I'm Peter Andreas, here
from the Watson Institute and the Department of Political
Science at Brown University. It's my pleasure to welcome
you to another security seminar series event, this time
co-sponsored with Hillel. Thanks to Marshall
Einhorn there at Hillel. It's my great pleasure
to welcome him back to Brown again Tim Snyder,
an old friend actually. It seems that we have him
here at least once a year, often for a new book. He's so prolific that we
can have a new book for him every year. Tim Synder, I would spend
much of the seminar going through his bio and you want
to hear from him, not from me, but just a few highlights. But I will start with what I
think is most important, which is Tim is at Brown grad. And not mentioned
in his bio is I think he was the first editor
of the Brown Journal of World Affairs, or one of the
first editors of the Brown Journal of World Affairs. Also buried in his bio is one of
his most important books, least recognized, is an edited volume
with myself and Tim, called The Wall Around
the West, which has a title that is interestingly
relevant for today. State borders and
immigration controls in North America and Europe. We did that when we had postdocs
together almost two decades ago up the street in Cambridge. Tim since then, actually
then as well, but since then he specializes
in depressing books. But he does them very well. I'd say I don't know which
is more depressing, to be perfectly honest, this one
or his last book, which was equally successful
best selling books. This one is Black
Earth, The Holocaust As History and Warning. And what is, from
my perspective, most distinctive about this
book is that although Tim is historian, he's also a
historian of the present, including the present
moment, and maybe even we could say historian
of the future. And so today's talk,
perhaps more relevant than we ever thought. Tim will also add
some comments about the current historical moment. So Tim Snyder from Yale
University, Black Earth, the Holocaust As
History and Warning. It's out in paperback actually
a couple of months ago and we will have a book
signing and reception immediately after the talk. So help me welcome
Tim back to Brown. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much, Peter. No matter how many
times I come back here, I never get over the feeling
of debt to this place. As Peter mentioned, I
was a '91 grad of Brown. I majored in History
and Political Science. And I had the
wonderful good fortune to study with an amazing
history department here. I certainly didn't
appreciate it at the time, because when you're 19, you
don't appreciate anything properly. But I am glad and gratified
that I have the chance to come back every now and
again and express that gratitude and remember. I want to start, in a way,
with that historical moment, with that precise
historical moment. 1989. That's when I was in
the middle of my studies at Brown when the revolutions
in Eastern Europe took place. 1991, when I graduated
from Brown, when the Soviet Union came apart. Because of the way I want
to introduce this talk, the way I went to
get into my argument about what caused the
Holocaust, is by asking a bigger question about how we
think about history, how we think about time, how
we think about causality. It seems to me that really to
make a case for the importance of the Holocaust, this
is going to seem strange, but to make a case for the
importance of the Holocaust one has to first make a case for the
importance of history as such. When I look out at the landscape
of memory in our country and in Europe and
elsewhere in the world, it's certainly true that the
Holocaust is above the surface. People see it. There's a claim
that we remember it. But I think it's very
hard for one event to rescue history as such. And indeed, I worry when we
put so much weight on an event, often without context or
without an attempt to interpret or without causality. We're actually overlooking
a deeper problem, which is that we've lost a sense
of historical time and even what history means. All right, that's a big claim. And I'm going to
try to defend it in about five or six minutes. So if you think back,
those of you who can. I see young people here. Thank you for coming. If you think about that
moment, 1989, '89, '90, '91, this is the moment
of what I would call the beginning of the
politics of inevitability, the sense that history
had worn itself out. Or as some of the
Hegelians of the time said, worked itself out. If there was a text,
an intelligent text, a text from the
American intelligentsia which hovered over
that moment, it would have been
Francis Fukuyama's text article about the end of
history, which, let's be fair, had a question mark
at the end of it. I remember this text very well. I remember reading it
with great excitement, the idea that somehow we'd
reached the end of something and that therefore all the
wonderful intellectual history had studied would be
sufficient because there would be no more new ideas. Three semesters with
Professor Gluck and we were done, because there
would be no more ideas ever. Liberal democracy
was the last idea. But I also remember very clearly
speaking to my TA, Mary Lou Roberts, who has gone on to have
a very significant-- indeed, formidable-- career
as a historian since, telling me that in her
mind, Fukuyama's article was sophomoric. That word somehow stayed with
me because I was at the time a sophomore. But that it was sophomoric, that
this was preschool Hegelianism. This was a fundamental
misunderstanding. What kind of idea was it though? What kind of
Hegelianism was this? It was the notion that
history had finished, and that insofar as there
were facts out there, they could all be
gathered into one story. Whatever seemed to
be happening, it was all working its way out
towards liberal democracy just because there
was no alternative. And I would say that
notion of no alternative, the Germans have a nice
word for this like they do for everything, [GERMAN]. The idea that there's
no alternative is the big idea of our time
or was until very recently. It takes different forms. Some people call it
neoliberalism, some people call it the lack of alternatives. I'm calling it here the
politics of inevitability. The idea that history,
whatever it seems to be doing, is moving forward. Bombs may go off,
wars may happen, financial crises may come,
but basically history is moving forward in
a certain direction. We understand what it is. This is the politics
of inevitability. Now, what is the
problem with this? I'm sure you can give me a
list of many, many problems. But one of the problems with
this way of seeing time, because I'm just
talking about time. I'm trying to build out
a little space where we can talk about history. In order to do that, I think we
have to first talk about time and how we feel about time. The problem with this
way of seeing time is that it's really vulnerable
to the notion of emergency. Because sometimes things happen
that are so dramatic that you can't quite immediately figure
out how they are helping us move towards liberal democracy. Like for example, when two
big buildings are knocked down in New York. It's not easy at first glance
to explain how that is moving us closer to liberal democracy. Or when there's a financial
crisis as there was in 2008. It's not easy to work that
into a story of how everything is moving towards
liberal democracy. And so what do you then do? You fall into a panic and
you use the word emergency or you use the word exceptional. And you talk about how
things are unprecedented, how nothing like this
has ever happened before. And of course, in a
trivial sense it's true. Nothing like anything
has ever happened before. Everything's new,
it's wonderful. But in a deep, in
a profound sense, the reason you say
that, nothing like this has ever happened before,
is because you've already moved history completely
out of the picture. When you're in the
politics of inevitability, when the only thing that matters
is our march towards something, let's say liberal
democracy, then you've already given
yourself a license to forget about
history entirely. And so for example,
although the attacks of 9/11 really were similar to a
whole lot of things which had happened in the past,
we went for the idea that this was an emergency,
this was an exception, therefore we should
do exceptional things. OK. Now, what's the alternative? Or what's the darker
alternative to the politics of inevitability? What's an alternative
way of seeing time that we may be tempted
towards, which I suspect you in various ways are feeling,
although you may not use the same words. There's an alternative
way of thinking about this, which
is what I would call the politics of eternity. That may seem even more obscure. What do I mean by eternity? Well, ironically,
at the exact moment when Frank Fukuyama was
publishing his arresting piece about the end of history,
at that exact moment, another Hegelian was
being revived in Russia. A man called Ivan Ilyan,
who I spoke about at length the last time he was here. Another Hegelian,
another person who had an idea of how the
past becomes the present. But his conclusions
were very different. What Ilyan said, and
I mentioned him just because he's a nice alternative,
but also because he's another Hegelian and
also because he's the most important political
thinker in Russia and arguably in the entire West right now. What's interesting about
his view of the past is that he sees things in
exactly the opposite way. It's not that history
has worked itself out. It's not that all
the facts can be gathered into a story
about how we're moving towards liberal democracy. On the contrary, in his
view, history never started. God tried to create
the world and failed. We're surrounded by
fragments, which are in a meaningless arrangement. There is really no
truth since God sent started to create the world. All we have are these
meaningless encounters with pseudo reality. We know nothing for sure. In fact, there is no truth
in this world at all. A kind of startlingly, we
might say, post-modern or post factual way of seeing things. There's no truth in
this world at all. All we have are fragments. All we have is meaninglessness. And from this, he draws
a couple of conclusions. The first is that a leader,
when a leader comes, will come from outside
history, riding on that sort of metaphorical
or metaphysical white horse. Fascists really did
like white horses rather a lot, white horses. So riding on that
metaphysical white horse from outside history. A leader with a capital
L was going to come. He's going to rescue
a virtuous nation. No nation seems
virtuous, but our nation, or Russia for Ilyan,
our nation actually underneath the incrustation
of the irrelevant facts, is deeply virtuous. So for example, we may be
overweight men wearing Velcro camouflage suits,
but at a rally, we can imagine that we
are a special nation. There's going to be
more about the president by the time we get to the end. So we can imagine that
underneath all of this, there is some kind of
deep, metaphysical virtue which the leader is
going to bring about. Now, in this way of seeing
the past or of seeing time, everything is flat. Nothing ever really happens. There's just the virtuous self. There's just almost
the virginal self, which is under constant
attack from the outside by the forces which don't
understand its virtue. For Ilyan, this
means Russian virtue. But this kind of
idea can function in pretty much any context. And this idea also cancels out
history in a different way. It turns time into this
totally flat horizon where everything which
happens in the past is just a kind of monument which
sticks up above the horizon. It's not close, it's not far. It's always in the
middle distance. And everything which
happens in the past reminds us of how
we were virtuous and how others were
trying to attack us. There's a kind of regularity
in attempts at penetration of the virtuous self. But that's pretty much it. These are two ways
of experiencing time. I think, I'm way off
the end of my branch already at this
point, but I think we're hovering between
them right now. I think in the United
States of America, and more broadly
in the West, we're hovering in between
these two points these two ways of
experiencing time right now. I think we are at
that thing which is called a turning point. But here's the funny thing
about turning points. When you're at a turning point,
you're not actually moving. I mean, you're not
going anywhere. You're just turning. You're just kind of standing. It gives you a chance to look
around at the alternatives, to think for a moment. So what I want to try to
do is to take this moment, take this turning point,
which I think we're at, and use it as a way
to think about how we might engage with history
to understand where we are now. Now, why do I think an exercise
like that might be useful? Well, these notions
which I'm tossing around, politics of inevitability,
politics of eternity, although these are my words,
this is not a new conflict. The liberal order has
been imperiled before. A global order based on rules
has fallen apart before. People who were convinced
that there was progress and that there were rules have
lost that confidence before. People who believe that
history was moving forward have been broken
and decided instead that history was flat,
that time was flat. That's already happened once. It happened between
about 1912 and 1933. It happened during the end
of the first globalization. This was, and now I'm
not joking at all, one of the main topics of
Professor Gluck's lecture course. What happens when
liberalism, when the confidence of liberalism,
when the sense of time of liberalism, this
thing I'm calling the politics of inevitability,
what happens when that breaks? What happens when that breaks? Now, what I'm going
to try to do here is assert that history is useful
right now in this turning point where we are because history
helps us to think about time. It gives us a certain amount of
self-consciousness about time, and therefore may
give us a better sense of our own agency in time. OK, so what's the
historical argument? And what does it have to
do with the Holocaust? Because after all,
what I'm doing now is I'm introducing a
lecture and a book which is about the Holocaust. I'm trying to do this
in a very different way. Because the easy thing to
say about the Holocaust, and I know it's easy because
I've said it a number of times myself, the easy thing to do
with the Holocaust is to say, this provides some lessons. And it certainly does. If you see a swastika,
you should get rid of that swastika. It certainly does
provide some lessons. There are some things we can
learn in a fairly simple way. What I want to do though here is
make a slightly more ambitious claim and slightly more
ambitious argument, namely that the
Holocaust shows what happens when a certain
kind of idea of time triumphs over another
kind of idea of time. OK, that's too abstract. Let me try to be more specific. My argument with the Holocaust
in this book has three parts. The three causes are
ecological panic, the sense that the
world is nothing but a finite
collection of resources for which we must struggle
as quickly as possible. The second causal argument is
the destruction of the state, that the Holocaust and episodes
of mass murder in general are possible when
states are destroyed. And the third causal argument
has to do with globalization, that the way that
globalization is processed, the ideas of
globalization can tilt us towards or away
believing in panic, can tilt us towards
or away supporting structures or destroying them. That's enough abstraction. Let me try now to be concrete. Let me start a
historical argument now with a particular
person and see how a particular person
and her experiences might lead us towards the
claims that I'm trying to make. The person who I want to talk
about, who figures in the book, is [? Irina ?] Lipschitz. [? Irina ?] was a
young woman, older than the students here, but
younger than the sort of median here, I would say. [? Irina ?] Lipschitz was a
young woman, a Polish speaking Jew from Warsaw. In September of 1939, when
the German army invaded Poland from the West, she,
like about a quarter of a million other Polish
Jews, fled to the east. On 17 September 1939,
the Soviet Union then invaded Poland from the
east, meaning that [? Irina, ?] all of those Jewish refugees
and all of the native Jews and all of the native
other Polish citizens of eastern Poland we're
now under Soviet rule. [? Irina ?] was welcomed
by a local Jewish community in a town very near the Polesian
marshes called [INAUDIBLE]. She stayed with local Jews. She made friends. Then in in June of
1941, almost two years after she had fled
there, the German army then invaded the Soviet Union. And this is where our
sense of geography goes all awry because
we're not used to thinking about Eastern
Europe when I used to think about the Soviet Union. And above all, we're not used
to thinking about how the Second World War really begins in
Eastern Europe, which is with a double German invasion. First one half of Poland,
then the other half of Poland, but the other half
of Poland has already been invaded by
the Soviet Union. That's [? Irina's ?] experience. So German power comes,
displaces Soviet power. About a year after that,
in September of 1942, [? Irina ?] along
with the local Jews, along with the other
refugees, is gathered up by the Germans and local
people to be shot over a pit. She runs away into the marshes. She's a city girl. She's not the kind of
person who is really fit to live in marshes. I don't think many of
us here really are. Raise your hands if you
want to give it a shot. After two or three
days, she realizes that a life on
mushrooms and berries probably isn't going
to work out and she takes the existential
decision, really, that she's going to stand
on the side of the road and just raise her hand and
ask the first person who comes by for help. So she does that. She sees someone emerge
over the horizon. As he comes closer,
she sees it's a youngish man, broad
shouldered, unshaven carrying a double barreled
shotgun over his shoulder. She asks him for help. Now, this is a story
about the Holocaust. This is a story
about the Holocaust. And although it may
not sound typical, it's actually right
down the middle of how the Holocaust
actually happens. The place where [? Irina ?]
is, the Polesian marshes, of which no one has ever
heard, is the first place where the Germans shot women
and children in large numbers. The way that people were being
killed, being shot over pits, was how half the victims
of the Holocaust died. It was also how the
Holocaust started. So in that sense, it's much
more important than the gas chambers, which came later. [? Irina ?] was a Polish Jew. Most of the people who died in
the Holocaust were Polish Jews. Her fate was tied to
the fate of Soviet Jews. That is the other large
victim group in the Holocaust. So everything about this
is actually typical. But it doesn't seem typical
to us because it escapes or it defies the
timelines that we associate with the Holocaust. The ways that we explain the
Holocaust by not explaining it, but by putting it on
certain timelines, certain automaticities. What do I mean? Well, the nation. I mean, surely the Holocaust
was about the German nation and whatever, its anti-semitism
or something, its orderliness. Surely if it wasn't
about them, then it must have been about
the Ukrainian anti-semites, the Russian anti-semites,
the Polish anti-semites. It must be about
the nation somehow. But where [? Irina ?]
is, what is she? She is a Jew, an
assimilated, rather, Jew in Poland who speaks
Polish, among other Jews who speak Yiddish, who are in a
village which is surrounded by people who speak a mixture of
[? Belarusian ?] and Ukrainian. And a part of Europe where
the majority of the population does not define
itself nationally, who in the period
of a very few months is under Polish rule, Soviet
rule, and then German rule. And she's in middle
of the swamp. Are we really going to explain
all of this by nationality? And what about the machine? Where's Auschwitz
in all of this? It's nowhere. Auschwitz isn't a major
killing facility yet. It's not going to be until
the end of the Holocaust. Where is this
metaphor of a machine? Where does that lead us? It doesn't lead us anywhere. The Holocaust has
already started. By the time [? Irina ?]
is rounded up in September of 1942, we're
moving towards two million Jews who have already been shot. Two million Jews have
already been shot, and yet Auschwitz is
not in the picture. So this story of
administration and efficiency and enlightenment, logic, how
the history of the Holocaust is the history of the extrusion
of emotion and the [? insert ?] and reason, some logical
outcome of the Enlightenment. This very popular story
associated with Zygmunt Bauman. Where is that? I can't find it
in these marshes? And I think that's
because it's not there. And what about the German state? Right When she's looking for
mushrooms and the contact she makes with this local
man with a shotgun, where is the German state? How is the German
state exactly bringing about the Holocaust
which is taking place before [? Irina's ?] eyes? It is, no doubt, but not in
a very straightforward way. And the case that
I want to make is that it's precisely this kind
of scene which is typical. Not the scene of
German bureaucracy taking rights away, putting
people in concentration camps, and then killing them, which
is not at all, in fact, how the Holocaust happened. But the scene of chaos is
typical in two important ways. The first way is
our own scholarship. Our own scholarship about
how mass killing happens. What does our own scholarship
about mass killing actually say? If we take a step back
from the Holocaust. If we imagine that it's
part of history and not just an element in these stories
about how things must happen, what is our own scholarship
about the Holocaust say about mass killing say? And Peter Andreas has worked
on neighboring questions. It says that mass
killing, ethnic cleansing, is associated not so
much with a strong state, but with a failing state. With state collapse. That's the strongest
association, so say the social scientists. What do the historians say? Historians say we
know exceptions, because that's our
bread and butter. We always know exceptions. Political scientists may
have big end studies, they may have studies of
those big end studies, they may have
critical literatures about those studies
of big end studies, but we know a couple
of exceptions. And that's how we
make our living. What are the exceptions
that we know? Cambodia, People's Republic
of China, Soviet Union. These are the
states which managed to kill large numbers of
people without falling apart. What is the rule in
those exceptions? Those are all party states. Those are all places where the
most important relationship between the citizen and the
polity is not with the state, but with the party. Why am I stressing this? Because that helps us to
see what is so, in a way, predictable and so normal
about Nazi Germany. Not normal in the sense
that it happens everyday, but normal in the
sense that it actually corresponds to exactly
what our scholarship says. We have two bodies
of scholarship. One says mass killing happens in
conditions of political chaos. Another says party states
are capable of killing people in large numbers. What is Nazi Germany? It's the one historical
case of a party state which deliberately destroys
other states, and in doing so creates a zone where
mass killing is possible. Almost all of the mass
killings of Nazi Germany will take place in zones of
deliberately manufactured anarchy. And that mass killing includes
the entirety of the Holocaust. So [? Irina's ?]
position in a marsh looking for
mushrooms and berries is actually what
we should expect to see because it's normal. That is how this event unfolded. Why else should we
expect it to be normal? Why else should we
expect to see this? Ideology. OK, ideology. Now I'm going to try to move
closer these ideas of eternity and so on that I
was raising before. Ideology. The person in European
intellectual life who would have said that a Jew
struggling for existence and failing and
ending up face to face with someone with a gun,
someone with overpowering force, the person in European
intellectual life would have said that was normal
was precisely Adolf Hitler. That is Adolf Hitler's idea. That is chapter one and
chapter two of Mein Kampf. That is out of Hitler's
description of the world. The world is nothing
but racial struggle. If you think it's something
besides racial struggle, that is because a Jew has
put ideas in your head, whether they're Christian
ideas, communist ideas, capitalist ideas,
constitutionalist ideas, it doesn't matter. They're all
fundamentally Jewish. And those ideas create the
impression in your mind that there's something
like history. But there isn't
really, says Hitler. All you have are
biological regularities. The biological
regularity of the races being threatened from
the outside by Jews. And so, therefore,
the world can be restored, the normal rhythm, the
normal regularity of the world can be restored, if Jews can
be removed from the planet. The very felicitous
title my colleague Alon Confino's book is
A World Without Jews. And that is, in fact,
what Hitler is imagining. Now, this ideology
is also a politics. It's a vision without
time, you see. It's a vision of eternity. It's perhaps [INAUDIBLE]. It's an eternity of animals
and plants and biology. But it's still an eternity. There's no time. Nothing ever moves forward. Everything is always the same. Race struggles against
race, the stronger wins. That's all we need to know
about the past, the present, and the future, says Hitler. These regularities, says Hitler,
on page one of Mein Kampf, are like the laws of physics. They just work this way. This is all we
really need to know. But this is, of course,
also a politics. It is a response
to globalization. It's a claim that all
the various rules that might constrain
Germany right, again, whether they're Christian
rules or capitalist rules or an idea of working
class solidarity, those things which seem to be
general rules, to be universal, are actually
external impositions. They're artificial. They have to be gotten rid
of so that Germany can just take everything that it needs. So that Germany can seek
what Hitler calls lebensraum. Now, the vision of lebensraum
has two sides, each of which is political. One side of
lebensraum is the idea that we are, in
fact, as Hitler says, I can never remember whether
it's finches or finks, but like an animal. We're like animals. My German translator
corrected me. I said finch and it was fink or
I said fink and it was finch. I can't remember for the
life me which one it was. But the point is that
we are like animals, we're like reptiles,
we're like insects. And we just struggle
for lebensraum. We just struggle for
ecological niches. That's what we do. And if we don't,
we're starved out. So existential politics. And if you don't think that
kind of thing is motivational, you just have not
been paying attention. But the second kind of
politics of lebensraum, which is even more relevant
to the present moment, is the idea of lifestyle. Hitler says we
need to have, this is more or less
word for word, we need to have as much
land as the Americans. Not to survive in
a physical sense, but because our
standard of living must be as high as the
American standard of living. And what's standard of living? Standard of living is what
people perceive to be. It's all relative and
it's all subjective. And therefore, we must
continue to struggle and starve millions, tens of
millions of other people in order to have
the highest standard of living in the world. And so then if this
notion that it's all right for people to die
in some far away country so that I can live well,
I mean, I hope you see it. That's not so terribly
far away from the way that much of our
political thought or political
non-thought happens now. So this notion brings us very
close to a swamp in 1942. But what does it tell
us about Germany? Because of course,
Germany is important. And if we're going
to contemplate what Germany or what
the national socialism or the Holocaust
teaches us now, we have to think about
Germany in the 1930s. How do we think about
Germany in the 1930s if we're thinking in these
broad concepts of time and panic and the state and
the destruction of the state? Surely Hitler didn't
destroy the German state. No, he didn't. But he transformed it. He transformed it by
way of these ideas. When you think of
Jews being singled out in Germany for
discrimination, yes they were singled out
for discrimination, but how in particular? By being associated
with [GERMAN]. By being associated with an
imaginary notion of world Jewry. They were extruded
from citizenship. I mean, also legally. But above all mentally,
spiritually, symbolically they were extruded from
the body of citizens and put into this
global metaphor of Jews. They were taken out. They were taken out from
among their fellow citizens and put somewhere else. They were put into a
story of how the world was working against Germany. All of the measures of
discrimination against Jews, which we, I'm sure, can
all recite, the boycotts, the Nuremberg laws,
the expropriation, that was all accompanied
by this rhetoric. And also by a very
specific sociology. So for example, and
this is an example which always stays with me
because I have small children. If a Jewish family can't put
its child in a school anymore, how do the neighbors react? They don't leave
that space open. That's just the way it happens. And when you take
something in that way, then you're much more
likely to go along with the story of why
this was necessary. And that sociological
logic functions at higher and higher and higher
levels all the way through to murder. How else is the
system transformed? It's transformed by way
of an institution, which is anti-state. And again, I
realize I'm fighting hard against our
stereotypes of the Germans as orderly and the Germans
as loving the state and the Germans as rule
bound and so on and so forth. And of course, my claim is that
that's one more set of ethnic stereotypes, which cannot
help us understand, which almost by their
nature must be wrong. What is the SS? When you think of the
SS, you're probably thinking of shiny boots
and a clean uniform. You're thinking about policemen. But they were not
actually policemen. They were people who worked
for a party organization, what we would call a
non-governmental organization. They were beyond the state. They were animated
by an ideology which was anti-political. They were animated
by the ideology which I've just described. That is, that the world
really is composed of nothing but racial struggle. Where can they act
inside Germany? Pretty much nowhere. The SS in the 1930s has
a relatively small impact on German life. Again, compared to
what happens later. Where do they actually
rule in Germany? Where do they have
total power in Germany? In the camps. What's a camp? A camp is a zone where
the law doesn't function. It's a stateless zone. In interwar Germany, in
Germany in the 1930s, it's a small pocket of
lawlessness, of statelessness, of anarchy, which is
engineered for the SS. That is their
function in the 1930s. They run the camps. Why is that so important? Not because the camp's lead
directly to the Holocaust, because they don't. But because the camps
are a small laboratory for a much greater policy
or a much greater experiment of destroying the state beyond
the boundaries of Germany. Now, here the book does
something which I can't really allow myself to do,
which is that it proceeds from beyond Germany
to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union,
and tells the history of 1938 to 1941 as a history of
progressively radical state destruction. It makes the point
that the Holocaust did not happen in
Germany in the 1930s and could not have happened
in Germany in the 1930s, that the events that we know
as the Holocaust could only unfold once a very special
kind of German power went beyond the boundaries
of pre-war Germany and destroyed other kinds of
states, whether that's Austria. What happens in Austria? So we have a mental habit. We say the Austrians are worse
anti-semites than the Germans. But who knows, really? Why do we think that? We think that because
in the spring of 1938, there were more
atrocities committed against Austrian
Jews in a few weeks than there had been in
Germany in a few years, even though it was Nazi Germany. So what do we do? We say, well, the Austrians
must be worse anti-semites. Is that really it? Or is it perhaps the fact
that the Austrian state ceased to exist from one
day to the next and that created a very
special kind of politics where one part of
the citizenry was very keen to associate
another part of the citizenry with a state that
was ceasing to exist and where one part of the
citizenry, the ones that could identify
with Nazi Germany, I don't mean this personally,
but you get the point, that could identify with Nazi Germany
because they weren't Jewish knew what was coming
and could associate this part of the citizenry with
the old regime, the regime that was going away. And what if that politics
only becomes more radical? If you think of Vienna
at all or Austria at all or Czechoslovak
at all or Poland at all, it's probably nationally. The symbols are
Munich or Anschluss or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But what the destruction
of these states meant for the
history the Holocaust has to do above all to what
happens to their citizens. The citizens of Austria,
the Jewish ones, ceased to be
citizens of anything. And then things are possible
that literally were not possible the day before. The citizens of Czechoslovakia,
the Jewish students of Czechoslovakia, when
Czechoslovakia ceases to exist, they lose their citizenship. And then some of
them in Slovakia become, in newly
independent Slovakia, become second class citizens. And among them are the first
people sent to Auschwitz. Some of them in the far
east of Czechoslovakia, sub Carpathian Ruthenia, lose
their citizenship entirely and end up in a long
series of events being the first victims
of mass shootings in the history of the
Holocaust and indeed in the history of the world. The story begins with
destruction of Czechoslovakia. When we move into Poland
and to the Soviet Union, we're now moving into zones
where Germany intended to colonize, where
Germany believed that the people in question,
the majority populations, were racially inferior,
where the whole idea was an idea of creating an
exploitative empire, and where [INAUDIBLE],
the Germans said, not only are these places not
states, they were never states. These people were never
citizens of anything. We're not actually
invading a country. There's no country here. It's not an occupation,
say the Nazi lawyers. Because an occupation
requires the prior existence of a polity. And there is no polity here. We're just moving into this
uncharted territory inhabited by various natives. So no one has any
sort of rights. And so of course,
this means the place that [? Irina ?] lives or tries
to escape is precisely typical. And her fate is also typical. We don't hear much from
the German Jews who die. We hear from the
German Jews who live. Victor Klemperer, for example. But why not the
German Jews who die? Where do they die? They don't die in Germany. They don't. They can't be killed in Germany. They're sent to places like
[INAUDIBLE] or [INAUDIBLE] or the [INAUDIBLE] ghetto. Why? Because in those zones of
anarchy, they can be killed. Their death in that
sense becomes typical, because their death is like
the death of the Polish and the Soviet Jews who were
killed very close to the places where they actually live. Now, where does this lead us? How should we be
thinking about this as we try to move
back to the concepts that I started with about how we
think about time, how we think what the present, how we think
about a historical moment, how we think about the 1930s? I mean, just to make
one point very clear before I move on,
what I'm describing is the whole Holocaust. There are details like France. There are details like Italy. There are details like
the Netherlands and Norway and I'm happy to
discuss them all. All of them fall into this
basic logic of the state and statelessness. But insofar as Jews
are going to be killed, they're going to lose their
connection with the state and they're going to
be physically moved into a zone of statelessness. That's the whole Holocaust. There is no other
Holocaust besides the one that I'm describing. The data that reaches
us of the survivors, of the trains and so
on, that's exceptional. It's filtered out
precisely by survival. And the reasons
why people survive have something to do almost
always with the state. What I'm describing to
you is the Holocaust, I think, as a
historian, or at least as an international
historian would see it. What can this tell us,
then, about this thing that I've been calling
the politics of eternity? Can we make this very, I
know, abstract concept somehow land on the events
that I'm describing? Well, first think about Hitler. The ideology that I described to
you is an ideology of eternity. It's about the way
things always are. When Hitler talked
about 1,000 year Reich, it wasn't that he meant
a specific 1,000 years. He was using round
numbers the way that we use round numbers in
order not to think about time. When there's a war
in Ukraine in 2014 and we think 100 years ago,
there was the First World War, therefore this is like that. That's a way of not
thinking with time. Using round numbers is a way
of not thinking historically. It's a way of imagining
eternity, cycles, regularities. 1,000 year Reich. So if you say, well,
the thousand year Reich, it only lasted for
whatever it would be. It only lasted for 12
and a half years, ha ha, you're missing the point. Because while it lasted,
it was in 1,000 year Reich. While it lasted, it
was all about eternity. When the German army marches
into the Soviet Union in the summer of
1941, they're not all thinking about
eternity and regularities. But as they start to
lose and as they're ordered to live
from the land, they do start to think about survival
and calories and the struggle of one race against the other. When the SS moves
into Eastern Europe, it's thinking about
eternity one way. It's thinking about
this lebensraum, which is going to reestablish
the normal rules of life on the planet. This lebensraum where
the master race is going to command and rule forever. But very quickly
they start thinking about turning a different way,
again, in terms of calories. As they manage the ghettos,
as they starve who they think needs to be starved, as
they make the decisions that the Jews, for example,
in the summer of 1942, the spring of 1942, the
Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, [? Irina ?]
Lipschitz's relatives, that these people should
be gassed to death rather than worked to
death because we don't have the calories for them. That's 1942. Or in 1942 when those Jews
are taken from the ghetto to the trains, how were
they brought there? The beginning, they're
promised bread and jam. They're promised bread and jam. Because their world
had been reduced to these regularities of
eating, of survival, of trying to get to the next day. That's unimaginable, isn't it? Bread and jam brings you
to [GERMAN], brings you to Treblinka. But that's how it
happened in the beginning. Or in 1943, the Warsaw
ghetto uprising. [INAUDIBLE] is putting down the
Warsaw ghetto uprising, one of the bloodiest
atrocities imaginable. Asked later about
why he was there and what he thought he was
doing, what does he say? He says, I was fighting for
the milk and honey of Ukraine. That's how he sees it all. It's a struggle for eternity. It's a struggle for
prosperity, which trend. So these facts, the fact
that you're actually taking Jewish children
out of basements and shooting them
or burning them, that fact is lost
in this general view that we're going
to master an empire and things are going
to change forever. They're going to
change forever for us. This logic, the way
that time breaks, the way that everything
flattens out, you can see it at
almost every level. When we move down to less
dramatic perpetrators, like the Polish police. Is their a sense of
time make any sense? Up until 1939,
Polish policemen were standing in the corners
of Jewish markets preventing pogroms. In 1942, they were
on the outside of the Jewish ghetto
helping to make sure the deportations
to Treblinka take place. How? Why? Because the state
has been destroyed and people who performed
one function in one set of institutions perform
another function inside of other institutions. If you were to say, no wait,
they're all anti-semites, then think about the Judenrat. The Judenrat undergoes exactly
the same kind of evolution. In 1939, the Jewish
men, the elders of the cities and
towns of Poland, were in charge of local
communal autonomy. Kosher, ritual slaughter,
taking money from abroad, marriages, funerals. All of that was
regulated in arrangement with the central Police state. When the central Polish
state is destroyed and German authority
comes in, those same men, and it is usually
those same men, then form this thing that
we call the Judenrat. And the men who were in
charge of weddings in 1939 are the same men who are making
the decisions about who's going to be deported first in 1942. Is it because they changed? They did change, but that's not
fundamentally what happened. What fundamentally
would happen is that the state ceased to exist. Time no longer made sense. Think about the collaborators
in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. Think about the fact that
many of them, quite possibly most of them, were
double collaborators. That they had first collaborated
with the Soviet regime and then collaborated
with the German occupiers. That's what I get for
talking with my hands. Then collaborated with
the German occupiers. Does that make any sense
in any kind of story about time moving forward? It doesn't. It makes so little sense that
books about the Holocaust do not capture. It cannot capture it. It's so much easier
to say, the Germans were going in a
certain direction or the locals were
all anti-semitic. A lot of them were. That's fine. We can grant that. But the story of a
Latvian policeman, for example, who earns his
living as a Latvian policeman in the '30s then becomes
a communist right when the Soviets come
and invade Latvia. And then becomes the commander
of the bloodiest unit of murderers of Jews in
history of the Holocaust. That story does not
make sense in time. It doesn't make
sense in progression. It only makes sense with these
powerful, powerful breaks. And one goes on and on. It can just keep going
down and down and down. At every fractal
level it's like this. The rescuers. How can you rescue when all of
the institutional structures incentives are against you? In the land of
statelessness, in Poland in the Soviet Union,
the Baltic states, it's a crime to try to rescue. It's a crime. It's a crime punishable
by death to aid a Jew. But how is that possible? Because there's no state. You're not a citizen. There's no institution
protecting you. The incentive
structure, therefore, is to turn in any Jew who
asks you for help, having first taken his or her money. Which is how most
people, but not everyone, not everyone behaves. Now, where does this bring us? It brings us to where I went
to try to come to a close which has to do with today. So first let me try to sum up. There are three parts. There are three
things happening. There's an idea
about globalization. And the idea is this
idea of eternity. Globalization is not
really moving us forward. Globalization is an illusion. The rules are an illusion. They're there to be broken. The exception is the rule. The emergency is normal. Struggle is all that's real. Anyone who tells you
otherwise is a Jew. This is Hitler's idea. And once you break that
down, you're moving towards, and this is the second idea,
a notion of ecological panic. If the world is just there
as a source of resources, as a limited supply
of resources, and all these rules are
lies meant to crush you and implicitly to
starve you, then you should break them
as soon as possible. You should take what you
can in order to survive, but simultaneously in
order to have the highest standard of living possible. How can any of this happen? This ideology can
only be animated and this panic can
only be produced when a state is transformed
on the basis of this ideology, and when that state then
destroys other states, which in the specific example
of the Holocaust is how the mass killing is
demonstrated to be possible. Now, let me then try to conclude
with a brief word about today. I'm not going to say that what
we have from here are lessons. I mean, I do actually think
there are lessons from the past and I've talked
about them elsewhere. What I'm going to
try to do instead is say that this notion of
how something was possible, this interpretation,
might be more useful to us than just remembering. A causal interpretation
which has pieces might help us to see patterns. If we can see what some
of those pieces are, then we might be able to see
them coming towards us now. So if I'm right, if I'm right
about this historical moment, and you notice
that all I'm doing is I'm trying to resuscitate a
notion of a historical moment by putting causality
into the story. I'm making a moment. If there's no causality,
it's just a flat memory. Or it's just an inevitable
line of progression. If you talk about causes,
then what you're trying to do is you're trying
to create a moment. So if I'm right
that in this moment there were basically
three kinds of causes, the anti-global idea, the
feeling of ecological panic, and then this fact of the
destruction of states, where does that leave us? Well, it makes the
history of mass killing since 1945 a lot clearer. All these events which
seem exceptional, whether it's Rwanda or Sudan
or Yugoslavia or Syria, they all make more sense
under this analysis. I'm happy to talk
about just why. We also have reasons to be
worried about the present, as we look at it now. China is a bit
similar to Germany in 1930s in that it's a
growing export power which can't, by any stretch of the
imagination, feed itself, and which has problems
which Germany didn't have, like a shortage of water. We have reasons
to be concerned, I think especially in
the present moment, with the collapse of states. When we look at Europe,
we see the weakening of the European Union. That's what's on the surface. But those states had
basically never existed. We can talk about this more. But those states have
basically never existed except as empires or as elements
of an integration process. There's never been a France. I realize no, I got
your attention finally. There's never been a France. There has been an empire
called France for a long time. And then as France
lost its empire, it went to this
integration process. That's European
history right there. You lose your empire and
you go into integration. The whole nation
state business right is there for the children. It's nice for the children. But it never actually happened. So as we look for, if
we look at the, perhaps, the end of the
European Union, we're looking at the risk of states. Do you really think
that Great Britain can pull out of
the European Union and still be Great Britain? Do you really think that
France can pull out and still be France? I have my doubts. And even if they
exist, it's not going to be the prosperity of the
European Union just divided into pieces. It's going to be something
very, very different. And of course, you
know what I'm going to say next, which is that
the populists who are now so important in Europe
and in the United States have a notion of time
which is basically flat. They're the ones who tell the
children's fairy tale about how there was once a nation state
and the nation state was great and all we have to do is
get rid of the globalism and the European Union
and then everything will return to normal. That never happened. That is a vision
of what's normal. It's not a reference
to history at all. Which brings me to
the United States. In the United States,
there are certain, I don't have to
tell you perhaps, there are some things going on
in the United States which are maybe not entirely [GERMAN]. To be wished for. To be wished for, I meant. To be wished for, sorry. It's like falling into
German is a bad habit that we've got to stop. It's got to be stopped now. So the personalisation
of globalization. The idea that
globalization has a face. That face is Jewish
or Mexican or Chinese or whatever it might be. The flattening
out of time right. The making America great
again with no notion of when again was because
there was never again. Again never happened. It's all a cycle. America was great when? At that mythical
time when it wasn't affected by the outside world. When was that? Never. It's a regularity. It's not history. It's a regularity. Enthusiasm for the
destruction of the state. A campaign and now a
White House strategist whose basic idea of
politics is that it shouldn't exist because the
state shouldn't really exist. That seems like a strange idea. People aren't used to it,
but it's definitely there. And of course, the generation
of ecological panic, by way of global warming. If we don't think that
there is global warming, we make ecological
panic more likely. Partly because we make the
disaster worse, but also partly when the country,
which is arguably the most important in the
whole process, says it's going to do nothing
except make the problem worse, other people are going to panic. And it doesn't help
in this connection that the region of the
world that's most affected by global warming
is largely inhabited by people who are Muslim. That doesn't help at all. It's a coincidence. It just happens to be the
case, but it is the case. And so when then one thinks
about south to north migration, both as a symbol
and as a reality, so long as we're
warming the planet, that's going to keep coming
both in Europe and in the United States. So these things,
unfortunately, are all connected in a kind of complex. Very last word. And this is the part
where I try to say that this is not all hopeless. So I need some nodding now. Thank you. So then what can be done? I mean, does it actually help
to try to create the 1930s and 1940s as a moment? Can creating the 1930s
and 1940s as a moment, as a horrible moment,
but as a moment, can that somehow be useful? Let me try to claim that it
can by returning the story of [? Irina ?] Lipschitz. So [? Irina, ?] remember. City girl, Polish Jew, standing
by a track in the swamp, puts out her hand. The man appears
over the horizon, double barrelled shotgun
over his shoulder. She looks him in the
eye and asks for help. And without batting an
eye, these are her words, without batting
an eye, he agrees and he digs her a shelter and
he feeds her for several months and she's going to
survive the Holocaust and she's going to give us
the words to this story. Now, what I find
most interesting about her testimony,
which she left right after the Second
World War, is that she doesn't give the man's name. Why do I find that so
interesting or so touching or so intellectually important? Because here's why. When we end the history
of the Holocaust with rescue, which we
almost always do, especially cinematically or in
memoirs, we almost always end it with rescue. That rescuer somehow redeems. He redeems the Polish
nation, he redeems the [? Belarusian ?] nation
or the Russian nation or the German. He somehow redeems or
he redeems all of us, because we imagine
that we would have acted the way he or she did. That's the literary moment. She didn't give us his name. He probably didn't belong to any
nation or thought that he did. And by not giving us the
name, she suspends something. She makes it harder for
us to fasten on that as the ending of a story. And of course, my point here
is that there isn't actually any redemption possible. Now, why is that important
and how could that be hopeful? I know, I'm digging myself
in deeper and deeper, but I'm going to
try to come out. How could that possibly
be a hopeful thing to say or a useful thing to say? Well, for this reason. Think about where
the culture is now. In our popular culture,
and I'm looking at you, gamers, in our
popular culture, we flip from normal to
post catastrophic. Everything that happens
in films and in games is always after the catastrophe. It is in this precise
world that I'm describing. There is no state. Everybody is competing
for resources. That's the plot. That's the background
to the plot, whether you have your hands
on the seat next to you at a movie theater
or whether you have your hands
around a joystick or whatever they're called
now, that's the plot. That's what's assumed. There's no state and we're all
just struggling for resources. We flip to post catastrophic
in the popular culture. What I'm trying to claim here
is that this is the wrong way to think about rescue. Because we don't know his name. And because we
don't know his name, we can think about whether we
would actually be like that. And the short answer
is we wouldn't. OK, again, I realize I'm digging
myself deeper and deeper. But this is going
to turn around. It's going to turn around. We wouldn't behave like that. We wouldn't rescue. So he was a smuggler. He was a moonshiner. He was an anarchist. Certain eyes light up. He was an anarchist. Under Poland, he
rescued communists because the Communist Party
was illegal in Poland. When the Soviets came, he
rescued Polish bureaucrats because the Soviets
were deporting them. And when the Germans
came, he rescued Jews. And for him it was all the same. It was a kind of defiance. I've been a friend who's
a moral philosopher who read my book in draft. And when he got to this
part about this rescuer, the moonshiner, the smuggler,
the defiance of everyone, he said, he wrote in the
margin, most of his corrections were just grammatical, but
he wrote on the margin here, I want to party with this guy. And the thing is,
wouldn't we all? But we wouldn't be that guy. We wouldn't actually
be that guy. People like that
who rescued when there was no infrastructure
around were very, very rare. And so what I want
to say about this is that the way to
think about rescue has to be to try to
prevent us from getting to that last moment. That moment where there's no
state, that moment where it's all struggle for resources. The way we tend to think
about rescue is, let's wait. And this is very American,
the sort of American style procrastination. Let's wait until the last
moment and then someone will come riding out
of history and save us. We'll come riding out of
history and save ourselves. But I think really the
point has to be that we have to create the history. We have to create the time. We have to produce the time. If you let it get to the last
minute, it's already too late. The moment that rescue in
the sense of the one person rescuing another as
the operative notion, it's already far too late. And so therefore,
rescue politically has to mean something like
knowing what the causes are. Hence the usefulness
of a historical moment. Trying to head off
some of those causes by knowing what the ideology
is, which we're pretty good at. Caring about structure and
about ecological panic, which maybe we're not so good at. Trying to think in
terms of our own moment, not just as a turning
point, but as a moment where we have a certain amount
of room for maneuver still. So this is where
I want to end up. The mistake that
people made when I was a student here, not
anybody I knew personally, of course, or any
of my teachers, but the mistake that people
made when I was a student here was to think
we are entering an age of inevitability. We know how things
are going to go. The place that I think
we're now slipping to now is where you go when the
inevitability, whatever you want to call it, liberal
order, globalization, progress, enlightenment, the place where
you slip when you believe in that is flat fascist time,
the politics of eternity, the sense of one's own virtue. We're slipping
towards that, I think. And what I think history can
do, even the darkest history, in fact, maybe only
the darkest history. What history can do is
create a sense of a moment where with a certain amount
of self-consciousness about causality, then we think
and we're right to think, that we have a certain
amount of agency. That is, we can think when
we know about another moment. We have the ability to
think about the small things that we might be able
to do in our own moment, but also to produce our
own moment to create a sense that we have some time. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] Half an hour for
questions. [INAUDIBLE]. I was going to say, usually
we have questions and answers, but those are all of my ideas. That was it. So you've been warned. If you wouldn't mind just
telling me who you are, because I know some of you,
but I don't know all of you. My name is Andy [INAUDIBLE]. And I have a history. I relate to your last point
here and can attest to it. We think of these moments
that there's time. Out of my background,
you I've attempted to make a difference
in the politics. I lived in Salonika, Greece. My family was
survivors in hiding. 50,000 Jews in Salonika
were exterminated. And out of the
50,000 Jews, we were one of three families
that were in hiding thanks to courageous Greeks
and survived to liberation. And so that's been my
heritage and my story. And your talk is very
interesting to me, because it creates a
context of, let's say, my level one experience at
that level of day to day. I was three, four years old. I have no memory
before I was seven, when my parents told
me what all happened. It's like sensitive
to that history where the Nazis invaded Salonika. They told lies and then they
used force to take over. The metaphor that I have
seen in this country is that people have been telling
lies and they've been using it. I apologize. People have been telling lies
and they've been using money to take control. And so it's left me
with this dilemma, because I go to bed
at night watching these crazy occurrences and
it's scared the heck out of me. And I've attempted to
make contacts with people, but everybody in
the political system was busy doing their own thing. I had no influence. I didn't have a
pulpit to stand from. But what I saw occurring
in Greece, the takeover and living through having
lived with several families and made it after
600 days, bottom line is that my interest
is how can we make a difference in seeing
this progression that you've articulated and
prevent it reoccurring? So thank you. Thanks for that. I'm going to talk
around it a little bit and then see if I can
say something useful. The first way I want
to talk around it is just to refer to something
else, which I've written, which I can't recite here. But I tried to
crystallize the things that I think we have learned
from the 1930s in Germany, but also the 1940s
in Eastern Europe, and also the current
return of authoritarianism, into a two page memo,
which is called 20 Lessons From the 20th Century
or something like that, which you can find if
you just look for it. On that dreadful thing called
the internet, you can find it. It's called the 20 Lessons
From the 20th Century. It's pretty good at
distilling what I think we can do in just a few words. Which reminds me of
the second thing. That started as a Facebook post. It's now been published
all over the place. But it started as
a Facebook post. But it leads me to the
second thing I wanted to say, which is I really think you
shouldn't watch stuff at night. You should read books. [LAUGHTER] No, I'm perfectly
serious about this. I think the fact that we
all stare at screens right before we go to bed tends
to destroy our sense of, not yours personally. I mean, you obviously have a
well-developed sense of time. But I think that the way that
we look at screens right up to the moment we go
to bed is unhealthy and that we should all charge
our gizmos in some other room and read a book before bed. I just think that
would be much healthier and help us to have a
sense that there is time. Intellectually, I know that. Yeah. You're right. It's hard though, isn't it? I mean, corporeally,
neurologically, it's hard. Greece. Greece is really
interesting and I hope you won't mind if I
say some general things about the history of
Greece, because it teaches us some things that help us see
the argument and the moment. One of them has to do
with anti-semitism. Anti-semitism does, of course,
matter in the Holocaust because it's so central
to Hitler's own ideas. Also many people
who are anti-semites take part in killing Jews and
people who are anti-semites are at the forefront of
killing Jews in 1941. It's very important. But it's not the
whole explanation. A lot of what one
sees in the Holocaust is that when institutions go
away, certain kinds of ideas creep in, creep out. Things that didn't
seem that important suddenly are important. And Greece is a good example. Nobody thinks there was that
much anti-semitism in Greece compared to other European
countries in the '30s. Compared to France, no. Compared to Poland or Romania. But nevertheless, when
the Greek state goes away, which in effect it does. I mean, Greece is a
strange sort of entity. It's totally
dependent on Germany. There isn't enough food
for a lot of the time. There's no foreign minister. It's not quite a state. During that moment when
the rule of law is open, then things that look
anti-semitic start happening, even if the people in
question weren't necessarily anti-semitic beforehand. There's a wonderful
article-- I wish I could remember
the colleague's name who wrote it-- about
the Jewish synagogue precisely in Salonika where the
people had kind of wanted that. It was a choice
piece of property and people had kind of
wanted it for a long time. The university was built on
being supportive [INAUDIBLE]. So people had had designs
on that piece of land for a long time. But under the conditions
of German occupation, and this goes to your point
in the way about money, the Germans can sort of
reach out to those people. And the people can
say, yeah, let's file a petition about that land. And it's not exactly
anti-semitism. It's very anti-semitic
in the outcome. [INAUDIBLE] Goodness. That's another question. But the end of the normal
regime of property rights means that something
like this can happen. And then once people
get that land, then you're not
just getting land. You're partaking in a story of
why it's OK to have that land. And then you have
anti-semitism afterwards, because you have to tell
some story about why that was a legitimate thing to be doing. So those are ways that
the history of Greece is actually really informative. That's the best I can do. I mean, on what we can
do, read the piece. But I think there's actually
rather a lot we can do. I mean, this is about my book. I didn't want to make it
all political advocacy. But what I'm trying
to set up here is the sense that we shouldn't
be sliding from, oh, hey, we knew was going to happen
to hey, we know nothing. We know a lot, actually. And because we know a lot, there
are a lot of specific steps we can take. How would you articulate
your objective? What would be your
[INAUDIBLE] to succeeding? Well, for me an understanding
and the production of time are very closely related. Understanding is an action
which isn't fleeting and it's not eternal. But it takes time and then it's
permanent once you've done it. So something like that. I think it's worthwhile trying
to understand the Holocaust. Not just because I think
it's the most important event of the 20th century in the West,
at least, on its own right, but also because if we
can understand that, then we have a better chance
of seeing history as going on. Something like that. If we can see history going on
and understand the Holocaust, then we can really believe
that history's going to go on. And we have to
believe it's going to go on or else we slide. Helps us address
the human condition. Excuse me? It helps us address
the human condition. There's that. Thank you. Thank you. OK, maybe this gentleman here. Thanks. My name is Aaron
and I'm studying philosophy, specifically
ethics here at Brown. I'm a junior and I'm a
grandchildren of survivors. My question is, I love
your framework, or at least these two warring conceptions
of time and history. But my problem is that they
in their inevitability, they both obviate the
discussion for the other. So if I believe in an arc
of time, an arc of history, that is inevitably going
to go towards one way, that obviates the intellectual
argument for a flat conception, an eternal conception of
history and vice versa. And so the problem
with that, then, is that it doesn't,
pardon my language, light a fire under
our ass when there's a problem facing the world now. For instance, in
Syria like you said. Or when you said in 1941
with [? Irina, ?] how already too many two million
Polish Jews had died. Right now there are a
million Syrian people who have been displaced
by the civil war. So it's happening now. And the problem is these
conceptions of time, how useful can they
be if they're not compelling us to fight the
terrorists when we see them? That's my question. I want to be very clear. I'm against them both, you see. I'm against them both. I'm against them both. I see them both as traps. And I see-- [INAUDIBLE] Sorry. Aaron is referring back to these
two ways of experience time. The first I call the
politics of inevitability. That is that we know roughly
where things are going. We know not to use the
word progress anymore because that's so 1950s. But we have a basic idea
where things are going. So Fukuyama 1990,
end of history. It's all somehow going
to work itself out as liberal democracy. That's what I'm calling the
politics of inevitability. Which is in opposition
to, as you quite rightly say, a flat fascist time, a
politics of eternity where nothing ever really happens. There's no goal. We shouldn't expect
anything better. Nothing's ever going
to really get better. It's always unclear
what's happening. We don't really know. There's no truth. So let's just kind of
hang out and let's click. Let's click. Let's get fat. There's nothing
we can really do. Life is one big couch surfing
party with the internet. And occasionally the leader
rises up and says something. You're absolutely right those
things are against each other. I'm trying to
oppose both of them. And it's not easy. Where I see is us sliding
from one to the other. Maybe my images are wrong. But what I see is this
vertical notion of time, the inevitability
now giving way. It's giving way. It's being crushed right now. But what's going
to happen to it? We're going to end up here
with this flat notion of time. And the one reason that
I think this can happen is that, well, A,
I see it happening. I mean, I see the
philosophers, literally the fascist
philosophers, return. I mean, I have this
professional deformation which says that everything
that happens in the west first happens in the east. I mean, my colleagues
who work on France think it's the other way around. When I see the return of
fascist philosophy to Russia and starting in Poland now, when
I see that happening, I think, OK, those are ideas which
are coming this way. And in terms of voting
patterns, in terms of things that leaning
politicians actually say, that seems to be happening. So my concern, I'm not for this. I'm also not for this. I think they're both
wrong, but also they're both, at the very
least, authoritarian. Because the first says
there's no particular reason to do anything because basically
history sorts itself out. And the second says,
there's no particular reason to do anything because there's
not really a future anyway. So one says we know what
the future is anyway, and the other says
there's no future. And if you slip from
one to the other, then there's no agency anywhere. I'm trying to oppose them both. And frankly, I don't
think it's easy. I think there are a lot
of ways in which people of good intentions are
shifting from this to this. For example, the argument, well,
it's all liberalism's fault, therefore we should
stop being liberals. That notion that liberalism
calls for fascism and communism and all about
things, therefore we should feel very
bad about ourselves. But feeling very about ourselves
is not a historical posture. Or just flat out
fascism, like the idea that history hasn't
been interesting, it's just art being interesting. Like Steve Bannon
says in his interview with the Hollywood
Reporter, it's going to be fun
again like the 1930s. That spirit that things should
be-- yeah, that's what he said, unfortunately. It's going to be fun
again like the 1930s. That notion that
everything is boring, let's make it exciting
again, that's what the fascists thought. Mainly most of them
were younger than 62 when they wrote that or said it. And by the time
they were 62, they had shares in
American universities and then they could disclaim it. But basically that's
a fascist idea. This is all boring, let's
make it exciting again. Let's break some stuff right. The word disruption. Everyone loves the
word disruption. Let's disrupt for the
sake of disruption. So I agree with you. I'm against both of them. Neither of them motivate
us towards action. That's my point. And so I'm trying
to make this case for history, which is
an unintuitive one, a counter-intuitive one. Because usually we think,
OK, history, that means we're sitting on a couch
reading a book. I'm trying to say that
a sense of history gives us a sense of
time and a sense of time gives us a sense
that we actually might be able to do
something about the world. This is obviously
not a revolutionary. It's not a banner that
I'm asking you to follow. But what I'm saying
is we're at the risk of falling from one mistake into
an even more dangerous mistake. And we have to catch
ourselves somewhere. He had his hand up before. My name is [INAUDIBLE]. I'm a first year species
student at the Political Science department. Firstly Professor,
thank you for a book that's not only good
scholarship, but also good prose. It was a very easy read,
so thanks a lot for that. There was this paragraph in
the last chapter that had me take a pause from reading. And I actually took a photo
so that I don't lose the page. We find it easy to dismiss Nazi
ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness
convinces us that we are different from
Nazis by shouting the ways we are the same. Before coming
here, my background was in the think tank world. I was the bottom rung of
the places I was working at. But some of the
people I worked with, they were genuinely
convinced evangelists of the liberal triumphalistic
zeitgeist you were taking on in your speech. And many of them seem
genuinely distressed and at a loss as to
how we came here. The big revelation
for me in all of this, some of these pieces
one could infer through reading other stuff. But this is paroxysmal. It comes in sudden bouts
of hysteria of sorts. And once you realize that
it's arrived, once you realize that you've forgotten
how similar you are to Nazis and to those that
proclaimed the end of history before them, it's
kind of too late. So it seems like
there is something we lose in translation
in progress and it seems like we're entering
a similar period once again. What's this malaise
about our forgetfulness and how do we fix that? What's the omega 3 solution
for our longer term memory? Thank you. I mean, it's a little bit
like the previous question. If I were to give a
clear, resounding answer, I would be disagreeing
with my own argument. Yeah, I can give a
two finger answer. I give two cheers answer. Well, you want two of what? You want two seconds. I'm not asking what the solution
is necessarily, but more why do we forget? How do we come here? Is it just the way we are or
is it something about the way politics and our ideas
about politics function? No. So that's a good question
because you're forcing me-- so I started this talk with a
kind of intellectual history move. And I said, there's this
idea, there's this idea, they're up against each other. They're both wrong. Let's try to have
a different idea. And now you're asking,
why do we even have? Why do we do this? And that's a good question. It's a hard question, but
I'll take a stab at it. It seems to me that
we don't want to say that it's just the way we are. Because even if it is
just the way we are, that would be such a
horrifyingly dreadful conclusion that we wouldn't
really want to draw it. We should use our agency
not to draw that conclusion. We don't want to say
it's just the way. I mean, no historian
will ever really say it's just the way we are
because every historian will say human nature is plastic
and so on and so forth. So what I would say
is that the notion that I very quickly
and roughly called the politics of
inevitability actually has some pretty
interesting material roots. So politics of
inevitability can take over politics of eternity
in a material situation where food leaves politics. So for the entire history
of the entire world-- I don't think I'm
wrong about this-- with the exception of about
60 years in the post-war west, food was always in politics. There was no politics
without food, there was no food
without politics. In that sense, Hitler
and lebensraum and all that are normal. I mean, they're
normal in the sense that he doesn't distinguish
between nutrition and aggression. That's actually
pretty much normal. Your generation, my generation,
the generation on top of me and maybe half a
generation more, those are the only people in
the history of the world who have ever had this
notion that politics could be separated from food. And that really helps to think. That really helps you to
think that then history could be coming to an end. Because what would
we be fighting about? When you're not on a day
to day basis animated by, or as a government
planner, you're not on a year to year or
quarter to quarter or month to month basis,
animated by the question of how are we going to
get enough calories? Then the notion that
it's all about ideas and that the better
ideas are going to win, that kind of thinking
becomes much more plausible. So now I'm making a historically
contextualizing argument because I'm saying that we're
in this very special bubble. Now, that bubble, I
think, is going to burst. I think that's part that's
part of our problem. And when I say we're more like
the Nazis than we realize, we have to be aware
of the bubble we're in before we have
a sense of how we react when it's going to burst. Then as for the
question of liberals and why they have
to be so evangelist and why they always have
to be wrong, I mean, I would counsel
against this notion. What's funny about
fighting with Hegel I'm not the first
person to say this, is whenever you fight with
Hegel, he always comes back and like slaps you from behind. Like in my story. So Fukuyama says Hegel. But then ironically, even
as Fukuyama's saying Hegel says history is over, ironically
at that very moment in Russia another Hegelian is coming back
who says that history is over for a different reason. And in that very disagreement
between two Hegelians, we see how history is not over. Because we have a disagreement
of ideas between two Hegelians, et cetera, et
cetera, one of them is very important in the
American power structure, one of whom turns out to be very
important in the Russian power structure. And so irony, irony, irony. You can't ever get
out of dialectics. I want to try to say, though,
that liberalism, we can't just unfold the history of liberalism
into this kind of dialectic where it seems like they're
winning, then they're blind, then they have to lose. I really hope we can avoid that. I admit it happened once. I mean that's
happened once already and that's a story
that I'm telling. But I think that one can
have a notion of liberalism where you say, we
don't have to win. We can lose. We lose all the time. We've lost before. But nevertheless, we're real. What worries me a
little about liberals and their opponent
sometimes is they say, well, once liberalism loses something,
liberals must win everything or it loses everything. I don't see why. Why can't liberalism win a
local election in South Dakota every now and again? Why can't liberalism win some
things but not everything? In a way, I think that's a
way of defining the stakes. Because like if the
stakes are all or nothing, then of course liberalism
is going to lose. And that's why I
think you have to, not you, one has to drop the
idea that it's all or nothing. Because if you think
it's all or nothing, then it is all or nothing. I don't think it is. I mean, I think liberalism
has kind of won. I mean, I'm really a
cognitive pluralist. I think there are plenty of
other ideas out there, which have their own logics and power,
and liberalism is out there with them. One part of liberalism's
predispositions is to say it's all or nothing. Since we're universalists,
we have to win completely or we have to lose completely. And I'm afraid that that's
part of why liberals tend to go from here to here right. So I'm trying to
answer your question. I'm just trying to
say we don't have to. We can fall halfway
down the ladder and then grab onto a window
ledge and then say, oh look, there's a flower here. And then kind of
smell it for a while and then get a better sense of
the moment, take a deep breath. We need to do that. Window ledges,
flowers, deep breaths. Need that. Yes sir? Yeah, microphone. Is it on? My name's Roger
[? Zentner. ?] I'm a retired lawyer living
here in Providence. Your description
of the regularities of the politics of
eternity kind of struck home with me
because the first time I heard Donald Trump refer to
let's make America great again, I looked at my wife, I
said, what in the hell is this guy talking about? It's a fantasy. And the thing about
it, however, is thing that I have despair
about is that there's about 60 million people in
this country who believe in that fantasy, who
believe in that articulation of irregularity that really,
as far as I'm concerned, doesn't exist. And I just am concerned
that with Hitler it took a terrible
world war to correct his conception,
his regularities, and his conceptions,
fantastical conceptions. And I'm not giving up. But I guess I do have some
despair in the situation this country finds itself in. I guess it's not a question. No, it's OK. I'm going to do the same
thing I did in the talk, which is I'm going to make
it worse, and then I'll try to make it maybe a
little better at the end. So American political culture
is not my area of expertise. It does strike me, though, that
the people who voted for Trump. I share your anxiety. Of course I share
anxiety, because I had this notion of regularities
and I was arguing about this and talking about the
return of flat fascist time and all this sort of
thing before the Trump phenomenon came on the scene. And in my way of seeing the
world, which might be right or might be wrong, the west
really is a kind of entity. And this is something
which started in Russia and has sort of been spreading. And there are various
ways Russia and America cross-pollinate all the time. And right now they're doing
more of the pollination and we're doing more
of the flowering. But I think it's like this. This is one historical loop
between Russia and America, including Ukraine and Europe. I mean, this is the book
that I'm trying to write now. I see it as sort
of one story, which is a way slightly going
back to your question and your question. It's a way that I'm not an
American exceptionalist. American exceptionalism
for me is another word for complacency. You think you're an
exception, therefore you don't have to think. We're so slow of foot. It's going to be a painful
comparison, I hope. But Ukrainians were
so much faster in 2014 to react to the same
stuff that we got in 2016. The Russians did the same
cyberwar against Ukraine they did against us. And the Ukrainians were much
faster in reacting to it. And they were also much
more skeptical more quickly about this thing called
fake news than we are. I mean, that's a
big generalization, but I was in both
places, and that's kind of my very strong sense. We're reacting to
the same stuff. We kind of limp along,
we're not sure, who knows. Oh yeah, somebody got elected. But I promised you I was going
to try to make it better. I mean, I'm worried about this. There are some other reasons
why people vote for Trump. There are some reasons, which
I think on the east coast are often not clear. Like one phenomena
I think we have to keep in mind is all the
folks who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. If you take them out,
he loses the election. In Ohio, he gets a lot of
people who voted for Obama. And so then we have
to think a little bit about our identitarian stuff. We have to think a little
bit about whether it really is all about racism,
which I think is a shortcut we too often use. And I think there are
things that are simpler. People are really getting
hit by globalization. And here's a guy who has a
story about globalization. We don't like the story,
but there's also the fact that they really are getting
hit by the globalization and it really is happening. There really are class
interests involved. And rightly or wrongly,
of course I think wrongly, but rightly or wrongly,
people were seeing him as being somehow on their side. And then that invites
them into the story and that's where
things get dangerous. The reason why I have
some amount of hope is that I think
that we can actually process the 20th century. So for example, if I
say Reichstag fire, I'm now going back to
your question, sir. Reichstag fire. We should immediately
have the reflex that if there is a terrorist
incident in some sensitive spot in the United States a couple
of months into the Trump administration, we shouldn't
all jump up and down and scream about
how we need to have parliament suspended and a
state of emergency and so on. We should know that that's the
oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. We should know that
the state of emergency declared in Germany
after the Reichstag fire lasted throughout all
the way to 1945, as you say. We can recognize these things. And there aren't actually
that many new things in the eternity playbook. Reichstag fire is pretty big. So there are things that
we can look out for. So this is why
devote so much energy in the talk to let's
remember that there is a historical moment. Because in that moment,
there are these patterns and these examples that
we can maybe pull out. When the Reichstag fire
happened to the Germans, they weren't really
ready for it. There's no reason
why we shouldn't be ready for the Reichstag fire. I mean, not the
actual Reichstag. The actual Reichstag is fine. I've seen their fire alarms. They have a really
good fire alarms. It's not called the
Reichstag anymore either, but you get the point. But if something blows up the
United States, god forbid, we should not immediately
think oh yes, this means there must be
a state of emergency. We should be ready. We should be ready. We actually don't know who
set the Reichstag fire. There's no revisionist
literature about this now, which says that maybe it
actually was the German state. I'll just leave you
with that thought. Let's see. There was this gentleman. I guess two things. One of which, the idea of--
you mentioned, you know, about discontinuity. I think it was someone, a
police officer or someone, and it was a communist
and there were the Nazis. And I was wandering with the
authoritarian personality to a certain extent there
might have been continuity in the sense that
there are always people who are opportunists, who
have their finger to the wind. And if some new people
come into power, they'll identify
with them and do whatever they can to not
identify with whoever was on the receiving end. And so when there's a change,
they go along with that change. So the idea that there's
an authoritarian that goes with whoever the powers may be. And when those in power change,
their allegiances change. But their compass
remains the same. The other thing is
[INAUDIBLE] two things, one of which about
the vulnerability of historical truth. And the other thing
about the idea of that colonialism as a
precursor to fascism. I think of these maps of
1920s Europe and so forth and the entire globe is
under colonial domination. There's no place else to go to. You think of Eichmann
and Madagascar. And the idea of
the United States as a model of eliminating
the indigenous population and seeing that as a potential
model of what Hitler might have wanted to do with Russia. And last but not least, I
mean, the idea of the state. And here's where I'm
trying to tease, out because it makes so much
sense what you're saying, but at the same time
I wanted to push back. I mean, to a certain extent,
the repressive apparatus of the state is the SS. The idea of using that force. So wasn't at least
that facet of the state that Hobbes would
say conceivably might have been the most
essential, a monopoly of force might have been an
essential element. And to that extent it
wasn't statelessness, even though it is, but
there was elements of state. And last but not least,
France, Britain, and so forth. If it's not 1648 Westphalia,
Western nation-state system as the model of the state
that they're not really states or haven't
been in the past. It was empire and
then integration. What is a state? And what kind of
historical instance would you provide us for
an idea of a stable state as an alternative to
this horrible Holocaust? OK. You started off so modestly. I'll take it in reverse. So I'm not trying to claim
that there's never been a state or that Britain and
France weren't states. What I'm trying to
say is that the notion of a nation state, a
territorially bounded [INAUDIBLE], in the case of
France, that that never really happened. Or when it did happen, it
tended to be a disaster. So I'm willing to accept that
there was a Serbian nation state. The Serbian nation
state, in my view, was the progenitor of
all the rest of them. And the Serbian nation state
led us to the First World War. With France and Britain,
they exist as empires. I mean, this way I'm really with
the transnational post-colonial people on this particular point. It's just that I include Europe. And usually people
mark of Europe and they say, this is the
zone where people colonize and they mark off
the rest and say, this is only where
people get colonized. I buy the whole
post-colonial thing. I just think it has
to be consistent and we don't put the
white people here and the brown people here. It's all one process
and people colonize other people regardless of what
we see as race all the time. Which brings me to your
Hannah Arendt point. Of course this is
absolutely right. I mean, Hannah Arendt
made this argument on the strength of cigarette
smoke and reading Joseph Conrad. But I think she was
fundamentally correct. The intuition that you have
to begin from a boyhood like Hitler is where the world
really was covered Empire, where the space for Germany
to have a place in the sun is running out and
that Hither concludes that what one has
to do is precisely apply the logic of
empire to Europe itself. So it's not because he's
perfectly consistent, but he sometimes
talks about Ukraine as India, sometimes as Africa,
sometimes is the American West. But in every single case,
it's always some kind of imperial reference. And it follows from this
that there aren't really states there. Those aren't really states. They might look like states. So he takes the same attitude
towards the Soviet Union and Poland that
European colonizers did towards the
political entities that they encountered in
other parts of the world. These aren't really states. These aren't really people. They don't really have rights. And that's the logic
of the destruction of the indigenous political
order, whatever it might be. International law applies to us. It doesn't apply
internationally. It applies to us. And so the dirty little
secret of the way the European Union works
is that the people who'd been saying that the
international law only applied to us ended
up only having Europe. And then international
law applied to them right and they've applied a
very well to themselves. So France exists as a state. Great Britain exists as a state. My intuition, my strong one,
is that the nation state or whatever is necessary
but not sufficient. So people who think
the European Union can exist without some kind of
lower level entities, I think, are mistaken. But I think also
people who think that Montenegro or
Macedonia or even Britain are going to survive without
some higher level of politics, I think that's also a mistake. I think you have to have
both things at the same time. On truth, this is
very close to home. I mean, let me try and answer
it in a vocational way. There are professions where
truth is very important. Journalism, history. We just have to
look around to see what's happened to journalism. Journalism is under huge threat. I mean, financial
but also ideological. I mean, the notion
that there isn't really any truth is one
that's been shoved down the throat of the profession. And now we're seeing,
interestingly, if you look at the headlines
of the New York Times and the Washington Post just
like in the last few weeks, they've taken some
kind of a turn. The Washington Post headline
which says, I'm paraphrasing, Trump says baselessly. The word baseless in a headline. That's new for
American journalism. They're moving out of the on
the one hand, on the other hand, I read it on the
internet, as opposed to I read it in the encyclopedia. They're moving away from
that, which is interesting. And what I'm not going to
define truth for you here. But I think I think truth as
a vocational goal is obviously very important to professions
like journalism and history. And those are both professions
which, in my scheme here, are professions
that help us to buy time. Opportunism as historical. I mean, I'm willing to accept
that people are generally opportunistic, or that
some people are, or maybe even that there's
some such thing as authoritarian personality. But what I mean is that once
we get down to that level, then there's no longer
historical story. Then we're precisely
moving towards eternity. Because what you're really
saying is people are this way. OK, they're this way. But then we don't have history. Then we don't have
history anymore. If you can create a situation
where your description is the right one, then that's
my description of how the Holocaust happened
in large measure, that we get people to that
point were the only thing that matters is that. Because that's
historically contingent. We could be in a
world like the world we're in now where
the law counts and where all sorts
of other things count. Or we could be in a world where
only our opportunism counts. And when we're in
that world, which is the world of, let's
say, Latvia in 1943, we're in that world, we all
behave very differently. So I would just
historicize your point and say, yeah, that
might be a description, but it's a description of
a certain kind of world. And then those people do things. And this is what's important. Then those people do
things that they never would have done otherwise. We are well out of
time, but we should continue the conversation
over drinks and book signings. [APPLAUSE]
