Angry Planet - ICYMI: A Timothy Snyder Double Feature

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

We’re running our Thanksgiving break episode a week early. We’ll be back next week to talk with Mark Galeotti about Russia, Kherson, and the missiles that just hit Poland.This week, we’re going far back into our past. It’s a Timothy Snyder double feature. Both of these episodes are from our “War College” days and feature the famous historian at two different points in his journey to the cable news pundit we feel (well, I feel) weirdly ambivalent towards today.The first is from 2015, and is a disucssion about his book Black Earth. The second is from 2018 and is about his book Road to Unfreedom.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom.

freedom is never state-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. We're doing our Thanksgiving break rerun

episode a week early. So next week, while you're spending time with your friends and family, you will have a new episode of Anchory Planet. It is going to be about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We're talking to Mark Goliati. But we're recording that conversation on Friday. We're supposed to do Monday, but some things got shifted around. So we're trying to figure out what we wanted to rerun. We've got this vast catalog of old episodes. And then the news hit, and it's just breaking now as I'm sitting down talking to you. So I don't know exactly what's going on or what the repercussions are going to be. But the news hit that two, what appears to be two Russian rockets, hit in Poland and killed some civilians, killed some. people. Again, this happened like maybe 30 minutes ago as I'm sitting here recording. And I got to

thinking about the bloodlands, that area that's between Russia and Poland, or sorry, that area that's between Germany and Russia, you know, Ukraine, Poland, this area that's kind of consistently been bullied and beaten and invaded from all of its neighbors and thinking about the military build up in both Poland and Ukraine since the end of World War II and everything that NATO and others have done to kind of build up those areas and just to make sure something like World War 2 never happens again or at least that it goes down in a very different way. And of course, if you're thinking about the Bloodlands, you're thinking about the book Bloodlands, which is written by historian Timothy Snyder, it is like an excellent history of the area that has a lot of primary

sources and really lays out everything that goes on in there. Well, we've had Mr. Snyder on the show twice. They were both in the war college days. They were both as he was having new books out. I thought it would be interesting to dig those up and put them out here. And you'll see some some real rough edges from us. I obviously don't have my recording equipment in the best possible shape for the first conversation. And then the second one, Snyder is coming through on like a phone, the worst possible source. To be honest, he's always a little bit interesting to deal with. You'd always only set aside like 15, 20 minutes. He'd want to kind of rush through You always got the sense that we were not quite big enough game for Mr. Snyder.

And I think this is also very interesting, kind of given how history is played out. The first time we talked to him was for his book, Black Earth, which is first part is kind of Holocaust history. And it starts to dive into how climate change could be the precursor for something similar to the Holocaust. how things like the Holocaust don't just happen because of ideology, but there are like material conditions that set the stage for them. And it's a pretty good book. And then like after that, as, you know, we learn more about Russia and Ukraine and its involvement in our election

and Donald Trump, Mr. Snyder, like so many other academics, really dives feet first into this. America is ending. We are on the road to unfreedom, which was the title of the book that we talked about him in the second half, and really getting into how authoritarianism is kind of born out of democracies and how it's possible that we're seeing the early signs of that. it is a kind of a through line of thought that I've been having more trouble with as the years go on, you know, the more like I think increasingly that authoritarian regimes like Russia look pretty weak, that democracy, especially in America, is shockingly strong.

I think we've proven that out time and time again. We do have these very, very loud voices that, that, you know, fight pushback against our elections and say that things are rigged, etc., etc., but we have these pretty secure elections here. The institutions, despite some people's attempts to undermine and destroy them, remain fairly strong. And I think that keeps being borne out. An election in America does not look like an election in Russia, and thank God for that. What does a Russian election look like? Well, Snyder is pretty good on this, and he's going to walk you through it here in a minute.

So we're doing a double feature today. We're going to talk about, we're going to talk with Snyder about Black Earth and Road to Un Freedom. I think the first one is from 2015, if that's possible, if we go back that far. And then the next one is from 2018. And it's interesting to see history play out. And it's also interesting because Snyder is this guy. that is this very famous historian and wrote like this incredible text, and then he's kind of lost himself in cable newsworld.

And the books keep getting shorter. And I think that there's, if you talk to some historians about Black Earth and some of the things that are in there, there's some stuff in there that feels a little bit sloppier than Bloodlands does. And Road Doan Freedom is this tiny, thin little thing. And so the books keep feeling like they're shift into more political commentary and less history. And I think that that's kind of, to see one of our stellar academics kind of shift into that space, I don't know. It's all very interesting. So let's see where Snyder is at these two different pieces of the journey.

And we will be back next week, Thanksgiving week, with a more current conversation with Mark Galiati. I will be sure to talk about what's just happened in Poland. We'll talk about Kursan. and we'll talk about what all of this means for Putin, and we will see you then. All right. So here's Jason introducing War College, a different podcast from a different time. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters opinion editor, Jason Fields.

And I am Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. With us today is historian and author Timothy Snyder. Snyder's research focuses on recent European history and especially the Holocaust. His newest book is Black Earth, The Holocaust as History and Warning. Professor Snyder, Tim, thanks so much for joining us. Very glad I can. So this book, along with Bloodlands, is a very careful examination of the conditions necessary for something like the Holocaust to happen. Can you describe what the conditions are?

We usually think about the Holocaust as if it were a story, and that means we use. We usually narrate it. We think about it in terms of people's memoirs or we think about it in terms of a film that we might have seen, a Hollywood film we might have seen. We think about it as having a kind of necessary narrative structure where things start out good, they get worse and then they end in the most absolutely terrible kind of way. And I think we get carried along by those narratives in such a way that we don't actually see all the causes. So we of course do see the cause of anti-Semitism, political anti-Semitism, we see discrimination in Germany. We understand that Hitler mattered and so on. But what we don't see, I think, is that for a Holocaust to happen, you need much more than people who are anti-Semitic, you need much more than authoritarian state. That's part of it. But even within that part, even within Hitler's mind, even within the ideology, which we all understand to some extent or another, you can see that other factors are necessary. because what Hitler was about was not just making Germany an authoritarian state or a national state or an anti-Semitic state.

What he was about was changing the planetary order. What he was about was mobilizing our sense that we need more, that we want more, and that that's legitimate. His anti-Semitism actually was the notion that all notions of ethics that might restrain us from taking more are somehow from Jews, by Jews, and the service of Jews. And in practice, Hitler understood that in order to carry out something like, like a Holocaust. One had to go well beyond Germany and destroy other states. So even to love of the ideology, it's clear that this thing that I call ecological panic, the desire for more and more in the sense that that's legitimate, and then this thing that I call state destruction, moving beyond Germany are necessary. In practice, that turns out to be completely right. In practice,

there is no Holocaust to speak of in Germany while Hitler's in power before the war. The Holocaust is something which takes place beyond Germany, during a war, which has fought for resources, in places where Germany ends up destroying other states. So ideology, ecological panic, and state destruction are the factors that I would mention. When you're talking about the scarce resources, because that's something that really has a lot to do with today, and hopefully we'll get to a little bit more of that later on. But did his fears have any sort of foundation in Germany at the time? This is the part that gets really tricky, because the simplest way to run the argument would be this kind of Malthusian or mathematical way.

where you say, aha, there was objective scarcity and therefore people did the things they did. But in fact, societies aren't like that. Political systems aren't like that. People aren't like that. It's not that we rationally look at resources and make rational decisions. Unfortunately or unfortunately, that's just not how things work. What happens is that you have a combination of two things. You have certain real sources of scarcity, which were present in Germany plus a political interpretation. So were there real problems in Germany? Yes. I mean, especially, if you compare it to say the United States now or Germany for that matter now, you had very reason to believe that international markets were not a reliable source of food. Reason number one is that

during the blockade of Germany, during and after the First World War, Great Britain, which at the time was the big champion of free markets, right? Great Britain actually blockaded Germany, which is the most fundamental violation of free markets that you could think of. And then, you know, after the workforce said, well, there's no reason to be concerned. Naturally, if you're Germany, you would be concern that your food supplies are dependent upon another state which happens to dominate sea lanes around the world. Second reason is that if your Germany, you would decide to feed yourself, you actually can't do it with the technology in 1930s. The only way to do it would be to sacrifice a good deal of the industry that you have. And the industry that you have is what makes you a

wealthy, prosperous country and it's your future. So there is some basis for all of this. What's important, though, is that Hitler takes those fears and anxieties and he adds to them an idealized. which has two parts. The first part is to say that it's legitimate to be afraid about resources. There's no reason not to, and it's legitimate to want ever more. This is really important. What Hitler says is that our fears and our envy, these emotions are totally justified, and that anything which might restrain them is artificial and Jewish. That is, in fact, a big part of the content of his anti-Semitism. The other part of what Hitler says is that the way to ensure access to resources is to moved beyond Germany and to take and to take more land. And we're, we're Hitler and that of course

is not actually true. I mean, it would have made much more sense to rely on on pesticides and boring things like hybridization of grains and irrigation than than to take more land. But that's, that's the logic that Hitler was actually able to pass on. So it's a mixture. You have to take people's emotions, fears, you have to say those fears are justified, then you have to get them some mission where that emotion can be realized. And Hitler succeeded in doing that, which is what concerns me that someone else could succeed in doing that as well. And that's interesting that you're talking about him turning away from kind of these agricultural and scientific solutions, because this is a time also when Fritz-Hobber had invented a new way

to put nitrate into the soil. There's a lot of, there's the green revolution going on at the same time, right? But he used kind of science, Hitler, used science to his own ends in his ideology. Is that correct? The word science can mean a lot of different things. things. When we say the word science, your listeners will have a lot of different associations. What Hitler said was science gives us a portrait of the world. Hitler was a Darwinist in the bad sense of the word. He took an extreme social Darwinian view, which was that animals do nothing except seek after more resources. People are just like species of animals. We have no other purpose except to seek after more resources, land and food, above all. There's nothing else in life.

That's all there really is. Any idea you have in your head about something besides that probably comes from a Jew. That's his extreme version of anti-Semitism. So for Hitler, science gives you a portrait. It's a fixed portrait of natural struggle. Hitler says it's a scientific law. It's as sure as the law of gravity. That's right at the beginning of Mindcom.

Now, what that means is that science is not what other people might think it is, namely a field of experimentation, a mode of learning, a fashion of testing, hypotheses and have then the ability to change the relationship between people or between people and nature by way of technology. Hitler explicitly says, and this is really interesting, he explicitly says, science is not that. Or insofar as it is, it might create new technologies, but those two technologies cannot change the fundamental relationship between people and the world. So there are these long, unread sections of MnKamp and his second book in which he specifically talks about, he specifically talks about nitrogen fertilizer, irrigation, hybridization of crops,

all the things which, as you say, make up the green revolution. And he says, these things exist, but they can't change the relationship between people and land. That's really important. For one thing, for Hitler, it has to be true. Because for Hitler's whole worldview to work, we have to be in this, we have to be in this infinite and unending struggle for resources. But what's even more interesting than that is what Hitler says in the second book. And here I think we catch on to something which really has present resonance. Hitler is not saying exactly that these things don't work. What he's saying is they will never work enough for us to be satisfied.

And what does he mean by satisfied? By satisfied, he doesn't just mean that you have enough food in your belly. He means that you feel yourself to have the highest standard of living in the world. He makes the claim that Germans' understanding of consumer satisfaction, not from objective but from subjective sources. and those subjective sources are their perception of how well Americans are living, right? And if Germans are measuring their happiness by way of how well Americans are living, that means they have to have as much technology as the Americans do, right?

But also as much land. So at the end of the day, you still have to take more land. I think this is really important because what Hitler manages to do is that he confuses, he gets life and lifestyle all mixed up together. So that we think it's legitimate. It's a matter of, as it were, survival for us to go off and starve millions of other people in order to preserve our life. But what he means by life, actually, is the sense that we have the best lives in the world. That's what he thinks Germans deserve as the highest race.

We would never quite put it this way. But I think when you read his work, this is some of the stuff which strikes a little bit close to home. And I would say a little bit too close to home, which is why we ignore it. So that actually, I mean, we do talk about fighting for the American way of life. in this country. I mean, I guess that's supposed to be high-minded ideals more than it is. Material goods, though, right? Well, I mean, what we mean when we say we're fighting for the American way of life is something that exceeds my competence. We generally, I think, have in mind, I think in the nice version of that, what we're saying is that we would like for other people

to enjoy some of the better things about our way of life. But I think, yeah, in the dark version of that, we would be saying that it doesn't matter what happens in the rest of the the world provided that our way of life here in America persists. And that whole notion of fighting for a way of life is confused around the edges in a way which, you know, maybe we should be focused on. All right. So we're kind of talking about one of the parts of your book that fascinated me the most, which was the way the American dream and American Western novels and American pop culture kind of influenced Hitler. And I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, and how it shaped his conception of, I'm going to say this word wrong.

Leibn's realm. Leibons realm? Okay. Tim probably says it better than I do. I'm sure. He probably says it, yeah. Let me start again in a slightly different place. Okay. So much of getting history right is undoing the things that we think we know. And the things we think we know are generally the things that are implanted in our minds from, you know, national history education when we're too young to defend.

ourselves. So if we know anything about Hitler and America, what we were taught in school, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong in your cases, but what we were taught in school was that Hitler did not like the United States. He said it was too multicultural, that we were mongrelized racially, that we could never win the war because there were too many black people and too many Jews, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, he did say those things. But he said them in 1942 after Germany was at war with us. Once Germany is at war with the United States, Hitler can course, no longer say, as he said before, that America is the coming world power, that the American people are a young and strong race, that the Americans have everything that Germany needs

and so on. He obviously, once he's bound, once he's fighting the British and the Soviets and the Americans, he can't say things like that out loud anymore. But if you go back to his actual work, Mind Kampf, but especially the second book, it's clear that the United States for him is the model of how you build a land empire. The sea lanes are closed. you can't have another maritime empire. Britain assures that, but he's very reassured by the existence of United States of America, because he sees the United States of America as, as he believes, Aryan peoples, Germans and Scandinavians, pushing across an empty continent,

destroying whatever is in their way, wiping out native peoples, using slavery, and creating this unbelievably prosperous and flexible economy. And so his notion is that if the Americans, who he sees, I mean wrongly, of course, but who he sees as basically Germans, if the Americans can do it, in North America, the Germans can repeat that same feat in Eastern Europe. And his metaphors about this leave no room for doubt. He talks about the Volga, which is the river that runs through Russia, defining European Russia, that the Volga will be our Mississippi.

He says, you know, when he talks about invading Eastern Europe, he says, who will remember the Red Indians? When he talks about Ukraine, he makes references to all the grain that comes from Canada and so on and so forth. It's absolutely clear that what he also says, the history of the American West will repeat itself when Germany invades Eastern Europe. He's impressed by the fact that the Americans have been able to not only control a good deal of land, develop that land very quickly and create the standard of living, which is unparalleled. And he believes that the future of Germany is going

to have to consist in matching that level of standard of living. So this thing which we call the American dream was also part of what Hitler was pursuing. In the conclusion of your book, you examine how the concepts of, you know, standard of living, Leaven's realm, and global warming could come together. Can you help us to understand what you mean by that? And are there specific places that are more vulnerable than others to this kind of conflict? So I'm going to stress that whatever I say about the present and the future comes from a very specific place.

It comes from this reanalysis of the Holocaust itself. If you think of the Holocaust just in terms of ideology, then you can tend to believe that it's just a matter of a kind of moral self-examination. correction. If we behave well and teach other people behave well, everything will be okay. What I'm convinced of is that that's not actually true, that if other conditions like ecological panic or state destruction are present, then those kinds of ideologies, hitlerian ideologies, other kinds of exclusive destructive ideologies will find more purchase in society. So I'm looking at a mixture of those three factors as a source for the event itself.

And once you do that, then the Holocaust leads to different understanding to the present and different projections towards the future. All I'm stressing is that we all basically already look at the Holocaust and draw conclusions for the present and future. Mine are different, not because I am such a genius about the present and future, but because my analysis, the Holocaust is different. It has more factors in it. So looking at the present in the future, the first thing I would say is that we have had a whole series of genocides since the Holocaust. And if we have other factors in mind besides Hitlerian ideology, if we have state destruction, ecological panic in mind, then Darfur, for example, or Rwanda, make a lot more sense. In both cases, you have this thing called ecological panic, and you also have some problems

with the state, especially in the Sudan case. If we look at the contemporary world, in Syria, you have unfortunately, tragically, basically a textbook case of genocide going on, which has everything to do with ecological panic and with state destruction. I mean, the story is a complicated one, but it involves centrally the fact that we decided, in what I take to be quite a mistaken decision, we decided to dismantle the Iraqi state, which led to more than a million refugees to Syria. Then after that, beginning two or three years after that, there was a series of four years of drought, which basically ended this thing, which we have always called the Fertile Crescent, which led to another million,

actually million and a half refugees to the Syrian cities, now from the Syrian countryside. This sets up the situation, which is the Syrian Civil War, which is the refugee crisis. It creates the space for ISIS, which is carrying out, sadly, this textbook genocide against the Yazidi. But it also creates a larger world phenomenon where refugees are pushing into Europe. European politics is moving to the right. And the European Union may be on the verge of some kind of, if not disintegration, some kind of reformation. So these processes can lead to pretty far-ranging consequences. We'll focus, of course, on the bad ideology of ISIS and we'll focus on the bad ideology of Assad,

and that's perfectly true. All I'm claiming is that there are long-term processes that are also at work. Now, that's only one variant. That's the local variant. The variant that one would want to be very concerned about the international variant, where a country which is roughly comparable to Germany in 1930s, a country which has the ability to think ahead and make plans, reacts to ecological panes. not locally, not on this own territory, but by thinking about what other territories it needs to control, by weakening or destroying states beyond its own.

So one scenario for this would be Chinese investments in Africa. China, like Germany in 1930s, is a very impressive state. It has right now it has very impressive growth rates, but like Germany in 1930s, it cannot feed its own population from its own territory, at least not without sacrificing all of its industry. it's dependent on international markets. That is, as the Achilles heel, and the Chinese leadership is very aware of this. It's short on food, not just on food. It's short on water as well. And so the Chinese, as far as one can tell, are thinking ahead.

They're thinking about Siberia. They're investing in Africa. They're thinking about other places in Eastern Europe. And the scenario one has to be concerned about is one in which the Chinese state believes that it must have territory beyond this own borders and that other people, for example, in Africa, believe that they should control those territories, too. So that's one scenario. I don't know exactly how it would look, but it's the kind of thing that one has to be concerned about in the future where these three things might come together once again, state destruction, ecological panic, but also some idea according to which it's legitimate to take territory from other people.

We should point out that at the moment, China is using money rather than force to buy this territory. And sometimes they call it investment. and other times I think there's maybe more outright buying of things. That doesn't negate anything that you've just said. I just don't want people to get the idea that there are actually, you know, Chinese armies trying to accumulate territory at the moment. And yeah, it's a good point to emphasize. And I want to emphasize that talking about China,

I'm talking about a projection and a negative one of what might be happening in a couple decades from now, because of course, the Chinese are, they're very tactful about how they do these things. They invest, they buy off rulers and so on. This could lead, however, to a situation in which local states are not functioning. The only thing which is functioning is the Chinese, let's call it investment project, and local peoples, whether they're Africans or in some scenarios, Russians might resist this, right, thereby lead to conflict between the Chinese control of territory, whether we consider, you know, whether it's, you know, whether it's it's legal or not is going to be less important to people who believe that they're about to start.

The Chinese control of territory and the desires of the majority populations that are living around this zone. And one should also emphasize that the Chinese are paying more attention than ever before to alternative sources of energy. They've signed on to voluntary global warming emissions targets with the United States. So it's entirely possible that they could go the other way completely and help the world. I mean, these are just projections. They're not at all certainties or condemnations. You talk about Africa and how fragile so many of the states there are. I mean, again, I guess I'm asking you to project.

Do you think that we're at any sort of particular crisis point? I think it is a fraught time. I mean, it's one reason that I'm glad the book was published when it was. I mean, I've been working on the book for 10 years in various ways, and it's a history book, and it involved reading all these documents and all these languages. But I'm glad it came out now and not five years from now because I do think we're at some kind of, some kind of moment where we have to decide whether our response to these kinds of events

is going to be primarily short-term political or whether it's going to be primarily structural or maybe even ecological. What do I mean by these kinds of events? Well, in a general way, climate change means that there's going to be migration from south and north, both in Eurasia, Africa, and in North America, the question is how quickly we're going to act to slow it down. As this happens, it will always come through certain political modalities, like, for example, the Syrian crisis. It will never be the case that people just pick up and go, right? There will always be a state collapse here, a civil war there, a terrorist outbreak here.

And we can just focus on those political things and say, well, if there were no terrorism, if there were no state collapse, if there were no bad leaders, if people wouldn't migrate. That, I think, is the wrong answer because we can't stop those things from happening. The only thing that we can't actually influence a little bit is the climate. Also, there's the question of our own ideological way of handling this, which, you know, frankly, in the American presidential debates, as in, you know, European debates right now, has not been admirable, and this is what I worry about. If the world is changing in a certain way, and it is, that means inevitably people from the

southern and come from the north. If we process this just in terms of, well, those people are outsiders, they're uneducated, we don't want them, blah, blah, blah, blah. If that's the only the way we process it, then we are basically doomed. And so in that sense, I think it is kind of a turning point for us, because the states that are in question are not just the Latin American states or the states in the Near East or the states in North Africa, which might collapse. In the long term, the states that are in question are also the European states and, for that matter, our state. right? Because if you create a world or if you just happen to live in a world, you don't have to say it's your own fault. But if you're living in a world where there's this kind of climate pressure for south and north migration, the states, even the prosperous, robust ones in the north, like the United States, like the States of the European Union, have to have a way to process that, which goes beyond just a kind of immediate ideological reflex of exclusion. And I mean, one of the reasons why it would be good, actually, to have some kind of consensus about global warming is not just because it, be true and wise and so on. It's that it would give people a feeling that you're doing something

about this problem because it is a problem. I mean, it's a problem for, first of all, for people in the South who are going to be suffering, but it's also a problem for North, for Northern societies, you know, who can integrate, but have a legitimate concern of how much they can integrate and how fast. And one way to flip the whole discussion would be to say that having a policy about global warming is a way to reassure ourselves that we have an answer or some kind of an answer to these things which day to day people find so emotional. Finally, just to sort of talk about science, do you think that like the Green Revolution, which sort of changed the food equation, at least for quite a long time, do you think that there's

science out there that can help us to deal with climate change as it's happening now? Anything that can help ameliorate it, anything that will help ameliorate it? I want to play out your first reference because it's really important. The Green Revolution means transformation of agricultural technologies. It's a package of hybridization, fertilization, irrigation, which meant that Europeans in the 1950s no longer were worried about food shortages, they're worried about food surpluses. That is a very dramatic change. It's only really happened once in human history up until the second half.

of the 20th century, basically every human society ever was concerned about food shortages. Food was always a part of politics. We are the only generations, us in the United States, a couple generations of Europeans, for whom food could be separated from politics. That has never happened before in world history. It's totally new. It basically defines our entire lifestyle. It defines what we take for granted about what's political and what's not. So all I'm trying to say is that technological changes can be very fundamental and they can change society in politics so fast and so decisively that we don't even notice what it was like before. Or to put it a different way, the main difference between us, you know, in Germans in 1930s is not that we've learned

from the Second World War. I think that's largely a nice story we tell about ourselves. The main difference is that we just have enough food and we are not worried about eating more land. That is the main difference. It's really easy to be ethical when you're not concerned about shortages. The moment you're concerned about shortages, even people who think very well about themselves as individuals and as nations, fractures start to appear very, very quickly. And there are plenty of examples from recent American history, which make this very clear. Okay, that's all just as prologue, because what I want to suggest is that, of course, there are ways in which science could affect climate change. And if we allowed those things to happen, we could be looking at a very different

world. I mean, the techniques, as I'm sure you know, I mean, it was meant to be a softball question. The techniques that we have are already more than sufficient, right? The problem is not the existence of the science. We have wind, we have solar, we have fusion where a little bit of investment could probably make a huge difference. We even have ways where we could, where we can deliberately plan to soak it, soak back carbon that we've already emitted. This could be done for a very small percentage of GDP in the United States and around the world. It's just a matter of having the political will to do so. The question is whether we accept that we should do this and whether we do it fast enough, because the one thing you can't lose, the one thing you can't gain back is

time. And so my concern is always that if we let it go too far, then the science won't be good enough. And then we really are in a situation where ecological panic is actually justified. And that's a desperately bad situation to be in. So we do have the science. It would be very, it would be It would be relatively easy. I mean, compared to something like a moon launch or whatever, it would be relatively easy to get this online. It was just a matter of accepting that this is something that we need to do and that it has to happen fast.

Why do you think we have such a hard time accepting it then? You mean, we Americans? Because pretty much everybody else accepts it. You know, I mean, like, the Syrian refugees who are in Europe, you know, like, they know perfectly well that they were desertified, right? Like, people know that there has been a massive change in the way they, like, islands in the Pacific that are going under, you know, they are perfectly aware that climate has changed. And it's, it's, I mean, it's very strong, it is a good question because it's, the question is how we have

managed to build, um, what kind of mental or psychological barriers we've built around ourselves that we don't notice. Russian submarines are on their way to, uh, the North Pole so that we don't notice that there's no longer snow on Kilimanjaro. You know, I mean, these are like things that are basically obvious, right? And, and so the question is, um, not why do people think, um, why do people think there's climate change. The question is how Americans, some Americans anyway, because it is a minority, have persuaded themselves that this is not happening.

And I don't, you know, I don't really know the answer. I mean, I think part of it has to do with the fact that when there's, when you have a stable way of making lots of money, and this is perfectly understandable, and I'm talking about fossil fuels, of course, you don't want to be challenged, right?

I mean, when you have a stable, when you have a stable sort of, for example, energy industry, why would that, why would you want that to be challenge. And so you tell a story about how, in fact, it doesn't have the costs, which everyone in the world actually knows. But the other part, and this gets us back to the book, the other part, which is really important, this gets it back to Hitler, is the existence in your first questions, the existence of science itself, right? Because what Hitler said was, sure, there's science, but it's not actually different from politics. It's really all the same

thing. Science just gives a support to the world where you compete for stuff, right? Now, again, that hits a little bit too close to home in America. And it's something that we should think about because we often confuse science with ideas of the free market. We think that the market is some kind of science. The market is going to deliver everything good. The market delivers lots of good things, but it can't deliver every good thing. It can't deliver the conditions for its own existence, for example.

It can't deliver an ecosphere in which markets can take place. You have to say, okay, science is not just a metaphor for something, for some society that you like. Science is actually an independent sphere of research experimentation, which you have to support and only the government can really do it, right? And so you have to break out of whatever ideological hold you might happen to be under and say the government needs to support science. Even if you're in favor of the market, the government has to support science so that markets in the future can function well. You have to accept that, to put it a simpler way, that politics and science are really two different things.

Because the move the climate deniers make is they say, you know, they basically say bah humbug. scientists are just politicians under a different name. They're just they wear white coats instead of cheap ties. And they're just bringing one political message instead of some other political message. They try to bring it all into a political argument. And that is deadly wrong. That's deadly wrong. That's a mistake that can literally kill us.

In fact, it is killing us right now. And it does go back to Mein Kampf because this is Hitler tries to bring politics and science together and say that no. People who tried to tell you that science can change the world. People who try to tell you that science offers hope, Those people are Jews. Those people should not be listened to, right? They are they are out of the box. They are illegitimate. You have to listen to my message. And my message is that competition struggle is the only thing which actually counts. So, you know, I don't know why. I can't answer your question. I don't understand the American society to answer your question perfectly. All I can tell you is that these are mistakes that one cannot afford to make. One cannot afford to say that science is just another form of politics and that these guys in white codes are just another lobby like other. That's a basic fundamental and really risky mistake. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. I think that I would recommend your book to everyone just simply because it is an alternate way of looking at history, not just the Holocaust, but I think it goes beyond that.

And I found it informative towards what's happening now. I think what you said at the kind of towards the beginning of our conversation about parts of your book breaking down stuff that we were taught in high school and kind of drive. through those myths and misconceptions was one of the most fascinating and important parts of the book to me while I was reading it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for the conversation. I'm really glad we could do it. All right, angry planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break and then we will be back with the other part of our double Snyder special. All right, Angry Planet listeners, here we are again with the conversation and with Timothy Snyder

about Road to Unfreedom from 2018. Democracy around the world seems under siege. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidated power in an election held recently. Earlier this year, Russia held its own ritualistic election. Vladimir Putin won, of course. In the United States, an emboldened President Trump called for an end-to-do process for illegal immigrants. So what's happening, and what's the source of this stuff? We're joined today by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a professor at Yale and also a permanent fellow at the IWM Vienna.

There, he directs the project's Ukraine and European Dialogue and United Europe divided history. His book, The Road to Unfreedom, has just hit bookstore shelves. So thanks for joining us. Yeah, my pleasure. I'm glad to be with you. Can we start at the very beginning? What do you mean by the Road to Unfreedom and how do you know that we're on it? Well, I think the very beginning is an important point that within your introduction, namely that democracy is not a natural state of affairs.

Democracy is not like gravity. It's not just with us. There's nothing about human nature. There's nothing about even particularly about America or any other country, which ensures that it's going to be a democracy. Democracy is something which has to be created in history with knowledge of historical conditions, with knowledge of the tendencies that are working against it. which leads me to my answer to your question.

By the road to unfreedom, I mean a particular way that we in the U.S. and also Europeans are moving away from democracy. We have taken it for granted that democracy is a natural result of thing. That it's the result of there not being any other alternatives, as we've gotten used to saying. It's a result of the end of history after 1989. it's the result of the free market. Any of these happy stories, none of which are at all true, but any of these happy stories allow us to be complacent. They allow us to think that we don't have to do very much.

Democracy is going to be here anyway. It's not my responsibility. And that itself, that complacency, that sense that time is on your side, the history is working for you, so you don't have to do any work yourself, that itself weakens democracy, and that's part of what's going on.

So in the book I call this the politics of inevitability, that kind of sense, which has, you know, a right-wing variant and left-wing variant, that history's on your side, how that at a certain point gives away. A shock comes. Maybe it's an election you don't expect. Maybe it's a financial crisis. Maybe at a personal level is your inability to buy a house or you losing your house. But that kind of belief that things are just going to go right fades or crashes, and then it gives way to something else,

which in the book I call the politics of eternity, the sense that there is really no future. there's only a past. And in the past, things were better. And the reason why that past has gone away is, of course, not my fault. It's somebody else's fault. And so then politics becomes nostalgic. It's about making America great again. It's about America First, which is a 1930s slogan.

It's about cycling back into some more or less imagined past. And it's about blaming the people whose fault you say it is. And in this thing, the politics of eternity, the future goes away, but policy also goes away. there's no reason to be talking about policy because we're not really talking about the future. And that kind of politics where it's all about the past and it's not about the future, it's also about spectacle. It's about crashing into your heads every day with Twitter or the internet or with the news cycle so that we get so outraged that we come to agree that whether we're forward or against it,

that politics is just about emotion, it's just about in or out, us and them, right and wrong. and it's not about consensus and policy and moving things forward. So that's the road to unfreedom, from inevitability to eternity. That's the big philosophical description of it. And of course, what the book does is it tries to explain how this works in Russia, in Europe, and of course in the U.S. One of the people who you mentioned in the book is a guy named Ivan or Yvonne, Iliin. And so who was he and why does Vladimir Putin admire him so much? Well, thanks for mentioning him. I start the book with Yvonne-Elean, and it's kind of a risky move because everybody thinks ideas don't matter and certainly philosophy doesn't matter. Everyone thinks that, you know, right and left is fake and so on. But it's not, you know, there are alternatives and the alternatives are backed by ideologies, which are made up by ideologues. And it really does turn out sometimes that ideas that people have, even obscure people,

can have a very important influence on the course of political events. They can help people consolidate things they want to do anyway. They can provide the source for stories that allow others to go along with them. And they can make a shift of the kind that we were just talking about. So, Yvonnevin is probably the world's most important politician of eternity. And he's someone who provides a theoretical basis for fascism. He's a Russian exile, an exile from the Bolshevik revolution, an anti-Bolshevik, a pro-fascist, who argued that the world that we're in is completely flawed. God was mistaken in creating it.

Nothing's really true. The only truth is God's lost unity, which can only be found somewhere in Russia. Therefore, it's okay to lie or do anything. It doesn't matter. So long as it's in the service of Russia. You can see how that would be helpful for Mr. Putin. It's also helpful for Mr. Putin that Elin says that you should have elections, but the elections, to use the word you guys have already used, It should be rituals of support where, you know, no competition. It's a population's chance to show that it understands that the leader is the leader. And thirdly, what Ilene does is he turns freedom into more or less its opposite. He says freedom.

Basically, freedom means knowing your place. The nation is a kind of body, which has to be restored to totality. That means everybody knows which cell they are or which organ they are or whatever. he actually talks like this. And that's very useful. That idea of a corporate political system, corporate in the sense of the body, is very useful for a situation like Russia where you can't really move around very much. There isn't the rule of law.

There isn't much social advancement. And so you have to turn politics into something which is not about forward notion, but which is about the constant victimhood, right? There's no future. There's just the constant victimhood of Russia. The whole world's against Russia. That just proves that Russia's the world's only hope and so on and so forth. Now, the reason it's at the beginning of the book is not because he's an interesting philosopher, although he is.

It's because Mr. Putin dug up his body and brought it back to Russia. It's because Mr. Putin found his papers in America and brought him back to Russia. It's because Mr. Putin cited him at a whole bunch of very important conjunctures in his own presidency. So I bring Mr. Eving back to show that ideas actually do matter and to remind us what alternatives look like and feel like and to remind us that they can actually be realized in our world by an important country that has an influence on Europe and has an influence on us. What did you do with the body? So it just gets darker and darker.

So, I mean, to try to be quite precise about this, Ivana Lien died in exile in Switzerland and had a gravestone, had a marker, which was paid for by a German-American woman who also helped keep him going during his life. Her name was Charlotte Ayes. He was largely forgotten about. His papers were collected and published, but no one really read them.

He didn't have a natural audience so long as the Soviet Union existed. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, he was suddenly re-read. And the things which were reread first were a series of papers that he wrote late in life in the late 40s, early 50s, under the title Our Cask. and they were specifically about how you were going to reassemble a kind of right-wing Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. So a lot of people started reading those in Russia in 1990s after the Soviet Union had collapsed. And Alian gained a big following. Then all of his books were republished in Russia, which has been very helpful to me, of course. And then he at some point catches the attention of Mr. Putin.

Now, what Mr. Putin does with the body is an interesting example of what Russian foreign policies run anyway. He gets an oligarch friend of his, Victor Vexelberg, to pay to have the body disinterred and reinterred in Russia. So he can say, well, it wasn't actually Russian policy because, you know, Victor Vexelberg did it. But that's how Russian foreign policy works. I only stress that because Victor Vexelberg is also somebody who invested heavily in Michael Cohen in 2016, right? So this is all, it's really kind of all, it's uncanny how, you know, an event like the reintering of the body. of a Russian fascist philosopher and the padding of the wallets of Mr. Trump's personal attorney are done by the same person.

And the reason why it's uncanny is because it's all one story. Anyway, they brought the body back. I shouldn't say back because he died in Switzerland. They brought the body to Russia. And they buried it in a monastery, which is, of which there are two interesting things to say. The first is the monastery was a place where the ashes of the victims of Soviet citizens killed by the NKVED, killed by the Soviet secret state police, during the Great Terror were buried. There's a great irony about this, of course, because Alian himself was an anti-Bolshevik.

And the second thing which is interesting about this monastery is that the monastery is a monastery of Putin's favorite monk, someone who has tried to bring the traditions of Russian nationalism, Christianity on the one hand, and Soviet communism together into some kind of a whole. So they buried him there and goes back and lays flowers and so on. That also happens. I only laugh because it's startling. It's startling to see or hear that there's something more than personal advantage on the line. Or actually, can I turn that into a question?

Is Eileen convenient or? is Ilan something that Putin was looking for and that is Putin's own narrative or offers Putin a narrative? Yeah. No, that's a great question because it helps us to remember what political ideas are all about. Political ideas are not there because they're entirely because they just fit our story. They're also not there entirely because we believe them. They're not there entirely because they're convenient for us. But they do all the above. And they do all the above at the same time.

And that's why we need them. Because we can't go through life saying, I mean, unless some people can, like the President of the United States. But in general, you can't just go through life saying, I'm just here to make a buck and exploit you. You know, you usually have to have some kind of other story going on about what you're doing, not only for other people, but also for yourself, right? I mean, think of the way the U.S. works.

We have this story about how the free market is going to automatically bring democracy, which is completely wrong, but it's a good story to have because it makes you feel better about the fact that what you're really doing is just pursuing a certain economic system. If you can tell yourself the economic system is going to bring democracy of the world, then you think, well, what I'm doing is virtuous. That's great. So, I mean, I just give that as an example. So with Mr. Putin, I think your question is a very important one, because these things are helpful to him as he tries to make a certain kind of turn that he needs to make in Russian politics. after 2010, 2011, 2012, he comes back to power

as president again. He's going to run Russia in the 2010 differently than he did in 2000s. In the 2000s, he had a story about efficiency, even a story about law.

In 2010, he knows he's not going to make Russia efficient, and he knows he's not going to govern according to law. He knows that he's got his 40 billion or whatever it is, and that that's not going to change. He knows that he's going to govern

through the secret police and through his oligarch friends, that's not going to change. And so he needs to govern in a different way. And to do that, to present a story to Russians about how, no, it's not about success, it's not about Europe, it's not about law, it's not about prosperity, it's about virtue, it's about how Russia's good. It helps to have other thinkers. It really helps not have to make that up all yourself. And as you read, Eileen, if you're in Putin's position, if you need to change Russian politics, you probably find you believe it because you believe the things which are useful, which are useful. to you, which make the world make sense both to you and the people you need to persuade.

And I go slightly beyond that. I mean, for Putin, material convenience is not the same thing as for you and me. You know, I mean, if you already have all the money in the world, it's no longer about making more money, right? It's about this explaining why the world has to be the way that it is. You know, you and I don't have that problem. We don't have to explain, you know, why we have our bank accounts or our mortgages or whatever. But Mr. Putin has to explain why he has all the money and nobody else does, basically.

Russia has the greatest wealth inequality in the world. So he has something to explain which is different. And so he has to explain why things are just the way they are and why they can't change. And for that, you know, a big dose of mysticism and of national messianism really, really comes in handy. And I think that's how it's worked. And this is a story that, like you say, is much broader than just what's occurring in Russia, correct? Yeah, I mean, the reason why I bring Russia, the reason why it starts with Russia is because I think Russia gets to a certain phenomenon before we do. It gets to this politics of eternity before we do. It gets to a politics of spectacle before we do. And then it tries to make the rest of the world a little bit more like itself. And, you know, the surprising thing for us is just how well that works. And for the Europeans, too. You know, Russia is not attacking us with conventional weapons. Russia is not even really attacking us with some kind of. of ideology like it did during the Soviet Union. All Russia's doing is using tools and technologies

which we invented to try to mess with our minds. And I think five years ago, well, I know five years ago, nobody would think that could work. I mean, I know this because I was trying to persuade people that it could. Five years ago, we thought, no, we're America, you know, our brains are invulnerable and democratic and how could Russia stealing emails or, you know, how could Russia using Twitter or whatever make any kind of a difference? But now we've wised up, a little bit. Now we see that it has. But yeah, I mean, the story is one that begins in Russia because Russia gets to certain places first. Russia has realized certain tendencies that are still incipient in Europe and the United States. And so the point is that, you know, it's not that

Russia is so alien. The point is that Russia's a little bit like us and that Russia's trying to make us still more like them. So how far down the road to unfreedom is the United States at this point do you think? Well, I mean, I'd just to give it a little bit of perspective, I think if you asked people in 2016, you know, let's say, oh, let's say, you know, February of 2016, before Russia hacked the Democratic Party, if we ask people then, are we going to be separating children from their mothers? Are we going to have a president who's going to call for the end of due process? Are we going to have a presidential candidate who's going to call for his opponent to be assassinated? Are we going to have an upsurge of public races and racial violence in our country? I mean, I'm just citing a few examples of things that have happened in the last two years.

I think most Americans would have said no, or even more strongly, they would have said it's not possible. So a lot of things have happened, which a lot of people thought weren't possible. I mean, even the election of Mr. Trump itself, I think it's fair to say most Republicans and most Democrats as of February 2016 probably thought that wasn't possible. So a lot of things have happened that we didn't expect to happen, which means that more things can happen, which we didn't expect to happen. So the thing is, you know, it's largely then up to us. And the reason why I wrote the book, as I did as a kind of history book with all kinds of facts, but also with a moralistic tone, is that I wanted to get to, you know, people to realize that this is our history, you know, not in the sense that Washington and Lincoln are our history that we can be proud of, but that this is our history in the sense that it's real,

it's really happening, and we're in it, and the things that we do now are very likely to determine what comes next. So we're much farther down the road to unfreedom than I think we realize. We're much further down it than people would expect was possible, but we're not so far down that things can't be repaired. Or I should really say, I should really say improved. Because if the U.S. gets through this, it's going to get through it as a different country. We're not going to go back, you know, nobody's going to go back to 2016. We're going to get through it as a different country, which is going to have new and unexpected

virtues and new and unexpected ways of doing politics and new and unexpected forms of solidarity and so on and so forth. It can't all be defense. It's going to, the people who are trying to protect American democracy, also have to get the people who are rethinking it. So how do we get to the end of the pleasant road and not the sad and creepy road? Well, I mean, I'd say a little bit about this at the end of Road to Unfreedom and my little pamphlet on tyranny is all about this. At the end of road unfreedom, I talk about the politics of responsibility as the antidote to both inevitability and eternity or the thing which keeps you from going from inevitability to eternity, the thing that wakes you up.

It makes you realize, oh, yes, I'm in history. I can't control everything, but I can control something. And I can learn from history, including the history that's happening around me right now. What are some of those things that I can do? So, I mean, I sincerely think as a historian, you know, and as a humanist, that the humanities and history really matters. It really matters people are able to say, this is right and this is wrong. And that's what, you know, that's something you need the humanities for, or religion, but you need some, you have to have some way of thinking, a reason. about what's right and what's wrong. Is it right or is it wrong, you know, to be a racist? Is it right or is it wrong to take a baby away from its mother? You have to have some way of thinking about that and some way of talking about that. And you need history because if you don't have history, you just get blown away by the daily news cycle or the daily tweet or, you know, the daily turn of phrase, the daily spend. If you don't have history, then you're just not grounded in anything and every day seems, you know, new and shocking, unexpected. You know, maybe it's horrible, maybe it's amazing. But, you know, you know, you know,

either way, you have no power because you're not rooted in anything. You can't see any patterns. You're just being pushed around, basically, by the media and by the clever propagandists every day. So, I mean, I think we need history in order to have a, I think history we need, not just to see what's going on, but to gain a sense of responsibility for what's going on. And that's with that sense of responsibility, we can each do a few little things. And if we each actually, I mean, this sounds going to sound a little bit too easy, but it's

not as easy it sounds, if we each do a few little things, it really is going to be okay. If most of us just do nothing because we think it's going to be fine or we're doomed anyway, which are kind of the two great American ways to think about the world, you know, nothing can possibly happen and oops that already happened. If we can avoid both of those ways of thinking, I think I really do think it's going to be okay, but it means that most of us have to do something and we're not, we haven't reached that standard yet. Timothy Snyder, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thanks for reaching out, guys.

I'm really glad we had a chance to do it. Thanks for the conversation. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, thank you for tuning into this in case you missed it, special pre- Thanksgiving rerun. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, you kick us nine bucks a month,

please, at AngryPlanet.substack.com or AngryPlanetpod.com. What does that get you? It gets you early access to all the mainline. episodes, the occasional bonus episode, and some other weird writings that get tossed down there. Again, we will be back next week in another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.