Ideas - Why our long term relationship with the U.S. is done

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

America is just not that into you anymore, says historian Marci Shore. It's not us, it's them. The Yale professor blames the U.S. for the failed relationship and warns the world that her own country can no longer be counted on to defend democracy, not even within its own borders. Shore has been studying the history of totalitarianism for nearly 30 years. She tells Nahlah Ayed why she relocated to Canada and how her knowledge of Eastern Europe informed her choice.

How did the internet go from this? You could actually find what you were looking for right away, bound to this. I feel like I'm in hell. Spoiler alert, it was not an accident. I'm Cory Doctorow, host of Who Broke the Internet from CBC's Understood. In this four-part series, I'm going to tell you

why the internet sucks now, whose fault it is, and my plan to fix it. Find who broke the internet on whatever terrible app you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there, it's Nala here. Thank you so much for listening to Ideas. Before we start today's show, I need to ask you for a favor. If you like ideas, please hit the follow button on your app, whether you're using Apple, Spotify, or anything else. That way you won't miss any of our upcoming episodes.

If you already follow us, I'd love it if you could rate and review us. You'd be helping us connect with more listeners out there who have yet to discover ideas. Okay, here's today's show. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I became a historian of Eastern Europe in the 1990s, right after the fall of communism and the gradual opening of the communist archives, documenting and illuminating this totalitarian hell that had passed. Marcy Shore has been studying the history of totalitarianism for nearly three decades. So it may seem odd that these days she seems to be dispensing relationship advice. This is it, like the end of the affair.

Don't think you can finesse the situation. And when it comes to assigning blame for the failed romance, Shor says it's not us, it's them. You cannot trust this government, you cannot trust the United States as if they had some kind of first principles because you're looking at nothing. This goes for Canadians as well, you have to recognize this is it. I mean you really are looking into this kind of moral abyss. The urgency to warn the world is heartfelt. That her own country can no longer be counted on to defend democracy around the world or even within its own borders. It's also painful. Yeah I keep pleading with the Europeans and I'm like listen America is

going under. That is heartbreaking to me. It's wrenching. But do not let us take you down with us. Having studied the arc of fascism in Eastern Europe, Professor Shor was uniquely placed to see the red flags waving well ahead of many others. And if I panicked sooner, it's not because I was any smarter, but because I had been watching what was going on in Russia and Ukraine. But Marcy Shor's vantage point shifted recently. All right, thank you all for coming. It's my first time at Toronto Metropolitan University. I'm still getting to know the city. Since I'm in

Toronto, I'm gonna start with a... She's one of three prominent Yale scholars who recently accepted teaching posts at the University of Toronto. While the offer was on the table before the US election, Schor says the re-election of Donald Trump tipped the scales. Professor Schor delivered her talk at Toronto Metropolitan University. You'll hear excerpts from that and from my conversation with her. So when I got involved in Eastern Europe, it was as communism fell. And that was the moment, and the political science students here will know this even

if you're too young to remember it, that was the moment when the dominant narrative was coined by Francis Fukuyama as the end of history. And what the end of history meant is essentially that we replace one Hegelian narrative with another. We now know that history was not moving inevitably inexorably towards the communist utopia.

We now know, or so went the story, that actually history was moving inexorably towards liberal democracy. So there was a kind of smug triumphalism about it, but there was also a cheerful optimism about it. There was very much a kind of the wicked witch is dead and now we're all gonna live happily ever after and Eastern Europe is gonna catch up and the former Soviet Union is going to catch up,

you know, and everyone ultimately is going to end up in this liberal democracy. There was something condescending about it. There was an assumption that these relatively backwards places that had been under communism were gonna to catch up to their big brothers in The West who already knew how to do things, but there was also a kind of you know Hopefulness about it optimism generosity in its way and one of the same one of the assumptions that that went with it's very of course

It's very easy to make fun of things in retrospect, was this assumption that liberalism, liberalism as a philosophy coming out of enlightenment rationality, insisting on respect for the rights of the individual, of free speech, of due process of law, liberalism and democracy as government by the people, the people get to choose, the majority get to vote, and free market, you know, neoliberalism, that these were all part of a kind of seamless whole. What Adam McNich and Poland called the utopian capitalist package. We weren't really asking questions at the time. I think maybe on either side of the Atlantic,

about maybe liberalism and democracy were not actually synonymous, you know, or maybe the free market didn't just automatically kind of naturally usher in the kinds of freedoms you might want under liberalism. And there's a phrase that the Germans used even beginning before 1989, Vondel door Kel, change through trade.

And the idea was that you integrate these places that had not had liberalism or democracy by engaging in free market economic relations with them. And that will just kind of naturally bring them over to your side. And I mention this because this is crucial to understanding where Putinism comes from, you know, and why the Germans were, oh yes, we'll keep buying your gas and oil and allow you to acquire these resources,

which you're now using to conduct mass slaughter. The idea was that, well, you kind of domesticate Putin by trading with him. Like many things in life, was one of these things that worked in theory but not in practice. Understanding what she calls Putinism and where it was headed became a high-stakes geopolitical guessing game which reached its crescendo in February 2022. And this is when the Russian army has gathered around the Ukrainian border, and everybody is watching.

I mean, I was watching carefully, and I was watching anxiously, and I was working on this piece that Wall Street Journal and the editor kept saying, is he going to invade? Is he going to invade? And I said, I don't know. I mean, that's such a vertical system. That decision is in the mind of one man. And I have no privileged epistemological access to what's going on in his head. And so I was, I was waiting and panicking. And even so, the moment when it happened, I was paralyzed and I wasn't even Kiev. I was in New Haven You know, it was four in the morning in Ukraine and they have memories of getting woken up I have four in the morning in in Ukraine was like nine at night our time So we were wide awake like watching the stream and I thought this can't really be happening

It's can't be happening. I thought okay. This is it. This is really the end of the end of history. That end had its beginnings in 2014 when Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine. But Shor was also watching another assault unfold. One waged on truth and fact, where disinformation was the Kremlin's weapon of choice. And one of the stories that got a lot of traction was that the revolution on the Maidan was a CIA-directed and sponsored Ukrainian Nazi conspiracy, whereupon the Americans were supporting Ukrainian Nazis who were going to march east

and massacre all the Russian speakers. Now, for those of you who don't know Ukraine, it's a bilingual country. You guys are Canadian for the most part, you understand a bilingual country, right? Basically, anybody can switch back and forth. The idea that Ukrainian speakers were coming east to massacre the Russian speakers was always insane.

I mean, there was never anything to that at all. So there's this attempt to instigate these rebellions. There's violence. There's Titooshki. There's mercenaries. There's guys who are paid to beat up other guys, and it's always unclear who is there's guys who are paid to beat up other guys, and it's always unclear who is paid and who is not paid. They resist ultimately in places like Odessa and Kharkiv and Dnepropetrovsk, but it takes

off in the Donbas, which is this far eastern post-industrial, largely depressed mining region in Ukraine. And then you have these Russian-sponsored separatist forces that take over and create two kind of breakaway republics called the Lugansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic. And watching this, you know, as it was happening through spring and summer 2014, I kept thinking as a historian of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain through spring and summer 2014.

I kept thinking as a historian of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain coming to the Munich conference in September 1938, Hitler is demanding this Western swath of Czechoslovakia that's inhabited largely by ethnic Germans. Chamberlain goes back to London having appeased Hitler and agreed to let Hitler take the Sudetenland, and he says this infamous statement to the British. He says how horrible, how fantastic it would be if we were digging trenches and trying on gas masks on behalf of a quarrel in a faraway country

between people about whom we know nothing. And I thought I had this creepy-like feeling, and not just me. Other historians had this feeling as well. If you spend a lot of time thinking about the 1930s, you can't not have this feeling that, wow, the Donbas is going to be that quarrel in a faraway country between people about whom we know nothing.

That could be the beginning of the Third World War. It was palpable already in 2014. One of the things that was different from the 1930s is this peculiar form of a kind of post-truth form of ideology. Nazism and Stalinism had coherent ideologies. They were falsehoods, but they had an internal logic, internal consistency. Now what you were seeing coming out of Putin's Russia

was something else. It was less presenting a narrative and more trying to undermine any sense that there was a narrative at all. So you could feel kind of like right there between the Maidan and the war in the Donbas, this kind of break between modernity the Maidan and the war in the Donbas, this kind of break between modernity and postmodernity when nobody really knew

what was going on. This undermining of any sense that there was anything to ground us. And that so that was 2014. For sure, this was a hinge year, one that marked a new period of post-truth in Eastern Europe. America was not far behind. Trump comes on the scene a year later, again with this post-truth unhinging and lack of concern with the unhinging from empirical reality. There was a satire very early in the first Republican primary debates in the

New Yorker that talked about the fact checker who passes out from exhaustion at the end of the Republican primary debate. And people thought it was a joke. I mean, people took it as a joke. Nobody took it seriously for a while. And if I panicked sooner, it's not because I was any smarter, but because I had been watching what was going on in Russia and Ukraine. And I had a sense that this undermining of the notion that there is any such thing as empirical truth could be insidiously and

perversely dangerous. You know, as dangerous as these 20th century ideologies with their absolute distruth claims. I know our philosopher friend Jason Stanley has been talking a lot about America becoming a fascist country. But for me, what's really important conceptually really is this turn from the modern to the postmodern version. The idea that if we call something like Stalinism,

as my colleague Ben Nathans does, a participatory dictatorship, where people were compelled to actively engage and believe and declare their beliefs, that mobilized a population system, mobilized the population, Putinism is much more about demobilizing a population, about making people feel that you couldn't possibly

be certain of anything, therefore best not to try. And the motif of people who are asked about, well, what do you think about the war in Ukraine? What do you, like, the line is, I'm not interested in politics. You know, someone has facts, someone has alternative facts. So it's a different kind of fictitious reality. You know, it's a kind of insistence

that there is no such thing as kind of ontological reality. Hannah Arendt, you know of fictitious reality. You know, it's a kind of insistence that there is no such thing as kind of ontological reality. Hannah Arendt famously described the difference between pre-modern lies and these modern totalitarian lies. And she says, okay, the thing about pre-modern lies was that they were like tears in the fabric of reality. And so the historian, looking closely, could find the spot where reality was torn and sewn back together, could find the seam. And you get into modern totalitarian lies in the 20th century. She said they're seamless. They're complete reconstructions of reality in such a way as to be seamless. There's no tear. There's no seam to find. But now we're in a situation where it's less about getting people to believe one decisive,

seamless reality and more about undermining their notion that there is such a thing as reality at all. And so Putin, when he tells the Russians that there is a special military operation in Ukraine, he starts out by saying, well, we need to defend the integrity of the Lugansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic. And then we hear that, you know, there was a CIA-sponsored Ukrainian Nazi coup in Kiev, and we need to denazify Ukraine and save our Russian-speaking Ukrainian brothers. And then the next day, you hear that, no, this is actually a preemptive attack, not on Ukraine, but on NATO, because NATO had been plotting to attack Russia.

And then, you know, a couple days later you hear that, no, this is about restoring the lands of Peter the Great. And then my favorite was that, no, it's not that Zelensky is a Nazi, and it's not that the Nazis have taken power in Kiev, the Satanists have. It's a Satanist cabal. And then they actually, on Russian state media, have a debate as to whether Zelensky is the Antichrist,

or whether he is a mere demon in the service of the Antichrist. Again, like this would be funny if it weren't for the fact that people are being slaughtered in front of us. So I wanna just talk quickly about a couple motifs of this as I try to understand what this kind of postmodern form of fascism is about. The Ukrainian writer, Alexander Mikhmen, wrote recently, he's like, right before our eyes,

a world order is being formed in which truth as a category does not exist. So it's not just that you don't know what the truth is, it's that there is no such thing as truth anymore. One of the motifs I want to kind of suggest that's weirdly going with this is a Slavic word I'm going to feed you called obnazhenya, which just means laying bare. You put something right out in front of everybody and kind of expose it as opposed to hiding it. And so when journalists were asking me three years ago, well, how is what's happening now

in Ukraine different from what was happening in World War II when the Nazis were murdering the Jews and murdering the Slavs? And I said the internet. We're watching it all now in real time. We're watching it live streamed. And for those of you who studied the history of the Holocaust, the Polish underground courier, Jan Karski, went through extraordinary feats to smuggle news of the Holocaust and the gas chambers out of occupied Poland to the

government's in exile in London and ultimately to the states and even then people couldn't believe him it just seemed too fantastical and now it's like we've got a live stream into the gas chamber now nothing is hidden and that is really different that was never before in human history possible at the level at which it is now. So you have both the live stream and you have people like Trump and Putin who just throw it all out there for you.

You know, his chief propagandist on the state media, Margarita Simonyan, who I have a kind of unhealthy obsession with, at the time in the summer of 2022, when the Russians were still to a large extent controlling the Black Sea, and they were preventing the grain shipments from going to Africa, of 2022 when the Russians were still to a large extent controlling the Black Sea and they were preventing the grain shipments from going to Africa.

The idea was that we can hold parts of the world hostage to starvation. And Marguerite de Simonian during the Petersburg Economic Forum gets on television and says, siada deshda la gavolt, all of our hope is in famine. And she just announces to everybody that she is blackmailing the world with famine. See, Siana des Dezdenla Goult, all our hope is in famine. That's the kind of thing that historians would have once spent months, if not years, digging around in the archives, trying to find the scrap of paper when someone confessed to having that thought or someone having planned that and now it's

just announced and that has come to the United States as well and that was already true eight years ago during the first Trump administration when Betsy DeVos was being confirmed for the education secretary totally unqualified for this position, you know, and not a very good person. And Bernie Sanders says to her in a televised moment, don't take this the wrong way, but would you be considered for this position if your family hadn't donated millions of dollars to the Republican Party and the Trump campaign?

She's like, go on with your point. I mean, the idea that the elections can be bought, that these positions can be bought, it was no longer hidden. This was Obnazhenye. Now everything is in your face. The point is now not to conceal. The point is to normalize. I mean, in one moment that struck me very intensely,

and this is probably very generationally inflected, because I was 19 during the Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill hearings. It was pre-internet. I was a sophomore in college. I didn't even have a television. I was listening on the radio, but those words burned themselves into my mind.

So when Clarence Thomas was being the debate on his nomination for the Supreme Court, and Anita Hill, who was a young lawyer and law professor who had worked with him when she was questioned about him, said that he had sexually harassed her. Joe Biden was presiding over these hearings. And one man after another, like these people who were supporting Clarence Thomas, came to humiliate her.

We have a single woman naturally, like she's just going to be desperate for male attention. And at a certain moment it's clear to me she's telling the truth and these men are not going to believe her. They're just not capable of believing her, which was true. And then Clarence Thomas was confirmed and we are living with consequences today. But now fast forward to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, who was accused of things that were still much worse,

of being involved in an assault, on a woman named Christine Ford. And then Christine Ford has to testify. I was in a hotel in eastern Ukraine, like, listening on the Internet now, watching these hearings, as Christine Ford tells this horrible story about, you know, nearly being suffocated to death.

And listening to that, I had a very different feeling. I said, oh, this woman is telling the truth. And these men believe her. But now it's like, so what? Go on with your point. We all know that that's what men do if a woman is stupid enough to get drunk at a party like that. And that, that turn, I think, is not irrelevant.

I mean, in both cases, you get these slimeballs who end up on the Supreme Court, and that's why we have this grotesque presidential immunity for Trump at the moment. But that shift to Obnashenya, to yes, we all know, but so what? Let me read you a quote by Putin's spin doctor, Serkov, who was one of the masterminds behind Putinism,

and he wrote, "'Our system, as in general everything of ours, doesn't appear more elegant, of course, but in return is more honest. The most brutal structures of its power scaffolding run straight along the facade, not concealed by any kind of architectural decorations. The bureaucracy, even when it practices deceit, does so not terribly thoroughly, as if working

from the assumption that everyone understands everything anyway. What is terrifying is not what is hidden, but what has been normalized. You have these motifs of domestic abuse, and it was the Belarusian feminist who first came onto this, that this language they developed to articulate the problem of domestic abuse became a way for the whole society to understand how they were being treated by a tyrannical regime. And you see that in that Oval Office meeting when you have Vance and Trump saying to Zelensky, you must say thank you. You have to express your gratitude.

You know, it's the, we're beating you up. We're gonna abuse you, we're gonna humiliate you, and then you express your gratitude to us. Which was also something they did during Stalinism. You know, it was also, my older friends in Poland, a bunch of them who had been political prisoners signed this open letter saying, this was what the secret police interrogators used to say to us. You have to express your gratitude.

Look at all we've done for you. You haven't said thank you. And then the people being led off to their executions in the show trials were also made to say thank you, to thank the party for meting out your just punishment. There's a kind of laying bare of nihilism. There's not even an attempt to make people believe there are any kind of first principles involved.

Trump says, well, I'm the dealmaker, which is just an announcement of the fact that, for him, all relations are purely transactional. There's no other category. Everything and everyone can be bought or sold. There's another great Russian word for this, prodagnost, which is like, saleability. It's another word for corruption, but it's not just an individual instance, it's an existential state.

The idea that anything or anyone can be bought or sold. My philosopher friend in Kiev, Konstantin Siegel, describes what's happening there as, nihilism made systematic. A year ago, and I was in Kiev for a while, and there was one night in particular where just between three and six a.m., the Russians sent 31 missiles just to Kiev.

And, you know, as a nervous American, I spent those three hours in the bomb shelter. It's not like I was heroic or anything. I was then texting with an Austrian diplomat friend, and I'm like, you know, just out of curiosity, how much did those missiles cost? That was $390 million worth of missiles

just in that three hour period. From a country in which millions of people do not have indoor plumbing. And he texts me back, he's like, Marcy, do you know how many schools you could build in Russia for that money? Putin will, he will burn through all his country's resources and he will bleed through his whole population

until he's defeated. No one's life, including the lives of his own people, means anything to him. This is just pure destruction. My other philosopher friends in Chiavalo, Diantani, describe it as a negative sum game. You just burn everything for everyone. Both with Trump and Putin, you're dealing with people for whom other people's lives mean absolutely nothing at all. That gives them an incredible advantage.

Because when other people's lives mean nothing to you, then you have a free hand. Then there are no constraints. Then you really are in a Dostoevskyian world in which everything is permitted. But there's a sense that something that's happening is so grotesque that we're not really taking it in in real time.

And one thing I've now kept saying, especially to the Europeans who have to step up, is that this is it, like the end of the affair. Like, this is it. You cannot trust this government. You cannot trust the United States. Don't think you can finesse the situation. You are dealing, you're looking into an abyss. I think this goes for Canadians as well.

You have to recognize this is it. This is the end of the affair. These people cannot be dealt with, you know, as if they had some kind of first principles, because you're looking at nothing. I mean, you really are looking into this kind of moral, moral abyss. So we have the end of history.

We have liberal teleology failed, and we were way too slow to kind of take in that paradigm shift. And now everyone is being too slow to take in the end of the affair problem. I keep pleading with the Europeans and I'm like, listen, America is going under. That is heartbreaking to me me It's wrenching but do not let us take you down with us It's bad enough. It's bad enough. We are going under don't get sucked down. Don't think there's something to be done I mean this is you have to see the catastrophe for for what it is I'm like don't you see what's happening in America? Do they see that guys in masks are just taking people off the streets and locking them up

in this kind of arbitrary, lawless way? I mean, do you... You don't need... You shouldn't need me to tell you that. Like, you have to see it for what it is. Don't let us take you down. I'll end with a quote from my brilliant Bulgarian political theorist friend who always has something very sharp to say. I'll end with a quote from my brilliant Bulgarian political theorist friend who always has something

very sharp to say. And he said recently in an interview, he's like, yes, liberals are now behaving as if they have been betrayed by history. The end of history was supposed to lead us to liberal democracy. Now they're acting like they've been betrayed by history. And he said, but history, he said, is married to nobody. Hey, thank you. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North

America on SiriusXM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National. Stream us around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas and find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. You've been listening to excerpts from a talk given by historian Marcy Shore at Toronto's

Metropolitan University in April of 2025. She titled her address, How Did the end of history come to an end? Russia's war in Ukraine and totalitarianism in a postmodern key. Professor Shor and her husband, fellow Yale professor and historian Timothy Snyder, will be teaching at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. I spoke with Marcy Shor about their decision to relocate to Canada and more when she joined me in studio. I know a lot of people have said this already, but welcome to Toronto. Thank you so much. I feel very welcomed here. I should actually say it's more a welcome back because you actually lived here previously.

I lived here for a whole 10 months. The academic year 1995 to 1996 when I was doing my MA at UFT. So I did not see that much of the city. But it's wonderful to be back. And it's true that my nostalgia for that year, which was intellectually a very important year for me, played a role in my being tempted to return to Toronto. Today happens to be the day where a video appeared on the New York Times website in which you appear talking about democratic backsliding in the United States and also your reason for leaving the United States. The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later. And you talk, you compare the mindset or the mindset of some people in the United States to that of people who are on the Titanic.

My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, we have checks and balances, so let's inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances. And I thought, my God, we're like people on the Titanic. Can you describe the similarity in that mindset? Yes. This was something that came to me not now, but very powerfully in the days after the election in 2016. So in 2016, nobody really expected Trump to win. I was nervous about it. A lot of us were nervous about it.

It's not that I was completely confident, but I didn't think it was going to happen. And that next day, voting in America is always on a Tuesday, as people might know. And so that next day was a Wednesday. And so it's a work day, it's a school day. I took my kids to school, I had classes, I was at the university, and people are walking around and saying, okay, this is bad. This is very bad. But we're going to get through it. We have the world's strongest liberal democracy. We drink in our liberalism with our mother's milk. We have a division of power. We have checks and balances. And know, and I felt like they became like, okay, inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances, was like a yoga mantra. And my very overwhelming feeling at the time was that we were like the people on the Titanic

saying our ship can't sink. Of course, other ships sink. We know that other ships sink. But we've got the best ship, we've got the best ship, we've got the strongest ship, we've got the biggest ship, our ship can't sink. Too big to fail. Exactly, too big to fail, like the banks. And I thought, oh my God, we're in denial. Because the one thing you know as a historian, you don't know which ships are going to sink, but you know there's no such thing as a ship that cannot sink. Any ship can sink. Including the United States. Including the United States. In fact, your caution about the kind of ship that you were on began long before that actual

election. It began back in 2014, even when Donald Trump first entered or even entertained the idea of becoming president. And so, hearkening to your lecture here in Toronto, where you kind of take us on a journey of moments that you describe kind of leading up to the end of the end of history or the moment we go from modern to postmodern world. You talk about being a scholar of authoritarianism and Eastern European history, and how that enabled you to see things in the United States and in the West

that other people may not have seen as early as you did. And that that, in your words, made you panic. Yes. Well, I should first of all say that I'm a neurotic catastrophist by nature, so it could be overly determined that I tend to panic, and we could just subtitle the present moment, the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist. So I have that tendency, but it's true that everything I understood was inflected by my

being a historian of Eastern Europe. And I should also say that I'm American, but I'm not an Americanist in the sense that my scholarship and my academic background and my training was never on American history and politics. In that sense, I'm just another American citizen looking at what's happening to my own country, feeling implicated in it, but very much through the lens of someone who's a historian of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. And that definitely inflected everything I saw. And one thing I understood when Trump came on the scene, I would say at least from late 2015, with this crazy unhinging from empirical reality.

I mean, it just seemed ridiculous in the beginning. And journalists didn't know what to do because they were used to fact-checking individual facts. They weren't used to a complete unhinging from empirical reality. Nobody could keep up with that in real time. And there was a New Yorker satire after one of the early Republican debates about the fact-checker who passes out from exhaustion

before the debate is over. Because they had so many facts to check. Exactly, and nobody could keep up. And so it seemed like this is kind of comical. This can't be real. There's not even an attempt to pretend that this could be the truth. But having watched what was going on as Putinism rose in Russia and how that affected what was happening in Ukraine and the beginnings of the war in the Donbas, and this kind of postmodern, I don't know, let's call it neo-totalitarianism, neo-fascism,

but where you no longer have a coherent narrative, you no longer have an ideology that might be false, but has an internal logic and consistency. Now you just have an unraveling of the notion that there is any such thing as truth at all. And I knew that that could be more deadly than we might think because I had been watching what was going on in Russia. Another moment I want to raise with you is I'm curious just what went through you, through your mind later, as you saw the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin develop and become warmer?

I found it sickening, but not surprising. Perhaps one advantage of being a neurotic catastrophist is that I knew from the beginning that with Trump, we're looking at somebody who has no values, who has no first principles. And so the fact that he would then be enamored of this other dictator did not strike me as a departure from anything else about him. There are lots of discussions about the source of his being so beholden to Putin, his being so enamored of Putin. Was there a compromise? Was it a debt that he owed Putin for his assistance in winning the 2016 election? Was it just the way one sadistic lunatic might feel an affinity with another sadistic lunatic? Was it admiration for someone who was doing what he was doing on a still more sophisticated scale? In some sense,

I thought it doesn't matter. For whatever reason, we know that Trump has this affinity for Putin and it's just one of many reasons why he cannot be trusted. You often make references to words from the Russian language to kind of help us understand what is going on in this moment. In your speech you referred to this Slavic word for laying bare. I'm gonna get this wrong. What's the word? Obnazhanya. Obnazhia. Thank you. It's the idea that there's no attempt to cover up wrongdoing anymore. You'd expect this kind of blatant disregard for accepted norms would cause outrage. Why doesn't it? That's one of the curious phenomenon. Obnashenia, I should say, is a word, it doesn't come from

political theory in Russian. It actually comes from literary theory. It's a Roman Yacopse word, it was a word used to describe the aesthetic methods of the avant-garde that you lay bare the device, you show people what you're doing. And it then became a kind of theme of the political technologists, the postmodern spin doctors who bring Putin to power. Sorkol talks about this in a fairly scandalous essay that he wrote in 2019 saying, okay, this is how we did it. And what is remarkable about our system is that nothing is hidden. All of the ugliness is right there, not disguised by any architectural excesses. And that's the whole strategy.

And there's something disempowering about it. And I kept going back to that idea of obnagenia. I mean, one, because I'm an intellectual historian, so I've spent a lot of time mentally in that time, that avant-garde period in the 1910s when it develops. But I saw how, especially during the first Trump administration, so many of my friends and colleagues, you know, and so many Democrats were so invested in the Mueller report that the lawyers and the investigators

were going to dig up, they were going to reveal the secrets behind the corruption and the intrigue and the illegality and the Russian influence, you know, and then the fact that these ugly things that had been done once they were brought to light, that was going to unravel, that was going to cause tyranny to unravel. And I knew that wasn't going to work because I was watching Russia. And I thought the whole gesture is you put it right out there and then you disempower the opposition because what is threatening is in fact not what remains concealed but what has been normalized. Another example that might be of that laying bare could be that moment that we saw, that

extraordinary moment that we saw in the Oval Office. And I know you've talked about this before, but where Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, is basically being admonished publicly by Vance, JD Vance and Donald Trump. What new insight, if any, did you glean from that moment about the moment that we're in? That was one of the most revolting things I've ever seen on television. I think it affected me very viscerally, you know, on a couple different levels. I mean, I would point to at least three things. You know, one is a historian of Stalinism, that motif of you must say thank you. You have to say thank you. This is first of all, this is what the abusive husband says to his wife.

This is also what the people being interrogated by the Stalinist secret police hear from their interrogators. This is what the victims of the show trials, you know, are made to do. You thank the party for giving you your just punishment. In fact, Lech Wałęsa and a whole collection of former Polish political prisoners, including several people I know well, who sat in prison in communist Poland, wrote a letter saying, this is how our secret police interrogators spoke to us. There was a brilliant film that was done in the late 60s in the Czech

new wave called Klářívá na červenice, which in fact I first saw in Toronto at a film festival in 1996, which was an allegory of the Stalinist show trials through the prism of the early modern witchcraft trials in Bohemia. And at the end, once they brutally tortured and gruesomely tortured these women to making false confessions of being possessed by demons and being witches, they're being led to the stake to be burned alive. And the last thing you hear is, Mūsītā pō diakovāt. You must say thank you. So that just ran through me that you have to thank us, this ritual humiliation. And you're not wearing a suit, you have to say thank you. And then, so that was the first thing. Then the second thing was you're not holding any cards,

which was just a laying bare of the fact that everything is transactional, everything is a game. And Zelensky's response was perfect, we're not playing cards, because for him it was not a game, for him he's responsible for the lives of these millions of people. But then I think what really punched me in the stomach was Trump saying to Zelensky, he has such hatred for Putin, it's really hard to make a deal with someone who's got this hatred. And when you are watching day after day, your city's burned, and your children buried alive under rubble, and these young journalists captured and dismembered and tied to boards and tortured with electric shocks, you might not feel very warmly to that person. You might not even have instrumentalists,

let's make a deal kind of feelings towards that person. And the idea, the moral nihilism of not being even able to make that empathetic leap, I just thought we are looking into an abyss. Right. And for him to be admonished for it is beyond everything. Back to this sort of idea of what's happening in the US, this democratic backsliding, you draw a line between what's happening now and the rise of fascism in the lead up of the world, a second world war. You in some sense, of course, we all see some of the parallels and some of the bits that echo from back then.

But the big difference now you said in your lecture is that events are being streamed live to us 24-7. You know, watching live streams of exactly what you just described, this horror that is unfolding in Ukraine. How does our perception and our response to these alarming events shaped by the fact that we're watching it so vividly and so instantly? That's a really good question. It's a question I've been musing over a lot, and I'm not sure I have a good answer for. But I think it's definitely, it's no longer about what is concealed, because you can't really conceal now,

you can only flood. Yeah. Right, it used to be that people thought once the truth gets out there, that's going to save us. We now know it's not going to save us because the problem is not that it's not out there that's going to save us. We now know it's not going to save us because the problem is not that it's not out there. But in 2022, when journalists were asking me, how is this different from the Second World War? And I thought about what the Polish underground courier, Jan Karski, went through to bring news of the Holocaust to the West. And he was smuggled by Jewish

colleagues in and out of the Warsaw ghetto to see the transports for Treblinka. He had teeth ripped out to have a microfilm report hidden in a tooth. He had to get across wartime Europe. He had to get to London, then he had to get to the States, and even then he's sitting in the Supreme Court and the Justice is saying, I'm sorry, I'm not able to believe you. And Karski says, are you accusing me of lying, Your Honor? And he says, no, I'm not accusing you of lying. I'm just, I'm unable to believe you. And Karski says, are you accusing me of lying, Your Honor? And he says, no, I'm not accusing you of lying. I'm just, I'm unable to believe this. And now essentially, we have a live stream into the gas chamber. Now we know everything in real time. There

might be details here or there, but basically we know everything in real time. And that has somehow paralyzed us. Yeah. And yeah, and we still don't believe it. I think we can't, there's something about it we can't take it in. I think this is part of the Obnagenia. This is part of the the laying bare that we don't yet have a strategy. We're so flooded. You also talk about insecurity, about masculinity as sort of a classical motif as you describe

it that can inform us about this postmodern moment that we're in. What are you seeing, what's one thing you're seeing in relation to gender relations or gender more broadly in the United States that gives you cause for concern? That's something that has hit me over the head for at least the past 10 years, at least since the Maidan. I don't know as a woman who's never at least since the Maidan. I don't know as a woman who's never actually felt personally any gender ambulance, I don't

know that I'm in a particularly authoritative position to talk about insecurities and masculinity, but I noticed, you know, for instance, Putin's obsession with gayropa during the revolution on the Maidan 2013-2014 in Ukraine. This obsession that the West is all about LGBT, it's all about homosexuals, it's all about this kind of deviation from authentic masculinity. Then Trump comes on the scene in very early, these early Republican debates, and you have this motif of penis-sized competitions.

And I thought, how did we reach this? I mean, it was just so vulgar that I wasn't even sure what to do about it. And then you have Lukashenko in Belarus, you know, and when there were massive protests, which should have succeeded if Putin hadn't interviewed interviewed they would have succeeded when he steals the 2020 election you know from his his competitor who actually wants Vietlana Tikhanouskaya and when she's detained and made to give a confession she is made to say I suppose in the end I'm the same weak woman I always was. And then later, and it was that summer afterwards when Lukashenko hijacks an EU flight in order to capture an opposition journalist, this young man, Ruben Protasevich, they capture Protasevich, clearly brutalize him, and then

put him on this glossy television show to give a Stalinist-era style confession, false confession. And what is he made to say? He's made to say that, now I see the era of my ways, now I realize that Lukashenko in fact behaves as a man with steel balls. That's steel balls. And this is comical. I mean, could be a caricature or a self parody this kind of grotesque Insecurity about masculinity that you see in Trump you see in Lukashenko you see in Putin I don't think I'm particularly well positioned to understand it, but it's it's clearly there I'm a young historian I interviewed who was in prison for being in the protest in Belarus a couple times.

Also, his wife was also arrested. Very brave young people. And when he got out of prison, I said, what were these guards? Did they really believe Lukashenko? What were they saying to you? You know, what were they? And he said, well, they were saying like, so what is it with you guys? You want to go to Europe?

You want to hang out with the fags? You want your children no longer to say mommy and daddy, but parent number one and parent number two? Like somehow there's a motif about this, this insecurity about masculinity. You talk bluntly about Europe as well as Canada needing to kind of recognize that this is the end of the affair, as you describe it, with America and its commitment to defending democracy. And we're seeing signs of it on a daily basis, the questioning of NATO and the need to protect Europe against the possible Russian threat. Do you see any signs that this message is actually sinking in, either here in Canada or in Europe?

That's an excellent question. I'm not yet qualified to comment on Canadian politics, but the wake-up call to Europe, it's clearly going in that direction, but too slowly. And the fact that those four presidents went to Kiev was a very good sign. I think that the gross test scene in the Oval Office helped that. It's very, very hard, I found,

more so, I think, for Europeans than Canadians to let go of that myth of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Gabriele Landberg, the former foreign minister of Lithuania, just gave this New York Times interview a couple days ago, and he said, you have to understand, it's like ripping through our bodies.

It's like you're tearing your heart out. You grow up with this idea of the arsenal of democracy and what it means to have that taken away. And it doesn't mean that all Americans have changed their mind. I constantly get messages from Americans saying, please tell all the Canadians you see that we still love them.

Please tell them that this is not representative of us. And there are certainly, you know, that's not what everybody feels. But the people in power should absolutely not be trusted. The idea that you can kind of get inside Trump's psyche and figure out how to have a good relationship with him. I think that's a mistake because there's no operative true false good evil. It's only what is advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment in time. There's nothing else. What you're describing sounds like a little bit of Titanic mindset as well, from in Europe. Yes. And I understand it's hard to let go of, but I think that letting go right away is essential.

I know, as you mentioned, you've only been in Canada for a few months, but I'm curious what you've been able to glean looking at the United States from this perch, from this side of the border, any new insights from looking, observing from over here of your home country, of the United States? Well, I feel calmer here. I'm in a very privileged position because now I've given myself a little bit of distance. I mean, Canada always felt to me like a place that was less edgy, which was part of the appeal, even independently of American politics, just America as such.

It's a place where there are gun control laws. It's a place where there's more of a social support system. It's a place where there's, I feel in my kids' schools that there's less of a competitive edge, you know, among the kids, among the parents. And so I feel like it gives me a little space to take a deep breath, but I also feel guilty about being in this relatively safe place and taking advantage of it. But does it in any way inform your thinking about what is happening in your country? Do you see, do you have more clarity or a different kind of, a different posture being

here and watching back to the idea of democratic backsliding, watching what's happening in the States. That's a good question. I mean, I would say the one thing I thought about was the way in which all the Canadian commentators were saying that it was Trump's election that saved the Liberal Party in Canada because it warned people about what could happen. And that sense of could people be attentive to what was happening across the border in such a way that would shake them into responsibility for themselves, I found that quite inspiring.

Okay. Speaking of which, I backed right to the beginning to that video with the New York Times. One idea that really struck me was one of your colleagues, Jason Stanley, talked about this notion of the necessity of a resistance in exile. Do you buy into that idea? Is that partly why you're here, is to kind of think about what might happen

with the United States post Trump or in resistance to Trump? Is that part of the thinking? Well, I would say that that was not part of the original motivation because these offers from the monk school were percolating for a long time. I didn't have that in my head. Now that I am where I am, and now that the situation is what it is, now I'm thinking about that a lot. But I can't say, oh, I had this plan all the way. But now that we are where we are, I think, yes, now we should, you know, now we should do everything we can here where we are. Last thing is, if this is, as you say, the end of the end of history, this is a very

broad question, but what comes next? What do you hope comes next? I'm trying very hard to hold on to hope. I'm desperately clinging to hope. My fantasy when I'm not being a neurotic catastrophist is that there will be a domino effect of the fall of tyranny, that Putin's regime will fall, Lukashenko's regime will fall, the Iranian regime will fall, that Trump's regime will fall, that there'll be complete Ukrainian victory and that Ukraine will be the vanguard no longer of catching up with the West.

Catching up with the West was the Fukuyama end of history model that we're all moving inevitably and exorbitantly to liberal democracy. It's going to go that way and you should follow the people who are further along down the road. We know now that that did not work. But I see now these young people in Ukraine, I think Ukraine has to be totally rebuilt. It should be rebuilt in clean energy. Not only should everyone be off Russian oil, everyone should be off gas and oil. Like, there should be a whole new model. So my fantasy is that that total destruction and that grotesque suffering will then, there'll be a light that will point to something new, some better way for all of us.

Like, for my kids' generation, global warming is the catastrophe that has always been present, that has underlie everything that are we going to have a sustainable world. Thank you so much for being with us. It's great to have you among us. Thank you so much for inviting me. You've been listening to My Conversation with historian Marcy Schorr. Schorr begins her new role as the chair in European intellectual history at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in Toronto in the fall of 2025. Thank you to Arne Kislenko, Brian Bose and Randall Savoie at Toronto Metropolitan University. This episode was produced by Donna Dingwall. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas.

Danielle Duval is the technical producer. Senior producer, Nika Lelukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad.