation state in the past when there wasn't right um and then the russians in supporting these populists are just fixing onto a soft spot just like they fix onto a soft spot in in the united states there are domestic sources the politics of eternity in the west and then there's a country russia which just happens to be further along in the politics of eternity much more comfortable in it and has the technical means to to export it so i think that's where we are which brings me to what i want to say about history and and and tyranny now there are a lot of things that historians say about all this one of them is that the 1930s were not good right um so no no i mean it is isn't it interesting how much nostalgia there is for the 1930s if we just stop explicit or implicit i mean the idea that our presidential motto is america first is a striking thing right america first means the united states and nazis have more in common with each other than they then they have differences and the americans the nazis should be on one side of a great walled system in which the brown and black people are on the other side that's what lindbergh says and you can hear you know lindbergh echoed in i guess bannon wrote it but in the inaugural address it's striking that um that france and britain that many people in france and britain are thinking of an implicit 1930s when they imagine that there was a nation state before the complications of the second world war it never happened of course but but it's there it is striking that russia has actually rehabilitated one of the most i think he's interesting i mean real philosophers i think disagree but um has has rehabilitated one of the more interesting fascist thinkers of the 1930s i mean rehabilitate in the sense of dug up the body from switzerland and brought it back right taken the archives from michigan state and brought them back citing him in all the major addresses sending copies of his books to every bureaucrat in the administration as a christmas present recommending him to school children and so on and so on and so on it is very striking how the 1930s have come back right which is a whole different subject like we've lost the personal memory of it and also notice there isn't that much history of it there's a lot of history in the second world war of the holocaust but how many like you you'll you'll correct me but how many books did you read which actually pick out the 1930s right the 1930s that that particular decade okay but so historian can say the 1930s were bad i was my career saying the 1930s were bad i'm going to stop doing it now and what instead i'm going to try to do is develop a couple of closing thoughts about how history can get us out of this so when i said history can create time what do i mean one thing i meant is that history can relativize other forms of looking at the world so a historian looking at this politics of inevitability politics of eternity thing can can you know make clever arguments like i've tried to make but historian can also say look this politics between the politics inevitability thing is a historical development and one that we have seen before the first globalization of the late 19th century also generated a politics of inevitability in the form of liberalism and socialism it also then generated the politics of eternity in the form of fascism and national socialism we have seen exactly this dialectic before which is bracing because it means we know where it can go right it can go to two world wars and a great depression it can go to genocide and holocaust we know that but it's also embracing a different sense that it gives us a place to stand that history is the thing which allows us to take distance on these ideas and say these are distance in our these are ideas in our own moment but they're not ideas which we have to hold that we can see them as ideas and therefore the moment we see them as ideas we may be able to take some some action now um what what what what how what would action consistent well it begins i think with with recognizing patterns if you can see the time skates themselves you don't have to use you know my words or even accept these concepts but if you can see the concepts the timescapes themselves if you can see them right as opposed to living within them then you're beginning to empower yourself if you're inside the politics of inevitability the danger is that you personally shift to the politics of eternity right which happens in a couple of ways the first way is that you face dramatic you stupefying disempowering inequality and a story of progress no longer makes sense and you fall into a different kind of story one of one of cycles but it can also happen if you're shocked i mean this very seriously now what happened to a lot of americans in 2016 was that they were shocked and they went from saying everything's going to be fine to everything's going to be disastrous and either way as citizens there was no particular reason to exercise agency um you know talking about this book at harvard i'm going to say harvard could it could have been yale talk about the look at harvard to a bunch of undergraduates i said you guys you know thought in october that everything was going to be great and therefore you could go work on wall street and now you think everything's going to be terrible and therefore you can go work on wall street right and they all laughed and nodded and that's what i'm talking about that you can that's the other way that you slip right that you one personally slips this shift is not an abstract slip shift slip people slip and the question is that you how how you stop yourself from slipping and one of the ways is to recognize these patterns the big ones and the small ones i won't belabor all the ways that 2016 was reminiscent of the 1930s but if one has these examples in mind one can see them one can catch them and then one can one can one can catch one can catch oneself okay which which brings me to the which brings me to on tyranny which is this little political pamphlet which you know i didn't want to talk too much about but i'm going to conclude i'm going to close just by talking about the very first lesson so the book on tyranny this very lo this very brief book which you could have read while i was talking um in fact that has happened in fact i think i see someone in this room who has done that to me before um no it's a very brief book it's a very short book it's not it's not a history book it's a pamphlet it's a pamphlet it's a normative book it's a pamphlet the very first lesson in this book is is don't obey in advance do not obey advance why is that the first lesson it's the first lesson because it's one of the few things that historians of the 1930s and germany actually agree about so we don't in fact agree about it's that's not even a secret that we don't agree about very much but historians of the holocaust disagree about an awful lot but one of the very few things around which there is earnest agreement is that in the 1930s especially in 1933 in the first weeks of months after hitler came to power in february 1933 it mattered a great deal that he received certain forms of consent not necessarily marching or voting but forms of consent like looking away not removing swastikas from walls not speaking out right waiting for the general mood and reacting to the general mood that turns out to be much much more important than very smart people understood in 1933. the converse of that is that little gestures provided that they're made at the beginning of the transition have an awful lot of political way one way to think about this is morally that if you are that person that acts at the beginning then you remain the person who acts at the beginning if you make an excuse not to do something at the beginning then you become the person who didn't do something at the beginning and one already sees in american public life the intellectuals and the politicians who now nine months in are writing the op-eds which explain why they didn't do anything at the beginning right that's already present in american public life politically actions taken at the beginning are magnified the long the chant it is actually it turns out it it in most situations it's not that difficult to prevent a regime change provided that action is taken at the very very beginning the time that goes by makes makes non-violent action which is the kind that i assume most of us hope will prevail makes non-violent action less likely to succeed at the beginning it has a very serious chance but the more time goes by the harder it becomes to practice and the less likely it is to succeed so for those reasons the very first lesson of the book is is donald vein advance it's also the first lesson because if you can follow that one then you'll be able to follow a lot of the other ones if you can't follow that one for the moral and political reasons that i already mentioned then the other ones all all cease to be irrelevant but the reason why i'm quote i'm closing with it is that donald obay in advance advances about creating time in the sense about creating moral choice and a sense of moral responsibility donald vein advance is about not shifting from one form from inevitability to eternity from from progress to doom don't obey advance is about seeing yourself in a historical moment and and and seeing oneself in a historical moment is the same thing as seeing how the historical moment can be changed by by oneself and it's in that way that i really do honestly sincerely and completely earnestly believe that history creates time um it creates the time the moment of time the moment of seeing that we need in order to be able to act that's what i wanted to say thank you very much for your patience thank you especially for you patience with iceland i appreciate that especially [Music] you

Channel: Yale University

Views: 123,947

Keywords: Yale, racism, radical right, antisemitism, steve bannon, whitney humanities center, conference on racism, far-right, new-right, islamophobia

Id: 6rRW7EvWqZk

Length: 45min 44sec (2744 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2017