Angry Planet - Is the Land of the Free on the ‘Road to Unfreedom’?

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

This week we talk with the author of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” Timothy Snyder, about the current threat coming out of the East. He argues, in “The Road to Unfreedom,” that there’s more than greed behind Russian President Vladimir Putin - there’s also an ideology that directly targets democracy.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollege.co. You can reach us on our Facebook page: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. 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. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. 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 in 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.

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, you know, in history with knowledge of the 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 things. That it's the result of there not being any other alternatives, as we've gotten used to saying. It's the 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, that 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, 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

to 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 the 1930s slogan. It's about cycling back into some more or less imagined past, and it's about blaming the people who's 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 about, it's not about the future, it's also about spectacle. It's about crashing into your heads every day with Twitter. the internet or, you know, 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 long, 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 Ivan Ilyan. 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 Eileen, 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, Ivan Dvon, is a very, 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 Eileen says that you should have elections, but the elections, to use a 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 a leader is the leader. And thirdly, what Eileen does is he turns. freedom into more or less it's opposite. He says, 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 a much social advancement.

And so you have to turn politics into something which is not about forward motion, 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 important, 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 conjunctions. in his own presidency. So I bring Mr. Ealing 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, Yvonne Lin 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 Bias. He was largely forgotten about. His papers were collected and published, but no one really read them. But there was even 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 Tasks. 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 Aline gained a big following. Then all of his books were republished in Russia, which has been very helpful, 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 the way Russian foreign policies run anyway. He gets an oligarch friend of his, Victor Vaxelberg, 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, Vexelberg did it, but that's how Russian foreign policy works. I only stress that because Victor Vechelberg 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 reinterring 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 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 Elin himself was an anti-Bolshevik. And the second thing which is interesting about this monastery is that the monastery is the 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 hole. So they buried him there and then Putin goes back and lays flowers and so on. That also happened. 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 Eileen 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't 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, you know, pursuing a certain economic system. If you can tell yourself the economic system is going to bring democracy to 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. In around, you know, after 2010, 2011, 2012, he comes back to power as president again. he's going to run Russia in the 2010's differently than he did in the 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, you know, 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 about prosperity.

It's about virtue. It's about how Russia's good. It helps to have other thinkers. It really helps not to 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 and equality 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 ideology like it did during the Soviet Union. All Russia is 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 is a little bit like us and that Russia is trying to make us still more like them. So how far down the road to unfridom is the United States at this point, do you think? Well, I mean, 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 racism 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 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 we want. But 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

the 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 say a little bit about this in at the end of road to freedom and my little pamphlet on tyranny is all about this at the at the end of road done freedom 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 need some, you have to have some way of thinking or reasoning 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 or phrase, the daily spin. 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 either way, you have no power because you're not rooted in anything. You can't see any patterns. You're just being pushed, you're being pushed around, basically, by the media and by the clever propaganda 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 now is going to sound a little bit, you know, too easy, but it's not 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 two great American ways to think about the world. You know, nothing could 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 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.

Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, tell everyone you know and post a review on iTunes or wherever you got this podcast. You can always reach us on Twitter. We are at war underscore college. And on Facebook, we are at facebook.com slash war college podcast. We love hearing from you. War College is me, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. We'll be back next week.

Thank you.