timothy snyder memory laws essay

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• Memory Laws, Memory Wars

Memory Laws, Memory Wars

The politics of the past in europe and russia.

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Laws against Holocaust denial are perhaps the best-known manifestation of the present-day politics of historical memory. In Memory Laws, Memory Wars, Nikolay Koposov examines the phenomenon of memory laws in Western and Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia and exposes their very different purposes in the East and West. In Western Europe, he shows how memory laws were designed to create a common European memory centred on the memory of the Holocaust as a means of integrating Europe, combating racism, and averting national and ethnic conflicts. In Russia and Eastern Europe, by contrast, legislation on the issues of the past is often used to give the force of law to narratives which serve the narrower interests of nation states and protect the memory of perpetrators rather than victims. This will be essential reading for all those interested in ongoing conflicts over the legacy of the Second World War, Nazism, and communism.

‘Nikolay Koposov is, by his personal experience and his international culture and mostly by his talent as both a philosopher and an historian, the most well equipped man to dominate such a large and topical subject.'

Pierre Nora - Académie Française

‘In Memory Laws, Memory Wars, Nikolay Koposov offers the first comprehensive history of the creation of laws regulating memory and memorial practices in both Western and Eastern Europe, beginning in the period after World War II with acts forbidding Holocaust denial, but then extended to topics relating to national traditions, racism and ethnicity more generally. Koposov's book is essential reading for anyone interested in the varied components that constitute modern historical understandings of the past.'

Gabrielle Spiegel - The Johns Hopkins University

‘One way to describe Nikolay Koposov's book on memory laws is masterful; others would be ground-breaking, thorough, illuminating, and compelling. I literally could not stop reading it. As historian rather than lawyer, Koposov explores a terrain upturned by the democratization and denationalization of history writing that elevated the concept of victimhood and therefore the protection of those who suffered or might suffer from false or hateful revisions of history. Criminalization of the past, however, conflicted with freedom of expression. In this extraordinary work, Koposov illuminates the tensions between acceptable and unacceptable pasts and the problem of what to do about them. Be careful what you wish for.'

Ronald Grigor Suny - University of Michigan

'Specialists might be aware of particular memory laws, but few of us have realized how general the phenomenon has become. In this first comprehensive study of the legislation of the past, Nikolay Koposov brings to bear thorough empirical study, a broad comparative sensibility, and the semantic care one would expect from a major philosopher and student of literature. The result is an indispensable handbook of an important European phenomenon.'

Timothy Snyder - Yale University, Connecticut

'Memory Laws, Memory Wars is a timely and illuminating assessment of the legal measures prohibiting Holocaust denial from their beginnings in Western Europe to the emergence of quite different memory laws in Eastern Europe and today’s Russia. Sober, nuanced, and international in scope, Koposov judiciously confronts the hard questions posed by the expansion of memory laws: Do public uses of memory promise a more democratic and humane relationship to the past, or do they represent novel ways of whitewashing past crimes?'

Anson Rabinbach - Princeton University

'This is an excellent comparative study of the role of memory laws in contemporary European societies and politics, with special attention for the right wing movement in Eastern Europe and the Ukrainian crisis. It paints a wide canvas of the struggle between free speech versus hate speech and denial, and illuminates the dilemma presented by memory laws in both liberal societies and authoritarian states. It is an important book for understanding the relation of collective memory and nationalism. Kosopov’s combines detailed description with incisive analytical perspectives. This is a rewarding text for the historian as well as for the general reader.'

Elazar Barkan - Columbia University, New York

'Koposov (Emory) studies the politics of national memory laws centered on ‘legislation penalizing statements about the past'. His review of European memory legislation is highly recommended.'

D. P. Forsythe Source: Choice

'Koposov shows in great detail how as memory laws spread from West to East they became ever less democratic and ever more despotic, weapons not of the weak, but of the strong, used to silence competing narratives about the past and to foster a mythical national history, often one of both unrivaled victimization and awesome heroism, as has been most fully realized in the last years of the Putin regime. A deeply researched, nuanced, and rich work, Memory Laws, Memory Wars makes clear the dangers in trying to legislate our understanding of the past.'

Douglas Smith Source: Los Angeles Review of Books

'Koposov has written a challenging book on a new and unfamiliar topic. It deserves to be widely read.'

Erik Jones Source: Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

'A sweeping and thorough study … this book ought to be read from cover to cover by those interested in both Eastern and Western Europe as it is a model of comparative history … a short review can neither do justice to the complexity of the volume’s argument nor fully convey the author’s erudition on the subject.'

Kathleen Smith Source: The Journal of Modern History

'Koposov offers useful insights into the historical conditions that make memory malleable and instrumentable, especially by authoritarian nationalist politics, at our current conjuncture.'

Saygun Gökarıksel Source: H-Net

‘Koposov’s book provides a foundational text in European memory laws, recalling known arguments and shedding new light on the power these laws can have on a country’s self-consciousness and national identity, as well as on its foreign policy in Eastern Europe … His book is timely as it offers an additional layer of understanding to policy making and national narrative making, particularly in countries which have recently been experiencing a democratic backsliding.’

Jennifer Ostojski Source: Interdisciplinary Political Studies

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Memory Laws, Memory Wars pp i-i

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New Studies in European History - Series page pp ii-ii

Memory laws, memory wars - title page pp iii-iii.

• The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia

Copyright page pp iv-iv

Dedication pp v-vi, contents pp vii-viii, preface and acknowledgments pp ix-xii, chronological table pp xiii-xvi, introduction pp 1-24, chapter 1 - the rise of memory and the origins of memory laws pp 25-59, chapter 2 - memory laws in western europe pp 60-125, chapter 3 - memory laws in eastern europe pp 126-176, chapter 4 - memory laws in ukraine pp 177-206, chapter 5 - memory laws in yeltsin’s russia pp 207-237, chapter 6 - memory laws in putin’s russia pp 238-299, conclusion pp 300-310, index pp 311-321, altmetric attention score, full text views.

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The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War

By Timothy Snyder

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.

As the objects of this rhetoric, and of the war of destruction that it sanctions, Ukrainians grasp all of this. Ukraine does have a history, of course, and Ukrainians do constitute a nation. But empire enforces objectification on the periphery and amnesia at the center. Thus modern Russian imperialism includes memory laws that forbid serious discussion of the Soviet past. It is illegal for Russians to apply the word “war” to the invasion of Ukraine. It is also illegal to say that Stalin began the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, and used much the same justification to attack Poland as Putin is using to attack Ukraine. When the invasion began, in February, Russian publishers were ordered to purge mentions of Ukraine from textbooks.

Faced with the Kremlin’s official mixture of fantasy and taboo, the temptation is to prove the opposite: that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is eternal, that it is Ukrainians, not Russians, who are always right, and so on. Yet Ukrainian history gives us something more interesting than a mere counter-narrative to empire. We can find Ukrainian national feeling at a very early date. In contemporary Ukraine, though, the nation is not so much anti-colonial, a rejection of a particular imperial power, as post-colonial, the creation of something new.

Southern Ukraine, where Russian troops are now besieging cities and bombing hospitals , was well known to the ancients. In the founding myth of Athens, the goddess Athena gives the city the gift of the olive tree. In fact, the city could grow olives only because it imported grain from ports on the Black Sea coast. The Greeks knew the coast, but not the hinterland, where they imagined mythical creatures guarding fields of gold and ambrosia. Here already was a colonial view of Ukraine: a land of fantasy, where those who take have the right to dream.

The city of Kyiv did not exist in ancient times, but it is very old—about half a millennium older than Moscow. It was probably founded in the sixth or seventh century, north of any territory seen by Greeks or controlled by Romans. Islam was advancing, and Christianity was becoming European. The Western Roman Empire had fallen, leaving a form of Christianity subordinate to a pope. The Eastern (Byzantine) Empire remained, directing what we now call the Orthodox Church. As Rome and Constantinople competed for converts, peoples east of Kyiv converted to Islam. Kyivans spoke a Slavic language that had no writing system, and practiced a paganism without idols or temples.

Putin’s vision of “unity” relates to a baptism that took place in this setting. In the ninth century, a group of Vikings known as the Rus arrived in Kyiv. Seeking a southbound route for their slave trade, they found the Dnipro River, which runs through the city. Their chieftains then fought over a patchwork of territories in what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and the northeast of Russia—with Kyiv always as the prize. In the late tenth century, a Viking named Valdemar took the city, with the help of a Scandinavian army. He initially governed as a pagan. But, around 987, when the Byzantines faced an internal revolt, he sensed an opportunity. He came to the emperor’s aid, and received his sister’s hand in marriage. In the process, Valdemar converted to Christianity.

Putin claims that this messy sequence of events reveals the will of God to bind Russia and Ukraine forever. The will of God is easy to misunderstand; in any case, modern nations did not exist at the time, and the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” had no meaning. Valdemar was typical of the pagan Eastern European rulers of his day, considering multiple monotheistic options before choosing the one that made the most strategic sense. The word “Rus” no longer meant Viking slavers but a Christian polity. Its ruling family now intermarried with others, and the local people were treated as subjects to be taxed rather than as bodies to be sold.

Yet no rule defined who would take power after a Kyivan ruler’s death. Valdemar took a Byzantine princess as his wife, but he had a half a dozen others, not to mention a harem of hundreds of women. When he died in 1015, he had imprisoned one of his sons, Sviatopolk, and was making war upon another, Yaroslav. Sviatopolk was freed after his father’s death, and killed three of his brothers, but he was defeated on the battlefield by Yaroslav. Other sons entered the fray, and Yaroslav didn’t rule alone until 1036. The succession had taken twenty-one years. At least ten other sons of Valdemar had died in the meantime.

These events do not reveal a timeless empire, as Putin claims. But they do suggest the importance of a succession principle, a theme very important in Ukrainian-Russian relations today. The Ukrainian transliteration of “Valdemar” is “Volodymyr,” the name of Ukraine’s President. In Ukraine, power is transferred through democratic elections: when Volodymyr Zelensky won the 2019 Presidential election , the sitting President accepted defeat. The Russian transliteration of the same name is “Vladimir.” Russia is brittle: it has no succession principle , and it’s unclear what will happen when Vladimir Putin dies or is forced from power. The pressure of mortality confirms the imperial thinking. An aging tyrant, obsessed by his legacy, seizes upon a lofty illusion that seems to confer immortality: the “unity” of Russia and Ukraine.

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In the Icelandic sagas, Yaroslav is remembered as the Lame; in Eastern Europe, he is the Wise, the giver of laws. Yet he did not solve the problem of succession. Following his reign, the lands around Kyiv fragmented again and again. In 1240, the city fell to the Mongols; later, most of old Rus was claimed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the largest state in Europe. Lithuania borrowed from Kyiv a grammar of politics, as well as a good deal of law. For a couple of centuries, its grand dukes also ruled Poland. But, in 1569, after the Lithuanian dynasty died out, a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was formalized, and the territories of Ukraine were placed under Polish jurisdiction.

This was a crucial change. After 1569, Kyiv was no longer a source of law but an object of it—the archetypal colonial situation. It was colonization that set off Ukraine from the former territories of Rus, and its manner generated qualities still visible today: suspicion of the central state, organization in crisis, and the notion of freedom as self-expression, despite a powerful neighbor.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the forces of Europe’s globalization seemed to bear down on Ukraine. Polish colonization resembled and in some measure enabled the European colonization of the wider world. Polish nobles introduced land-management practices—along with land managers, most of whom were Jewish—that allowed the establishment of profitable plantations. Local Ukrainian warlords rushed to imitate the system, and adopted elements of Polish culture, including Western Christianity and the Polish language. In an age of discovery, enserfed peasants labored for a world market.

Ukraine’s colonization coincided with the Renaissance, and with a spectacular flowering of Polish culture. Like other Renaissance thinkers, Polish scholars in Ukraine resuscitated ancient knowledge, and sometimes overturned it. It was a Pole, Copernicus, who undid the legacy of Ptolemy’s “ Almagest ” and confirmed that the Earth orbits the sun. It was another Pole, Maciej of Miechów, who corrected Ptolemy’s “ Geography ,” clearing Ukrainian maps of gold and ambrosia. As in ancient times, however, the tilling of the black earth enabled tremendous wealth, raising the question of why those who labored and those who profited experienced such different fates.

The Renaissance considered questions of identity through language. Across Europe, there was a debate as to whether Latin, now revived, was sufficient for the culture, or whether vernacular spoken languages should be elevated for the task. In the early fourteenth century, Dante answered this question in favor of Italian; English, French, Spanish, and Polish writers created other literary languages by codifying local vernaculars. In Ukraine, literary Polish emerged victorious over the Ukrainian vernacular, becoming the language of the commercial and intellectual élite. In a way, this was typical: Polish was a modern language, like English or Italian. But it was not the local language in Ukraine. Ukraine’s answer to the language question was deeply colonial, whereas in the rest of Europe it could be seen as broadly democratic.

The Reformation brought a similar result: local élites converted to Protestantism and then to Roman Catholicism, alienating them further from an Orthodox population. The convergence of colonization, the Renaissance, and the Reformation was specific to Ukraine. By the sixteen-forties, the few large landholders generally spoke Polish and were Catholic, and those who worked for them spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox. Globalization had generated differences and inequalities that pushed the people to rebellion.

Ukrainians on the battlefield today rely on no fantasy of the past to counter Putin’s. If there is a precursor that matters to them, it is the Cossacks, a group of free people who lived on the far reaches of the Ukrainian steppe, making their fortress on an island in the middle of the Dnipro. Having escaped the Polish system of landowners and peasants, they could choose to be “registered Cossacks,” paid for their service in the Polish Army. Still, they were not citizens, and more of them wished to be registered than the Polish-Lithuanian parliament would allow.

The rebellion began in 1648, when an influential Cossack, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, saw his lands seized and his son attacked by a Polish noble. Finding himself beyond the protection of the law, Khmelnytsky turned his fellow-Cossacks toward revolt against the Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic magnates who dominated Ukraine. The accumulated cultural, religious, and economic grievances of the people quickly transformed the revolt into something very much like an anti-colonial uprising, with violence directed not only against the private armies of the magnates but against Poles and Jews generally. The magnates carried out reprisals against peasants and Cossacks, impaling them on stakes. The Polish-Lithuanian cavalry fought what had been their own Cossack infantry. Each side knew the other very well.

In 1651, the Cossacks, realizing that they needed help, turned to an Eastern power, Muscovy, about which they knew little. When Kyivan Rus had collapsed, most of its lands had been absorbed by Lithuania, but some of its northeastern territories remained under the dominion of a Mongol successor state. There, in a new city called Moscow, leaders known as tsars had begun an extraordinary period of territorial expansion, extending their realm into northern Asia. In 1648, the year that the Cossack uprising began, a Muscovite explorer reached the Pacific Ocean.

The war in Ukraine allowed Muscovy to turn its attention to Europe. In 1654, the Cossacks signed an agreement with representatives of the tsar. The Muscovite armies invaded Poland-Lithuania from the east; soon after, Sweden invaded from the north, setting off the crisis that Polish history remembers as “the Deluge.” Peace was eventually made between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, in 1667, and Ukraine was divided more or less down the middle, along the Dnipro. After a thousand years of existence, Kyiv was politically connected to Moscow for the first time.

The Cossacks were something like an early national movement. The problem was that their struggle against one colonial power enabled another. In 1721, Muscovy was renamed the Russian Empire, in reference to old Rus. Poland-Lithuania never really recovered from the Deluge, and was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Russia thereby claimed the rest of Ukraine—everything but a western district known as Galicia, which went to the Habsburgs. Around the same time, in 1775, the Cossacks lost their status. They did not gain the political rights they had wanted, nor did the peasants who supported them gain control of the black earth. Polish landowners remained in Ukraine, even as state power became Russian.

Whereas Putin’s story of Ukraine is about destiny, the Ukrainian recollection of the Cossacks is about unfulfilled aspirations. The country’s national anthem, written in 1862, speaks of a young people upon whom fate has yet to smile, but who will one day prove worthy of the “Cossack nation.”

The nineteenth century was the age of national revivals. When the Ukrainian movement began in imperial Russian Kharkov—today Kharkiv , and largely in ruins—the focus was on the Cossack legacy. The next move was to locate history in the people, as an account of continuous culture. At first, such efforts did not seem threatening to imperial rule. But, after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, in 1856, and the insult of the Polish uprising of 1863 and 1864, Ukrainian culture was declared not to exist. It was often deemed an invention of Polish élites—an idea that Putin endorsed in his essay on “historical unity.” Leading Ukrainian thinkers emigrated to Galicia, where they could speak freely.

The First World War brought the principle of self-determination, which promised a release from imperial rule. In practice, it was often used to rescue old empires, or to build new ones. A Ukrainian National Republic was established in 1917, as the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution. In 1918, in return for a promise of foodstuffs, the country was recognized by Austria and Germany . Woodrow Wilson championed self-determination, but his victorious entente ignored Ukraine, recognizing Polish claims instead. Vladimir Lenin invoked the principle as well, though he meant only that the exploitation of national questions could advance class revolution. Ukraine soon found itself at the center of the Russian civil war, in which the Red Army, led by the Bolsheviks, and the White Army, fighting for the defunct empire, both denied Ukraine’s right to sovereignty. In this dreadful conflict, which followed four years of war, millions of people died, among them tens of thousands of Jews.

Though the Red Army ultimately prevailed, Bolshevik leaders knew that the Ukrainian question had to be addressed. Putin claims that the Bolsheviks created Ukraine, but the truth is close to the opposite. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Ukrainian National Republic. Aware that Ukrainian identity was real and widespread, they designed their new state to account for it. It was largely thanks to Ukraine that the Soviet Union took the form it did, as a federation of units with national names.

The failure of self-determination in Ukraine was hardly unique. Almost all of the new states created after the First World War were destroyed, within about two decades, by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or both. In the political imaginations of both regimes, Ukraine was the territory whose possession would allow them to break the postwar order, and to transform the world in their own image. As in the sixteenth century, it was as if all the forces of world history were concentrated on a single country.

Stalin spoke of an internal colonization, in which peasants would be exploited so that the Soviet economy could imitate—and then overtake—capitalism. His policy of collective agriculture, in which land was seized from farmers, was particularly unwelcome in Ukraine, where the revolution had finally got rid of the (still largely Polish) landholders. Yet the black earth of Ukraine was central to Stalin’s plans, and he moved to subdue it. In 1932 and 1933, he enforced a series of policies that led to around four million people dying of hunger or related disease. Soviet propaganda blamed the Ukrainians, claiming that they were killing themselves to discredit Soviet rule—a tactic echoed, today, by Putin. Europeans who tried to organize famine relief were dismissed as Nazis.

The actual Nazis saw Stalin’s famine as a sign that Ukrainian agriculture could be exploited for another imperial project: their own. Hitler wanted Soviet power overthrown, Soviet cities depopulated, and the whole western part of the country colonized. His vision of Ukrainians was intensely colonial : he imagined that he could deport and starve them by the millions, and exploit the labor of whoever remained. It was Hitler’s desire for Ukrainian land that brought millions of Jews under German control. In this sense, colonial logic about Ukraine was a necessary condition for the Holocaust .

Between 1933 and 1945, Soviet and Nazi colonialism made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world . More civilians were killed in Ukraine, in acts of atrocity, than anywhere else. That reckoning doesn’t even include soldiers: more Ukrainians died fighting the Germans, in the Second World War, than French, American, and British troops combined.

The major conflict of the war in Europe was the German-Soviet struggle for Ukraine, which took place between 1941 and 1945. But, when the war began, in 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany were de-facto allies, and jointly invaded Poland. At the time, what is now western Ukraine was southeastern Poland. A small group of Ukrainian nationalists there joined the Germans, understanding that they would seek to destroy the U.S.S.R. When it became clear that the Germans would fail, the nationalists left their service, ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 and 1944, and then resisted the Soviets. In Putin’s texts, they figure as timeless villains, responsible for Ukrainian difference generally. The irony, of course, is that they emerged thanks to Stalin’s much grander collaboration with Hitler. They were crushed by Soviet power, in a brutal counter-insurgency, and today Ukraine’s far right polls at one to two per cent. Meanwhile, the Poles, whose ancestors were the chief victims of Ukrainian nationalism, have admitted nearly three million Ukrainian refugees , reminding us that there are other ways to handle history than stories of eternal victimhood.

After the war, western Ukraine was added to Soviet Ukraine, and the republic was placed under suspicion precisely because it had been under German occupation. New restrictions on Ukrainian culture were justified by a manufactured allocation of guilt. This circular logic—we punish you, therefore you must be guilty—informs Kremlin propaganda today. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has argued that Russia had to invade Ukraine because Ukraine might have started a war. Putin, who has said the same, is clearly drawing on Stalin’s rhetoric. We are to understand that the Soviet victory in the Second World War left Russians forever pure and Ukrainians eternally guilty. At the funerals of Russian soldiers, grieving parents are told that their sons were fighting Nazis.

The history of the colonization of Ukraine, like the history of troubling and divisive subjects in general, can help us get free of myths. The past delivers to Putin several strands of colonial rhetoric, which he has combined and intensified. It also leaves us vulnerable to a language of exploitation: whenever we speak of “the Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine,” or pronounce the capital city in the Russian style , or act as if Americans can tell Ukrainians when and how to make peace, we are continuing imperial rhetoric by partaking in it.

Ukrainian national rhetoric is less coherent than Putin’s imperialism, and, therefore, more credible, and more human. Independence arrived in 1991, when the U.S.S.R was dissolved. Since then, the country’s politics have been marked by corruption and inequality, but also by a democratic spirit that has grown in tandem with national self-awareness. In 2004, an attempt to rig an election was defeated by a mass movement. In 2014, millions of Ukrainians protested a President who retreated from the E.U. The protesters were massacred, the President fled, and Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. Again and again, Ukrainians have elected Presidents who seek reconciliation with Russia; again and again, this has failed. Zelensky is an extreme case: he ran on a platform of peace, only to be greeted with an invasion.

Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way , dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.

The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.

Ukrainians assert their nation’s existence through simple acts of solidarity. They are not resisting Russia because of some absence or some difference, because they are not Russians or opposed to Russians. What is to be resisted is elemental: the threat of national extinction represented by Russian colonialism, a war of destruction expressly designed to resolve “the Ukrainian question.” Ukrainians know that there is not a question to be answered, only a life to be lived and, if need be, to be risked. They resist because they know who they are. In one of his very first videos after the invasion, when Russian propaganda claimed that he had fled Kyiv, Zelensky pointed the camera at himself and said, “The President is here.” That is it. Ukraine is here.

More on the War in Ukraine

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By Joshua Yaffa

By Alex Ross

By Isaac Chotiner

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Timothy Snyder Is Exactly Right: American Conservatives Are Seeking Their Own 'Memory Laws'

This is a cowardly usurpation of the nation's schools by politicians determined to make the next generation of kids as dumb as they are.

Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands was one of the hardest books I ever read. It was written brilliantly and its research was impeccable. It’s just that the relentless bloodletting of that part of World War II fought in the space between Germany and what was then the Soviet Union sooner or later got too much and I had to put the book down for a couple of days. It took me two months to finish the damn thing, and parts of it are stuck in my consciousness like splinters of glass.

Ever since the ascendancy of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago , Snyder has been warning us that he’s catching more than a whiff of a Munich beer hall in our politics. On Friday, in the New York Times , he looked at the current cultural brawl about the teaching of history and, once again, saw American conservative politicians discreetly fitting themselves for armbands. He sees things familiar in what he refers to as “memory laws,” which he illustrates with several examples from recent Russian history. Then, of course, he gets down to it.

This spring, memory laws arrived in America. Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws.

The particulars of these laws vary. The Idaho law is the most Kafkaesque in its censorship: It affirms freedom of speech and then bans divisive speech. The Iowa law executes the same totalitarian pirouette. The Tennessee and Texas laws go furthest in specifying what teachers may and may not say. In Tennessee teachers must not teach that the rule of law is “a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.” Nor may they deny the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, words that Thomas Jefferson presumably never intended to be part of an American censorship law. The Idaho law mentions Critical Race Theory; the directive from the Florida school board bans it in classrooms. The Texas law forbids teachers from requiring students to understand the 1619 Project . It is a perverse goal: Teachers succeed if students do not understand something.

As it happens, this weekend’s entertainment in the VIP Room of the shebeen— still a bargain! —is my own take on this cowardly usurpation of the nation’s schools by politicians who don’t know what they’re talking about and are proud of it. The latest in the line of fools is Pete Ricketts, the Republican governor of Nebraska, and his robot army both in the Unicameral and in the regents of the state university system. From the Omaha World-Herald :

Ricketts characterized the theory…on the radio Monday. It started with a caller named James from Raymond, Nebraska, asking Ricketts where Nebraska stands as a state on the theory. “Well, I’m opposed to critical race theory,” the governor replied. “It’s a Marxist theory ... it’s really un-American, about how it teaches us to think about ourselves as a country,” Ricketts said.

Well, you’re clearly a dunce. Let’s see what other Nebraskans have to say. Again, from the World-Herald :

Republican gubernatorial candidate and University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen is asking the Board of Regents to adopt a resolution opposing "any imposition of critical race theory" as part of university curriculum. "I believe critical race theory is factually and morally wrong," he said Thursday.

"I do not believe in teaching children to judge each other on the basis of their skin color. There is no place in our classrooms for this ideology.”

If we’re not careful, and all indications are that we’re not, we’re going to end up with 22nd Century kids who are dumber than 21st century politicians. And that’s going to be when the bees take over.

Still, there’s a lot to love about America. This week, I’m happy because I live in the same country as Zaila Avant-garde, and not just because she has the coolest Louisiana name of all time. Zaila, as everyone and her murraya knows by now, won the National Spelling Bee this week. From NPR :

"It made me feel really proud," she said after clinching the victory. "I'm really hoping lots of little brown girls all over the world and stuff are really motivated to try out spelling and stuff because it's really a fun thing to do and it's a great way to kind of connect yourself with education, which is super important.”

Well, hell yes. But then we found out that, to paraphrase Archie Bell, Zaila can not only spell, she can hoop just as good as she walks. She already holds three Guinness Book of World Records marks for dribbling. (Six balls at once!) B ut also, when she laces them up against real competition, she can flat play. Check out this video. Look at that graceful Euro Step. I’m assuming she can spell "Antetokounmpo."

Also, her father changed her last name to Avant-garde in honor of John Coltrane, and I’m glad I live in the same country as her father, too. And because that is too cool for words, and in Zaila’s honor, here’s ’Trane with “After The Rain.”

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “The River” (Son Little) : Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1929 , are huge cattle herds driven across the border to escape the Mexican Civil War. You will note how carefully the cows are bathed. History is so cool.

Don’t think the whole business about alien civilizations is over. Vice tells us that NASA is quietly trying to find “technosignatures” and “megastructures” on Other Worlds.

We might find technosignatures, too. These are things like radio signals, or even megastructures; that is, artificial objects on a gigantic scale such as hypothesized star-sized superc omputers . Now, Supercluster reported in an article this week , NASA has quietly begun to fund the search for such alien megastructures for the first time in the agency's history…Since the end of 2019, NASA has awarded four grants to fund searching for technosignatures. In November 2020, NASA awarded a grant to Ann Marie Cody of the NASA Ames Research Center and Croft to survey the whole sky for anomalous objects that transit across stars. It is possible, however uncertain, that they and their collaborators will find artificial alien megastructures.

C’mon, Vice. Optimism! Good old American know-how. There’s a mall out there somewhere and we can find it.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news , LiveScience ? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Scientists found unusual rib and sternum bones in an exceptionally well-preserved fossil skeleton of Heterodontosaurus tucki, a turkey-size, plant-eating ornithischian, or bird-hipped dinosaur — the group that includes duck-billed dinosaurs, frilled dinosaurs like Triceratops and armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus .

X-rays of the fossil, which was discovered in South Africa's Eastern Cape in 2009, enabled researchers to digitally reconstruct the skeleton in 3D. Their models revealed skeletal features that were previously unknown in ornithischians, showing rib and hip bones that were connected by muscles to help the animal breathe in a way that was novel for dinosaurs: through expansion of its chest and belly.

H. tucki's anatomy suggested that this dinosaur had a different strategy. By flexing muscles connecting the gastralia and the pelvis, and the sternal plates and bony paddles, the dinosaur would have inhaled air by inflating its belly and chest, and then relaxed those muscles to push air out, according to the new study. This type of breathing resembles the respiration of certain reptiles; crocodiles breathe using their chests, bellies, "and truly weird muscles" in their bodies, while lizards breathe by expanding and contracting their entire bodies "and even the neck sometimes," Radermacher said. Pterosaurs, which are flying reptile cousins of dinosaurs, have some bony chest features resembling those of H. tucki, hinting that pterosaurs may also have breathed with their chests and bellies, he added. (Pterosaurs, crocodylians and dinosaurs all belong to the archosaur group).

Dino yoga!!! I, for one, am partial to the downward stegosaurus position myself. They breathed to stay alive and they lived then to make us happy now!

Hey, the U.S. Senate is back is session next week. That should be some entertaining inertia. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, until it its acted upon by Joe Manchin. (Newton’s First Law of Politics). Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn mask if you want to, and get the damn shots. This means you, Missouri.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America , and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children. 

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The War on History Is a War on Democracy

Excerpted from The New York Times' Magazine: The War on History Is a War on Democracy

By Timothy Snyder

A scholar of totalitarianism argues that new laws restricting the discussion of race in American schools have dire precedents in Europe.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity such as “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth.” His most recent book is “Our Malady.” In his recent essay, he lays out the history of "a growing international body of what are called 'memory laws': government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past," that are cause for concern.

Memory laws started out as a noble idea and "generally [were] designed to protect the truth about victim groups. ...The most important example, passed in West Germany in 1985, criminalized Holocaust denial. Perhaps unsurprisingly, other countries followed that precedent, and banned the denial of other historical atrocities." 

"Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction."

However, beginning a little over a decade ago, Snyder writes, Russia "turned the original logic of memory laws upside down. It is not the facts about the vulnerable but the feelings of the powerful that are to be protected." 

"[In 2009, President] Medvedev established the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests, a panel of politicians, military officials and state-approved historians ostensibly tasked with defending the official history of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. It did little in practice, but it did establish an important principle: that history was what served Russia’s national interests, and that all else was revisionism." 

After that commission, a number of laws have been passed that make it a crime to acknowledge history that addresses some Russian actions in World War II. Snyder chronicles instances in which the state has prosecuted Russian citizens, including one "who mentioned in a social media post that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland." 

And this spring, he writes, "memory laws arrived in America."

"Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws. The particulars of these laws vary. The Idaho law is the most Kafkaesque in its censorship: It affirms freedom of speech and then bans divisive speech. The Iowa law executes the same totalitarian pirouette. The Tennessee and Texas laws go furthest in specifying what teachers may and may not say. In Tennessee teachers must not teach that the rule of law is “a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.” Nor may they deny the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, words that Thomas Jefferson presumably never intended to be part of an American censorship law. The Idaho law mentions Critical Race Theory; the directive from the Florida school board bans it in classrooms. The Texas law forbids teachers from requiring students to understand the 1619 Project. It is a perverse goal: Teachers succeed if students do not understand something."

Read more at The New York Times  »

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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, with Timothy Snyder

Feb 27, 2018

Timothy Snyder

Yale University

Smita Narula

Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, Hunter College

James Ketterer

The American University in Cairo, The School of Continuing Education

About the Series

This series featured speakers from very different backgrounds, countries, and professions. What they have in common are strongly held moral convictions and a passionate commitment to their work, which makes for memorable conversations.

Related Links

• Full Event Video: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, with Timothy Snyder
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• YouTube: Get Oustide and March with Timothy Snyder
• YouTube: "America First" & Confederate Statues with Timothy Snyder
• YouTube: "A heroic age of investigative reporting" with Timothy Snyder
• YouTube: How Business and Religion React to Fascism with Timothy Snyder

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Can tyranny happen here? asks historian Timothy Snyder. His chilling answer is, "it can happen, it happens to people like us, and it is happening now." How can we fight back? Snyder offers 20 lessons; the first is the most important, as if we fail in this one it will be too late for the others: "Don't obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given." Have the courage to take a stand--easy to say, but difficult to do.

This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series , co-sponsored by the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program and Foreign Affairs .

JIM KETTERER: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

I am Jim Ketterer, and I am the director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) program . In this program, we have students who come here to New York City every semester and during the summers. We have the students here who are interning at various organizations around the city and taking Bard College courses in international affairs.

We do these lectures once a month. It is the James Clarke Chace Memorial Lecture Series , named after James Chace , who was the editor of the World Policy Journal and Foreign Affairs and was a Bard professor and the founder of the BGIA program. In his memory we do these lectures, and once every semester we do them in partnership with the Carnegie Council. We are so happy to be back here, and we want to thank Joel Rosenthal , the president of the Carnegie Council, and all of the staff here who are such wonderful partners with us and hosts for these great events.

I should also note that this event is supported by Foreign Affairs as are all of our events at BGIA, and you can go to our website and find out about all the many other great things we are doing, events and otherwise.

We are very happy to have with us tonight Professor Timothy Snyder, who is the Levin Professor of History at Yale and a permanent fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. He will be in conversation with Smita Narula, who is a distinguished lecturer at Hunter College and the director of the Human Rights Program at Roosevelt House .

Without further ado, I turn it over to the two of you.

SMITA NARULA: Thank you so much, Jim, and good evening, everyone.

I would like to start by just saying something about the book , which I have in my hand right here. If you have not had a chance to pick it up, I highly recommend you do so, including immediately after the event, or you can even listen to it on Audible. I understand, Tim, that you do your own narration for your audiobooks. Is that right?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: That's true.

SMITA NARULA: I have had the pleasure of both listening to and reading this book, and Tim has a wonderfully soothing voice, even as portions of his book are quite chilling and unsettling.

The book, for those of you who are still unfamiliar with it, is a New York Times best-seller, and it explores the new threats faced by our political order and how we can look back to the 20th century for lessons on how to overcome these threats, 20 lessons in particular on how we can resist the decline into tyranny drawn from our author's vast body of work on how the Europeans of the 20th century yielded democracy to fascism, Nazism, or communism.

Tim, I think it is fair to say that this book is a departure from your previous publications , all compelling, thought-provoking books that take a deep dive into war, genocide, and the descent into dictatorship in the mid-20th century. But here we have an almost pocket-sized book, a manifesto if you will, but not a manifesto for a political party or an institution or an organization, but for everyday citizens interested in defending our democracy from what you describe as "profound threats to our political order."

Tell us what led you to write this book in this style and why now?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: First of all, I want to thank all of you for being here. It is a beautiful night out in New York, and it is the kind of springlike day which might have filled you with hope, and instead you chose to come to listen to me and Smita talk about tyranny in the United States, so I am grateful for your presence and for your priorities.

The book is a departure, but it is also an arrival. It is the first thing that I have ever really done as an American. I am an American, of course, but my work has been on, as you kindly remember, the 20th century in Eastern and Central Europe. What happened is that some of the things I think I knew or some of the things which were familiar to me from my historical work suddenly seemed to appear in my home.

One way to think about it is the "it." The question, can "it" happen here? The answer is always yes, by the way. The answer to that is never no.

For me, I took for granted, having written about Nazi and Soviet terror in places and times not so different from our own, where the perpetrators and the victims and the bystanders were people not so very different from us—in some cases, they were our relatives—I took it for granted that the "it" could happen. And I took for granted that the "it" could happen to people like us because my teachers, when I became a historian of Eastern Europe, were people who had survived the Holocaust or had lived through communism, or in the case of my doctoral supervisor, both. That is people like us, our teachers are people like us. If he can teach me, and I can have a conversation with all of you, that is people like us.

I think the third thing which was happening was that as a teacher of people who work on East European history, I was confronted with the younger generation from Eastern Europe—Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians—who had been dealing with the things that we are dealing with now basically for their whole lives as adults. Many of the lessons that are in this book are from the experiences of people in their 20s who had seen after 1989 —after that moment when history was supposed to be over and freedom was supposed to be easy and democracy was supposed to come automatically with capitalism and all that nonsense—rather, democracy move away from them their entire politically aware lives. So that is the third thing.

So it can happen, it happens to people like us, and it is happening now. I came to all of this looking at it from Eastern Europe historically, politically, contemporarily, and I recognized certain patterns in the Trump campaign , and so when he won, my first reaction was to try to translate what I thought I knew into recommendations about what we all can do.

SMITA NARULA: You do not call the president by name in any part of the book. What was behind that decision?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: There are a couple of things. The first is he had been elected when I wrote the book. I wrote the book in December of 2016. I wrote the lessons in the hours and days after he won in November of 2016. In that sense, it was not about him.

There are many ways in which focusing on him allows us to dodge the problem. If we say he is an aberration of the system or if we say he is mentally ill or if we say he is a historical blip, if we say any of these things, what we are doing is abrogating our own responsibility, both for the fact that he got elected in the first place but also for how we have to react.

The point of the book, the reason it was so fast and so short and also in a way so direct, was that I was trying to get us to act quickly while there was still time. If we spent all of our time trying to decide which way Mr. Trump is mentally ill or exactly which form of racist oligarchy was going to be established, if we spent all of our time on that, waiting and analyzing, we were going to miss the moment which was politically relevant.

The book is not about him. It is prompted by him. It is prompted by things that he did. It is prompted by things like his urging his supporters to murder his rival , it is prompted by things like the violent character of his rallies , it is prompted by the way he uses the English language. It is prompted by him, but it is not about him, it is about us. It is about what the American republic could be if it were defended.

SMITA NARULA: I wanted to segue from that, just going right into the first lesson of the book and to really make this about us: "Lesson 1: Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

What I hear you essentially saying is, "Do not consent to your own oppression," which is I suppose easy to say but profoundly difficult to do.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yes. That's good. A lot of the things in this book sound very easy, and some of them are in fact easy. But a lot of them are harder than they sound. There is a reason why Lesson 1, "Don't obey in advance," is Lesson 1, and that is that it is actually difficult, and if you fail Lesson 1, Lessons 2 through 20 are irrelevant to you because you will never get there.

Lesson 1 requires you as an individual to do something which is unusual, which is to say: "I, as an individual, define this situation as exceptional. I am drawing a line around myself and saying I am not going to act according to what's happening around me but according to something which is within me." That is hard. People think they are free. Freedom is hard. Freedom is doing the thing that everyone else is not doing. It is not saying, "I'm free, I live in a free country, yada yada." Freedom is that moment where you lean out and you are doing the things that other people are not doing, and that is Lesson 1.

Where it comes from is the study of Nazi Germany. One of the few things that historians of Nazi Germany agree about—because they are a disagreeable bunch in general—is that Hitler gained much of his power by consent, that especially in 1933 and into early 1934 the regime was possible because people allowed it to happen, because people normalized what was going on around them. That is one of the few things we think we understand historically.

Psychologically the way it works is that we have a very strong tendency to follow rules. We are all following rules right now. Smita is asking questions, I'm answering them, you're sitting, you're not square dancing, except for those people in the back. Usually we do what is expected of us, and usually that is appropriate. The reason why this is psychologically hard is you have to say: "I'm an individual. I'm actually going to break these norms that I'm feeling around me."

The other reason it is important is morally—to use an old-fashioned word—it is important because if you do obey in advance, not only do you help authoritarians come to power, but you become the person who helped them come to power, which means that for the rest of your life you explain why it was that you had to do that. You become the person who makes the excuse for that person who obeyed in advance, and that is a phenomenon which is already, by the way, massive in American society one year on.

SMITA NARULA: That is making me think about what will I say to my children ten, 20, 30, 40 years from now, my grandchildren, about what I did in this moment, and that is what you are asking us to think about now.

The second lesson you go straight into is to defend institutions: "Institutions do not protect themselves," you say, "so choose an institution you care about and take its side." Which of our institutions do you feel are either most vulnerable or most under attack, and are there any institutions that we need to transform instead of defend?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Let me say just a word about why this is number two because there is a kind of logic to it. Institutions have to be defended because individually we are hopeless. One of the great American myths is that freedom means that you are that last person on a blasted heath somewhere holding the automatic weapon and defeating the aliens, and that is freedom.

Or to be more serious, I will give a more serious example from our culture: Holocaust movies are always about rescue, and it is always about the unusual person who carries out the rescue. I work on the Holocaust. This is what I do, and it is true that there were some unusual people who as individuals saved other individuals, but in fact what mattered was institutions; in fact, what matters were whether institutions were preserved or whether they were destroyed. That is what determined whether Jews survived or not.

Institutions are magnifiers, institutions are what allow us to be decent, they are what allow us to feel like we are not alone. If power actually gets you alone, then you are hopeless. We love that photo of Tiananmen Square with the lone person holding back the tank, but he did not actually hold back the tank. It is a beautiful image, but that is not how freedom actually works.

We can disagree about which institutions matter most, but there has to be some way of getting us together. Also, there have to be some agreed-upon ways which limit the power of the government.

In terms of what is most threatened, I would say the fundamental institution which is most threatened—this comes later in the book—is factuality, which is like a pre-institution. Factuality, which is the realm of journalists and the realm of scholars like us, the realm of a lot of different people, that is the institution which allows all other institutions. Because if we do not believe there is truth in the world, we don't believe there are facts, we cannot cooperate, and then institutions become impossible. To be specific, journalists are under threat.

There are institutions also which are not under threat but which just do not work, like checks and balances. It has not actually worked out that well. I am all in favor of it, but unfortunately in this country on our good days we have a two-party system rather than a checks-and-balances system. So if the same party is in Congress as has the White House, you cannot really expect very many checks and balances, and we are not getting them. Congress has not failed, but it also is not restraining the president very effectively.

I absolutely agree, though, with the premise of your question: there are institutions that have to be renewed. This is a book about treading water, this is a book about how not to drown, this is a book about keeping the American republic going, which I think is actually the correct way to frame the issue.

The idea of the book is that if we practice some of the things that it recommends, then we would be better citizens and better able to form new institutions at the end. I think the institutions that need to be formed are largely the small ones.

It is heartening to see people doing that, whether it is the lawyers—a lot of them here in New York—getting together in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), whether it is Indivisible across the country, whether it is small groups helping other people run for state office. It is the small things which have to be revived, I think.

SMITA NARULA: I think what I found incredibly compelling about the book—the book to me was both very chilling and also very empowering, chilling because you bring the weight and this depth of knowledge of history to bear and ask us to have an active relationship with history as we see our own history develop before us today. That can feel very weighty, it can feel very chilling. Yet you also call on us to engage in small, everyday acts, making eye contact and small talk, putting away our screens and enjoying a long read. "Lesson 13: Practice Corporeal Politics: Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them."

Could you say something about the transformative potential of small acts?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: That is in a way what the book is all about. It is about the small acts which seem easy but which in fact require a tiny bit of courage, and then the magnification effects that a tiny bit of courage on your part has for other people.

Many of the lessons, some that you have already mentioned, are about very simple things. Like for example, do you go outside or not? Do you just get angry over Facebook or do you actually march? That for me is a really fundamental difference. And it is a choice because Facebook actually takes up the energy that you need for marching, or even worse it makes you feel like you have done something when at the end of the day you actually have not. You feel tired and dissipated. You are just dissipated. That decision to go out and put your body in a new place changes the way you think, and it means that you end up meeting people you would not have met otherwise, which is generally not true of the Internet.

It also has this interesting quality that you might actually persuade someone, not that that is easy. I feel like we have gotten to this point in America where everyone thinks we cannot persuade anyone of anything else because we are all completely in our own silos. It is hard, but it is actually possible in real life. It is not possible on the Internet. The Facebook exchange which ends with someone writing, "You have persuaded me with your rational arguments," that Facebook exchange has yet to happen, even though I have been making this joke for two years now. It still has not happened, and it will not.

But when you actually talk to people in real life, you talk to people who are a bit different and they talk to people who are a bit different, and there is some chance that that will make a difference. So little things like getting your body out, and making eye contact; it is interesting, that is the lesson that has inspired the most questions in the year since I have written this book, precisely that one.

In a way, it gets to the essence of one of the things about this book, which is that it is about not sleepwalking. It is what you said about history: if we take history seriously, we cannot sleepwalk; if we take history seriously, we realize these things are possible, we are partaking in them. We are either making them more or less possible with everything that we do all the time. Therefore, if we sleepwalk, we are making them more possible. There is no exit. History is existential that way. So every little thing has an effect outside of you, but it also has an effect on how you comport yourself, has an effect on your self longitudinally over time.

SMITA NARULA: I expect you all to be making eye contact at the reception afterward.

I want to come back to your point about courage, coming to Lesson 8, which is: "Stand Out: Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different, but without that unease there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks . The moment you set an example the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow."

My question stemming from that is: I have found that the burden of action is often carried by those who have the most to lose. Yet it could be argued that the moral responsibility of taking action should be borne by those who have unjustly gained or who have been unjustly enriched by the status quo. But your book speaks uniformly to all readers. Do you think some bear more moral responsibility than others to take the actions that are described in your book?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: That is going to be a "yes, but." Absolutely, there are people who bear greater responsibility for the calamity that we are in now, and some of them are not in the United States. The practical question is how does one actually get those people to acknowledge the responsibility that they bear?

One way to characterize, I think, the fix that we are in is that we are in a crisis of responsibility, where precisely the people who have power are the ones who talk about how they cannot do anything. The extreme is actually the president of the United States, who is the executive of the most powerful country in the world, and yet he is hopeless in reacting to something as basic as a cyberattack on the United States . All he can say about it is, "Well, you can't prove that I was right in the middle of it" as opposed to "I'm going to defend my country" or "I'm going to take responsibility for the good of my country."

That is an extreme example, but in general the way that he does the presidency is to make it into a kind of game where nothing is ever possibly his fault. That is a big part of our culture, and it is a big part of the problem.

I agree with the premise, and actually I worry a lot about how President Trump sets an example for people like himself. I worry a lot about the demography. I worry a lot about a group that might have been a little bit more decent and now are less decent because of the way he behaves, people who maybe do not identify with him but see him in some way as normal. I agree with the premise, and yet it is going to be people—the people who see things faster are often the people who are not the ones who are privileged, and the people who do things first are often not the people who are privileged.

Unfortunately, there is a racial element to this as well. You can go after me about this in Q&A, but it tends to be the white males who are slower to see just how egregious this is, and they of course bear in terms of the voting the greatest responsibility for where we are. So yes, that would be good. I am not going to wait for that, though.

SMITA NARULA: That leads me to another question, which is about protest, and coming off the question of privilege and protest. You said in the book and you have just said now: "It can be organized on social media, but nothing gets real until it hits the streets. But not all protestors are treated equally, and in fact the state's response to protest can be very racialized." And we have seen that, right? We have seen very disparate responses to protests depending on who is protesting.

When white supremacists are allowed to walk freely, brandishing guns and tiki torches , but peaceful Native American protestors or black activists are deemed "black identity extremists" or pelted with rubber bullets and tear gas and arbitrary arrests, it makes the call to protest carry this very heavy weight and burden. I was wondering if you could say more about the burden of protest and the racialized response to it.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I completely agree with you. I could even push the question a bit further and point to the difference between citizens and non-citizens. Non-citizens who protest in this country are acting from a different kind of courage than citizens because they have things to lose. They can, and in some cases have, been deported.

Yes, I agree with that completely, and it goes back to the corporeal politics. You captured in a way very well what I am trying to say to people who might think, I don't have to protest yet . One of the reasons you have to protest now if you are in a relatively privileged position is that for other people it is already harder than it is for you, and your presence on the streets will change the nature of the protest.

This is an old logic, but everybody knows it. If you wait until you feel you really have to protest, the game is already over. So you have to get onto it first, partly for precisely this reason, so that it is harder to characterize it as being just some Americans and not all Americans, and pragmatically speaking so that police react differently to protests. It is really important for protests to be bigger than they are, and it is really important to always protest earlier than you think you have to. This is true for everyone.

This is such a good question, because what has already happened in Eastern Europe and what happened in the 1930s and 1940s is that people wait to protest. They think—the privileged people in your categorization— I can always protest , but that is not true. It can be criminalized. Ask the Russians. You can get to a point where it is illegal, and then the nice law-abiding people will generally not protest at all, and then the game is over.

SMITA NARULA: And it is being criminalized in various states.

I wanted to step back from the specific lessons and pull back a little bit to the premise of the book, which is that we are facing new threats to the political order. I have in my own conversations about these issues and in my own work as a human rights scholar and defender encountered two distinct schools of thought.

One is that the current administration is a dramatic, radical departure from what has come before it, and the second is to see it as a natural extension or logical extension or natural combination of longstanding processes, namely deepening economic inequality, the corporate capture of our democracy, which you also talk about, and of course our long and undeniable history of upholding racism and defending white supremacy. My question is: Are these threats to the political order in fact new, or are they the result of longstanding processes, or does it depend on who you ask?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I am going to punt a little bit and say both. The important thing for me is that we are able to recognize a moment when we do things or when we ought to do things that we would not have done a moment before.

I am very sympathetic, and I agree with my African American friends and colleagues who say, "This is just the same thing but maybe turned in a slightly different direction so that you have happened to notice it." I am very sympathetic to that point.

But in political terms—and this is a political book—we need to be able to agree, as many of us as possible, that this is a moment where we need to do something. We need to do something.

I am going to try to answer the question by saying that I think there are some things here that are new, but I think some of the best ways to fight them is by remembering the old. The whole method of this book is not to say, "Tim Snyder understands the 20th century." The whole method of this book is to say Victor Klemperer or Václav Havel or other people who experienced moments that were in some ways like ours left us interesting things to think with. I think those things still work. In fact, I think I am seeing them work among some Americans in 2018.

But I think there are some new things or some things which we have not seen for a while. One of them is economic inequality on this scale. We have now reached a point where the top decile in America owns about 78 percent of the wealth. We are getting up to the Russian standard, which is 87 percent. If we measure the wealth at the top 0.1 percent that Americans owned, we have now reached where we were in 1929. This is extremely significant. I think it is quite significant—and you know all this, but I will mention it anyway—that for 90 percent of the American population there has been no positive change in wealth or income since 1980, which basically means we have produced a couple of generations now where this idea of social advancement or the American dream is not there.

That is an explanation. That is something which has crept up on us, but that is an explanation for Mr. Trump and in general for a kind of politics which, rather than promising something in the future, only promises the past.

Another thing which is new is the Internet, and it is new basically in a bad way. I am happy to discuss this back and forth, but I think it is basically a bad thing, all told, at least in politics. Havel and Klemperer did not have to deal with the Internet. It is now possible to reach more quickly to more people's most basic anxieties, fears, and prejudices than it was before, and it is more possible with modern forms of propaganda to tailor your message to what you think people will already want to hear.

There is something new, I think, about the contradictory character of a lot of propaganda. The Russians, for example, had no problem—they did this in Ukraine and they did this to us—in saying, for example, "In Ukraine they are all fascists" to one demography and then to another demography saying, "All of the Ukrainian state was created by the international Jewish conspiracy." They have no problem with that because they are targeting the message. Likewise with us, they have no problem saying to blacks, "You should defend yourselves, and you should buy guns," and saying to whites, "You should defend yourselves, and you should buy guns." They have no problem being completely contradictory because unlike old-school propaganda they have the technical tools to target particular groups and push them off in a certain direction. I think that is new.

It is not just them, they are just better at it than we are, but the American right does that now as well. You see it after the school shootings in Florida , for example. This is what happens.

The other thing which I think is slightly new, although it happened with fascism, too, is that the far right is now much more internationalist than the far left. They learn from each other. When Russia invades Ukraine , the flag which is used for the pseudo state in Southeastern Ukraine under Russian occupation is the Confederate battle flag, just to take an example.

SMITA NARULA: One other thing that I think is so profound about the book and the contribution that it has already made is this idea of not only taking personal responsibility and the call to action now, but to do things that are transformative also of your surroundings. You talk about taking care of the face of the world, pulling down the symbols of hate, not walking by a swastika and just saying, "Well, that's up now," but taking it down, or listening for dangerous words and really being critical in your thinking about how words like "terrorism" and "extremism" are being used and who they are being applied to and why.

I just was thinking maybe you could say a little bit more about that, because I think one of the things that really struck me in your descriptions of Europe and the rise of fascism or Nazism is there is just the incredible normalization of the daily march of dehumanization that takes place, and it takes place in this very almost banal way today, in such an onslaught of what is on the media and what comes to us that we can just simply walk by it until it becomes the new normal. Can you speak to that?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: As a student of the Holocaust, one of the things that really worries me, troubles me about American discourse about the Second World War and Hitler is that people tend to say, "Well, look, we haven't killed 6 million Jews, therefore everything is fine." Essentially, like if you have not gotten all the way to the end of the Holocaust, then nothing has happened, which ignores that to get from 1933 to 1945 a whole lot of things had to happen in a certain order.

We are not in 1941, but we are kind of in 1933, and in 1933 what matters is what you are talking about, which is the semiotics—the signs, the symbols, the public sphere. This is another thing which historians of Nazi Germany also agree about.

I am going to run out of the list pretty quickly, but another thing that we agree about is that the swastikas that were painted on the walls or the Stars of David that were used to mark Jewish shops were incredibly important. These are the things that actually enabled the regime to change, because as you say, they instructed people what they were supposed to normalize.

This is one thing which really is a lesson that can be learned, because at the beginning the people who were painting the swastikas and the Stars of David, those were private initiatives. The Schutzstaffel (SS) was an NGO. It was. The SS was part of the Nazi Party . Later it is merged with the police and is the main instrument of the Holocaust, and I do not mean to make light of it, but those were citizens doing one thing.

One thing that Americans have done better than the Germans of 1933 is that they have been more aware of their surroundings. So there are NGOs in the United States—in this city, for example—who get up early in the morning and paint over swastikas. This matters so much. It matters to all the people who do not see the swastika that day, and not just the Jews, everybody.

But it also matters to the people who do the painting. It is a very nice example of a little thing that you can do. And it is weird. It is maybe weird. It is maybe illegal sometimes to paint. But doing that little thing is liberatory.

SMITA NARULA: I think much of what these processes have enabled is the surfacing of conversations that are sometimes uncomfortable but so necessary to have. Also, looking back at more historic symbols like Confederate statues or Confederate flags or even just a few blocks away from here the question of whether Christopher Columbus 's statue should be standing in the middle of Columbus Circle. I think very recently there was a decision to keep the statue there but to add a plaque to it, to add some context.

It is not just the new symbols that are appearing or the old ones that are reappearing, but going back to our collective history and our collective understanding of what is our history and questioning that as well. Would you say that is part of the process?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Absolutely. The new encounters with time and the past are happening in lots of different dimensions. Some of the conversations that I have had have been with Holocaust survivors, the ones who are still with us, and over and over again—I know some of these people because of my work, but some of them I don't. They write me and they say, "This reminds me of X ." Then children and grandchildren also, "This reminds me of the thing that my mother, my grandmother mentioned." That is a historical conversation which I was not expecting to be having. I just thought I would mention that.

With the 1930s there is another thing I would say. We in America need to remember that in the 1930s we got lucky. We got lucky. We had good leadership in the 1930s. It made a difference that we started to build a welfare state , it made a difference that we entered the Second World War. Neither of those things was necessary. Possibly both of them were unlikely. But they happened, and it made a great deal of difference.

In the 1930s, the American attitudes about race or the American attitudes about Jews, for that matter, were perfectly in the European mainstream. We were not better than all those Lithuanians and Latvians who we find it so easy to criticize now. The Baltic States actually took more Jews than we did, not even as a matter of population before the Holocaust.

We have a certain tendency to say—this is a very American thing, the " city on the hill "—that evil happened over there, and we were over here being good. No. We were over here making the same anti-Semitic arguments about why we could not take refugees that everyone else was in the 1930s. We do not confront that.

More broadly, we do not confront how politics in the 1930s in the United States—you probably all know this—how close it was to politics in the 1930s in Europe and how popular fascist ideas were here. You could get 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden not just for a far right rally, but for a Nazi rally in New York City , of all places.

I am getting to the Confederate statues because we have to remember that when we say " America First" or when our president says "America First," that is a positive reference back to an alternative America where we remained isolationist, racist, where we did not do anything for the world, where we remained in that far right mainstream of the time. That is what America First means. America First meant opposition to the welfare state, opposition to involvement abroad, and in general it meant keep the refugees out. That is an alternative America which almost happened.

Philip Roth 's novel about this, The Plot Against America , is very good. It is possible that that novel is more likely than what actually happened. We have to be humble about the 1930s.

I am getting to the statues because the statues, as you probably all know, do not have anything to do with the Civil War , that is, they do not rise organically from the Civil War. The statues are monuments to the ethnic cleansing or the racial purging of African Americans from the center of American cities. That is what they are, that is what they stand for, that is what they were meant to communicate to African Americans, and that is what they do communicate to African Americans.

Monuments are not history in the sense that they somehow permanently represent something. They are history in the sense that they arose in particular historical circumstances, and then historians get very unpopular when we explain what those circumstances actually were.

I am not going to talk about every statue in New York because I am from Connecticut, but I will make a general point, which is—I am actually from Ohio—that one thing which history really shows is that statues change all the time. They change all the time. The argument that we have to have a statue today because we had one yesterday, that is historically false. They change all the time. So the question is do you think about it critically, or do you think about it uncritically, because they are going to change.

SMITA NARULA: I am going to get one more question, and then I am going to open it up because I am sure there are many questions in the audience. I am going to ask you to look back and then help move us forward.

Looking back, elsewhere you have said: "I'm a skeptic. My tendency is to look at examples from other places and to ask what we could learn. The point of using the historical examples is to remind ourselves that democracies and republics usually fail. The expectation should be failure rather than success."

This book was published in February of 2017 and a lot has happened since then. Looking back on this year, are we failing, or is the resistance strong?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: B-minus. There is a lot of grade inflation at Yale. I am sure there isn't at Bard, but at Yale it is kind of a problem.

B-minus. In terms of what has happened, I would like to think that a lot of the things I warned about from Mr. Trump have actually come true. I wish I had been wrong about those things, but just so that that is on the record, he has actually embodied a complete disregard for most of the unwritten conventions and a lot of the written rules of the way America is supposed to work; he has actually turned out to be the perhaps unwitting, but almost certainly witting, pawn of a foreign power; it has turned out to be the case that we Americans were not really ready for this sort of thing, most of us.

On the other hand, some of the institutions have done really well. My heroes are the reporters. My heroes are the investigative journalists. Without them, we do not have a clue. Without them, Mueller doesn't have a clue. Without them, Mueller doesn't know where to begin .

Also, without investigative reporters we do not have the Panama Papers , we don't have the Paradise Papers , we don't have a sense of just how unequal our countries have become. We do not know that $7 to $21 trillion dollars has been offshored without the reporters. The reporters are giving us the chance, basically.

To put it a different way, without them we have no chance. If this had happened in some world without The Guardian and without The Washington Post and without The New York Times , without the 2,000 or so investigative reporters, which is not very many, if it happened in that world, we would already be done with. Trump knows this. He is a skillful politician in many ways. His instinct that the reporters are a problem is correct, because the reporters keep the factual world going. A lot of them have done really well. I would say this is a heroic age. I think that people are going to look back and say this was a heroic age of investigative reporting.

The lawyers have done—not all of them, one of them perjured himself to become attorney general. Yes, he perjured himself to become the highest law official in the land. It is extraordinary, but it doesn't rise to the top.

But the lawyers have done really well, which is sensitive for me because in Germany in the 1930s, the lawyers flipped. In a very proud legal tradition, they found ways of justifying what was happening, and many of the commanders—most of the commanders—of the Einsatzkommandos who carried out the beginning of the Holocaust and other atrocities in 1941 were lawyers, were people with law degrees. So that is one that I am sensitive about. A lot of American lawyers have done very good things.

There are not enough people—there are a lot of people doing great things. People are running for office. That is hugely important. People are realizing that elections are not just rituals and that you have to win sometimes and you have to take risks sometimes. That is great. I think we are not yet at the point where enough people realize what is at stake.

SMITA NARULA: From my own perspective doing human rights work, I think the people have done really well not only in standing up and coming forward with courage, but bringing themselves into conversations, sometimes very uncomfortable, in very personal, transformative ways. It takes a lot to resist the onslaught of news and information.

I have actually been quite emboldened and impressed by also the solidarity that has been shown between social movements, the role of women and people of color in leading these struggles of undocumented youth, of the youth post-gun shootings who are right now on the streets and in the White House demanding that they be listened to. The pendulum is swinging in one direction, but there is an equal force, I think, that is also pulling people onto the street and away from their screens.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: That is wonderful, and that is true. A couple of things that really strike me in your closing remark: The first is in a way how old-fashioned the individuality is. When one of those high school kids in Florida actually talks, he gives us a chance. He puts him or herself out there, and even though he or she is 17 or 16 or whatever, he or she is going to get slaughtered on social media. This is already happening. And of course, being a teenager, they know that. So there is a very old-fashioned way—this is what the Greeks said, that democracy is only possible if the physical individual person stands out and is present and is recognizable as a person.

SMITA NARULA: I think that is a good point on which to open it up to all of you, and to say thank you so much.

QUESTION: First of all, thank you very much. I am John Hirsch with the International Peace Institute.

At the Munich Security Conference last Saturday, the Polish prime minister publicly stated , if I can get his actual remarks, that "Jews were perpetrators in the Holocaust as well as Poles, and this is part of their effort to criminalize anybody who criticizes Poland for any role in the Holocaust."

Do you have any comment about—here we are in the United States obviously. What do you think the reaction ought to be? I have seen nothing from the American government.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yes. I am going to make a big response to this. This is something I have been thinking about a lot about democracy. One of the things, if you are on the left, you think: Well, maybe we shouldn't talk about democracy. Our democracy is flawed. Maybe we shouldn't impose our ideas on everybody else , and so on.

One of the things that I have been noticing is that you either go forward or you go back. There does not seem to be that ideal place where you say, "We're just going to make our democracy perfect." What has happened is that America is rolling back.

There is no stable state. There is no point where you can say, "Well, we're just going to take care of America first." That is actually impossible. What happens is that when you say we are just going to take care of America first, everybody, whether it is the Burmese or the Poles, takes a cue from that. That is what has happened.

The mass murder of the Rohingya has something to do with the fact that the State Department no longer takes its own Human Rights Department seriously. To be fair, the diplomats who do that work do, but the top of the State Department does not, and the president of the United States obviously does not.

The fact that the Poles say the things they do and pass the laws that they do has to do with the fact that our own approach to history is anything goes. We have the chief of staff to the president talking about the Civil War as being something that should have been worked out among reasonable people, we have the president of the United States saying the same thing. We have the president of the United States saying that among Nazis are very fine people.

I am happy to criticize the Poles and so on, but we are very important in all of this. The way that we talk—we cannot close off the rest of the world. The rest of the world takes its cues from us one way or the other, and now they are taking their cues the other way. I am happy to get down into the details about Poland, but I think for us that is the most important thing.

QUESTION: You talk about the need for people to go out and march and demonstrate and be on the streets. A whole lot of students from Broward County traveled for eight hours to get to Tallahassee, and they demonstrated, and they were on the streets. Yet on this very same day, a majority of Republicans in the Florida legislature voted down a bill to ban assault weapons . Doesn't that point out the fact that the most important thing is to get involved in politics and fight for all these democratic values in the government?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I really do not think it is an either/or. There are 300 million people in this country. It is going to do a lot of them good if they protest.

One of the things about protesting is that it means that you have taken some kind of a stand, you have done something which is relatively easy. Another thing about protest is that it means that you meet people, and then you start a neighborhood organization, which may or may not lead to running for office. I do not think it is an either/or.

I do not think protest makes it less likely that people run for office. On the contrary, for a lot of people it is a first step. If you look for the 20-somethings and 30-somethings who are running for office now and starting to win, a lot of them protested. A lot of them were in this city for the Women's March . A lot of them traveled to this city for the Women's March. So I don't think it is either/or.

But I want to agree with you fundamentally that it is very important that people run for office, it is very important that people realize that districts are winnable, it is very important to realize that you can go out there and you can actually win an election. Yes, that I agree with completely. I just don't think it is an either/or.

QUESTION: First, thanks very much for a most fascinating and very helpful, I think, discussion for all of us.

I wanted to ask you perhaps a comparison with the 1930s with respect to two institutions or two groups, shall we say? One is the religious institutions of the day here in the United States vis-à-vis religious institutions, whether they be in 1930s Germany or in the communist era of Eastern Europe. The other institution, which is I suppose specifically relevant to the fascist era, is business. I wonder how you would compare and contrast. I tend to think that on both of those scores what we have today is quite a bit more hopeful, but I am interested to hear your comments.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I think I agree with you. My immediate response whenever I get a question like that is to talk about all the ways the 1930s are like today, but I am going to restrain that impulse and answer your question straight up, because I think you are right.

One of the things which is striking about business and National Socialism, it is not that business brought the National Socialists to power, that is not really true. It is not that the businessmen were for the most part Nazis. They were generally men of the right, and they did generally partake in the idea that: "We'll stay on top of this transition. We'll be able to manage this person."

But then once they couldn't, then strikingly they found ways to adapt, and they found ways to profit. Two of the most obvious are taking over Jewish firms and property. When you get to the point where the government starts distributing property from one place to another, it is hard for certain businessmen to resist that. Another even more striking example is the concentration camps, which were business operations. Auschwitz was a place, among many other things it was a site of cheap labor, which important German companies found irresistible.

With religion I want to make a slightly different point, which is that I think there is a discussion always about whether Christianity is a thing you have or Christianity is a set of actions that you perform, let's say. In this country, I agree with you that it is better, but in this country there is also the trap, very profoundly and visibly so, of saying Christianity is the thing that we are rather than Christianity is something that you do.

There are relatively few examples in Germany itself— Bonhoeffer is the most famous—of Christians saying, "Christianity is a thing that we do." Thus far, it looks a little bit better here on both fronts.

With business here, the interesting thing here is that businesses—let me make another point here about libertarianism . There is an idea in America—I am agreeing with you that it is not as bad, but I cannot resist ending on a negative note—which says freedom is about making it to the top. That is an idea that people find very attractive, even when in other ways they might think that they are on the left, or they might think they are progressive or new or whatever. But that idea that freedom means making it to the top, that is not that many intellectual steps away from social Darwinism and indeed National Socialism. When Hitler talked to businessmen, what he said was: "You guys have made it to the top. The whole world should be like that. It should just be survival of the fittest." That is the language that he spoke to them.

What I would suggest now is that normatively to American business, yes, a lot of firms are doing an awful lot of good things, and there are a lot of really smart and for that matter, wealthy people who are on the right side of all of this. But we are going to need to have a language which is not a libertarian language of "We're free because we made it to the top." That is not going to be enough.

QUESTION: Sondra Stein.

I would like to ask you, it seems besides Trump in your face every day with all his repulsive behavior that this is really very organized. Big money has been planning this for a long time at the local-state level, redistricting. And the new tax law —I read years ago that once they make enough debt, then they squeeze out all the social programs. So it is not willy-nilly. It is very organized by very wealthy people over a long time.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I am not going to disagree with that, and it speaks to the gentleman's earlier question. The only way to counter people who have a plan is to have a plan. The only way to win statehouses is to win statehouses. The only way to fix gerrymandering is to win elections. That is the only real way.

Whatever one thinks about the goals, one has to say, I think, with sobriety that for the last 35 years the Republicans have been better planners than the Democrats have, both in terms of ideology and in terms of winning and in terms of actually thinking about questions of power. The Democrats have become a little bit too much a party where they think we're going to win the presidency and then other things will sort themselves out, and then you do not win the presidency and other things do not sort themselves out even if you do.

So I agree with you. I guess I would just add that there is something special about Mr. Trump. He isn't actually a product of these plans that you are talking about. The people who are planning, whether you mean the Koch brothers or someone else, they were not actually planning for Trump. And Trump brings some things to the table which are both very special and very risky. His charisma is both very special and very risky. The fact that he is in bed with non-American oligarchs makes him a risky proposition. But for now, I agree with you that he enables a lot of things which have been in the works for a long time to go through.

Of course, you are 100 percent right that having deliberately added $1 trillion to the deficit they will now say: "Well, of course, we can't afford the basic things in the richest country in the history of the world that are normal in other places. We can't afford those things." That is what they are going to say next. Of course that is true.

QUESTION: Ron Berenbeim.

First of all, thank you for your kind words about lawyers. Some lawyers eventually become judges, and the failure of the judiciary was fundamental, I think, to the success of the Nazi regime.

It is quite clear obviously that Trump wants to populate the federal judiciary and also the Republicans at the local level, the state judiciaries, with people who very much share their point of view. And when they do not, as was the case in Pennsylvania where the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ordered that the districts be redrawn , there is now a movement afoot to impeach those justices.

How can we preserve the independence of the judiciary? Is it even possible? And isn't it fundamental to holding our ground against Trump?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yes. I am going to give you a range of answers. None of them is completely satisfactory.

The first is that I am going to be Joe Conservative for a minute here, and I am going to bemoan the loss of history and the loss of civics in American schools. The ideal of how checks and balances are supposed to function, the tripartite character of the American federal government as described in the first few articles of the Constitution , people just do not know that. They just don't, and it is worse than it used to be, measurably worse than it used to be.

People think that there is a "leader." That is a word that I really do not like for disciplinary reasons because it is professional deformation, because "leader" means Führer ; in Italian, leader is Duce ; in Russian it's Vozhd. These are words that we do not like in other contexts.

We do not have a leader. There is no leader in the American Constitution, yet people talk about leaders, leaders, leaders, leaders all the time. A leader is someone who emerges in an exceptional situation and does not have to follow the rules. He does not need rules, he just needs followers.

I realize this is long term and organic, but we have to have civics. The Constitution cannot just be something that a certain small elite remembers at the last moment.

The second thing is I agree with you that it is fundamental. An interesting thing that I think we are observing is the shift in who cares about, for lack of a better word or cliché, law and order. You simply cannot say that the Republican Party is a law-and-order party anymore. It is not. They are not a law-and-order party. If you think it is okay for the sovereignty of the United States to be violated, you are not a law-and-order party; if you think it is okay to interfere in an ongoing FBI investigation, you are not a law-and-order party. The actual law-and-order people, a lot of them are aware of this, I mean the ones who are in charge of law and order . . .

What I am saying politically is I think that there is room here for someone to say without the nasty implication of law and order, but for someone to claim the ground of saying: "We are in fact a state where the rule of law matters. We care about the law. Our people care about the law." I think there is politically room for that.

I agree with you that what we are holding onto or what is holding onto us, the thing that we still have, is the rule of law. I agree with you that actually having that—of our three parts of government, that part is actually doing something which is not negative. With a few qualifications, it is the only part. It is what is keeping us going.

I am going to say one more thing about the rule of law. There is an argument that ought to be made I think to the American right, or at least to American business, about the rule of law, and it is this: If you lose the rule of law at the top with respect to presidents, if you allow yourself to slip from being a republic—with all of the qualifications about how flawed a republic we are—to an oligarchy, what happens is that a few businesspeople do very well, but most of them are going to do much worse. The whole economy is going to contract, and it is going to be a few people doing better, but a lot of them being worse.

I feel like no one on the American right, for lack of a better word, is talking about how important the rule of law is for the economy, for this economy that we kind of take for granted. What happens when you move to oligarchy is that the economy shrinks and that the vast majority of people, the ones who are not in the immediate environs of what the Russians call "the family," the ones who are not right around power, they are going to be worse off.

I guess what I am trying to say is that this argument for law should reach into quarters where it has not reached yet.

SMITA NARULA: I also think it is a nice sort of reminder to come back to the book.

I would like to come back from the last question too. I was very pleased to hear you name that institution, as a human rights lawyer myself very concerned about what is happening to the judiciary and how it is being weakened, and to come back to one of your lessons to say: "Pick an institution and defend it."

I also think something that the book does—and I will conclude on this—is that it asks us "to sort of look up from our screens, our lives, to get out of this reactive state which is exactly where authoritarian leaders want us to be and to choose where we target our focus with laser-like precision and to go after and defend or transform or whatever needs to be done in a very proactive, profound, and courageous way." I think that is one of the institutions, but this is a call to all of us, this manifesto you have given, to step out of that reactive place, to claim our power in small ways and big ways.

I thank you for being here. I thank you for being in conversation with us. I thank you all for choosing to be here tonight to turn your attention with laser-like focus on what needs to be done ahead, and I hope you will all purchase the book, which is available in the back, and I know that Tim has a new book coming out called The Road to Unfreedom , which I am sure he would be happy to talk about in the reception.

My thanks to all of you for being here, and let's carry on. Thank you.

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Gravity of the Past: Polish-Ukrainian Memory War and Freedom of Speech

There is a power to the words ‘I remember’: the power of an event long past, exerting itself upon the present […] When the words begin a flow of warmth or love, it is a positive, binding power, but it is the most divisive and negative one possible when they lead on to events of death and destruction… Ilana R. Bet-El

Collective memory matters politically: it provides a nation with an identity and common myth of origin, legitimizing power by creating a desired image of the past. This explains why states are preoccupied with memory, prescribing by law what has to be remembered and what must be forgotten. Revanchism, ethnic cleansing and war are all results of memory . The clash of historical narratives sponsored by states can destroy interstate relations. This happened in the case of Poland and Ukraine; these States were involved in memory war because of the attempts, from both sides, to instrumentilise history and use it for nationalist and populist goals.

These two countries were the ‘bloodlands’ during the Second World War. Yet, they have different memories of controversial events of the twentieth century. Describing the differing memories of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict Timothy Snyder writes:

[…] for patriotic Ukrainians the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists created a moment of Ukrainian sovereign action by declaring a Ukrainian state under Nazi occupation in 1941 and a lasting memory of national heroism by their doomed struggle, for Poles its UPA [the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. – A.Ch .] was the organization which cleansed Poles from Western Ukraine in 1943 and 1944. Ukrainian patriots […] are unwilling to accept that the UPA did commit mass race murder in 1943-4. Poles […] are apt to believe that the anti-Ukrainian military operations of 1944-7 were a direct result (and a just one) of the UPA’s earlier ethnic cleansing. Both views are substantially incorrect. The UPA did indeed brutally murder […] Polish civilians in 1943-3. But in 1944-7 the Polish communist regime acted to ‘resolve the Ukrainian question in Poland’, not only to liquidate the UPA […]. [C]leansing actions (the word used at the time) […] was carried out in the name of the Ukrainian nation against Poles and in the name of the Polish nation against Ukrainians.

This passage from Snyder’s essay ‘Memory of Sovereignty and Sovereignty over Memory: Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine 1939-91’ challenges the ‘official’ truth of the two countries and, in light of recent legislative changes, can be considered ‘illegal’ both in Poland and Ukraine. (See: Timothy Snyder, ‘Memory of Sovereignty and Sovereignty over Memory: Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine 1939-1991’ in Jan-Werner Muller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 39-58, 41-42).

What does the law say?

In April 2015, as a part of the so-called decommunisation package, Ukraine adopted the Law On the Legal Status and Honoring the Memory of Fighters for Ukrainian’s Independence in the Twentieth Century ( the Law on fighters ). This law is a development in the extremely controversial Ukrainian historical initiative to glorify the OUN, which dates back to the Yushchenko’s presidency (2005-10). In 2010, President Yushchenko awarded Stepan Bandera, a leader of the OUN, the title of ‘National Hero of Ukraine’. This decision polarized the Ukrainian society as Bandera has always been a divisive figure: a hero in the West and Kiev, a Nazi criminal everywhere else east of the Dnieper . Bandera’s glorification was not supported in Europe and ‘deeply deplored’ by the European Parliament.

There were several attempts to challenge the constitutionality of the President’s decree. The Verkhovna Rada of the Crimea Autonomous Republic appealed to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine arguing that this decision violates Ukrainian legislation ( Law ‘On the State Awards of Ukraine’) as a title of ‘National Hero of Ukraine’ should be granted only to a person with Ukrainian citizenship. Bandera, due to obvious historical reasons, had never been a citizen of Ukraine. The Constitutional Court of Ukraine refused to consider thw claim and found it inadmissible . Interestingly, the President’s decree was declared illegal by the District Administrative Court of the Donetsk region.

The proponents of the Law on fighters present it as a matter of national security: for Ukraine, which suffers from Russia’s aggression, it is important to forge national identity based on glorification of the past. The Law portrays those who fought for Ukraine’s independence as heroes, never perpetrators. To erase from collective memory unwholesome moments when the national heroes were involved in crimes against civilians, the state holds responsible those who ‘publicly display a disrespectful attitude’ toward the fighters and ‘publicly deny the legitimacy of the struggle for Ukraine’s independence’. It should be noted that the Law does not determine the liability measures to be used. Instead it states:

Ukrainian nationals, foreigners and stateless persons who publicly express disrespect for … [fighters for independence. – A.Ch. ]… bear liability in accordance with current Ukrainian legislation. Public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for Ukraine’s independence in the twentieth century is deemed desecration of the memory of fighters, …denigration of the dignity of the Ukrainian people and is unlawful.

The unclear wording of the Law makes its practical legal application quite problematic. Yet, the Law is still able to freeze historical discussion and silence questions about the crimes committed by fighters. As noted, the Law ‘[…] exempts from criticism the OUN, one of the most extreme political groups in Western Ukraine between the wars, and one which collaborated with Nazi Germany at the outset of the Soviet invasion in 1941 […]’

Ukraine’s policy of memory aimed at monopolizing interpretations of the past was been met with indignation by the two states concerned – Israel and Poland. For instance, Reuven Rivlin, the President of Israel, speaking at the session of the Ukrainian Parliament devoted to the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, dwelt on the crimes committed against Ukrainian Jews by Nazis and also mentioned Ukrainian collaborators : ‘Many collaborators to crimes were Ukrainians. And among them were the fighters of the OUN – who mocked the Jews, killed them, and in many cases handed them over to the Germans […]’

The Polish reaction was more radical. In July 2016, the Polish Parliament adopted a Resolution ‘On the Perpetuation of the Memory of Victims of Genocide Committed by the Ukrainian Nationalists Against the Citizens of the Second Rzeczpospolita in 1943-5’, which recognized the Volyn events as a ‘genocide’ (the Resolution on the Volyn genocide). The Resolution gave Ukraine a reason to blame Poland for the ‘politicization of tragic chapters of the Ukrainian-Polish history’ and ‘triggering of anti-Ukrainian moods […] at a time of most considerable sensitivity of the Ukrainian State’.

Soon after the Resolution on the Volyn genocide, in August 2016, the Polish Sejm, the lower house of the Polish Parliament, initiated a bill – an Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance – to make the denial of crimes committed by the Ukrainian Nationalists punishable. The bill was adopted on 26 January and approved by the Polish Senate on 01 February 2018. On 06 February, the Polish President signed it into force. Reacting to the bill, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry expressed ‘concern about the attempts to portray Ukrainians exclusively as “criminal nationalists” and “collaborators of the Third Reich”’. In turn, the Ukrainian Parliament stressed that ‘the Amendment contradicts the nature and spirit of the strategic partnership between Ukraine and Poland’ and warned against ‘incitement of conflicts between traditionally friendly Ukrainian and Polish peoples’ as these conflicts are in the interests of their common enemies ‘which were the Nazi and communist regimes in the past’ and ‘the Russian aggressor today’.

It is undoubtedly wrong to state that every member of the OUN was a Nazi collaborator and was involved in crimes against Jews and Polish civilians (the Polish historical narrative). It is also incorrect to claim that the OUN played no role at all (the Ukrainian historical narrative). This is a matter of historical discussion which should be free from the states forcible imposition of ‘official’ truth. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian Law on fighters and recent Polish legal initiatives make this discussion impossible.

It should be stressed that besides criminalization of the denial of crimes committed by Ukrainian Nationalists, the Polish bill sets measures to protect the ‘reputation of the Republic and the Polish Nation’. It provides that anyone who:

[…] publicly and contrary to the facts claims the Polish State or the Polish Nation to be responsible or co-responsible for the Nazi crimes […] or for the other crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes or in another manner grossly diminishes the responsibility of the true perpetrators of these crimes, shall be a subject to a fine or imprisonment of up to three years.

This provision referred as ‘the Polish Holocaust bill’ and strongly criticized by the US and France, has sparked a diplomatic row between Israel and Poland. The Israeli Foreign Ministry stated :

The State of Israel opposes categorically the Polish Senate decision. Israel views with utmost gravity any attempt to challenge historical truth. No law will change the facts.

As a countermeasure, the Israeli Parliament is ready to amend Israel’s law on the Holocaust denial to make it a crime to diminish or deny the role played by those who aided the Nazis in their persecution of Jews. Also, it has been proposed to provide legal defense to anyone prosecuted under the new Polish law.

‘The Polish Holocaust bill’ is a rebirth of Article 132a of the Polish Criminal Code which was in force in 2006-8 and punished (up to three years of imprisonment) ‘anyone publicly accusing the Polish Nation of participating in, organizing, or being responsible for Nazi or communist crimes’. The Article was called to protect official historical narrative pursuant to which in World War II Poles fought against the two totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Stalinism – and have never collaborated with them. Interestingly, that Article 132a was named ‘Gross’ law’ as it was directed against Jan Gross, a Polish-American historian. In his internationally acclaimed book ‘ Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne’ (2000), Gross challenged Polish ‘official’ truth and showed how in July 1941 local population of the small eastern Polish community of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbors without direct involvement from the Germans. Article 132a had to prevent publication of Poland Gross’ next book ‘Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz’ (2006).

In 2008, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal declared Article 132a unconstitutional based on procedural grounds. The February bill reestablishes this provision. But even without a norm directly aimed at protecting reputation of the state and nation, opinions and memories which challenge the Polish ‘official’ interpretation of the past can be punished under Article 133 of the Polish Criminal Code (public insult of the Nation or the Republic of Poland). For reference, the Criminal Code of Ukraine does not contain a similar article. Yet, there is a risk that following the destructive logic of memory wars, Ukraine will introduce criminal responsibility for public denigration of the state and national dignity.

What about the freedom of speech?

Despite the fact that Ukrainian and Polish regulations protect mutually exclusive historical narratives, they are very similar; these are examples of the state’s attempts to be the only caretaker of national memory. While protecting national heroic myths, both states treat freedom of speech as a secondary value. Poland and Ukraine use the same ‘totalitarian’ approach to history as, for instance, the Russian Federation and Turkey in Article 354-1 and Article 301 of their national criminal codes accordingly. Under the tag ‘Rehabilitation of Nazism’ Russia punishes ‘spreading of knowingly false information on activities of the Soviet Union during World War II’ to suppresses a discussion about crimes committed by the Stalinist regime and protect Russia’s mantel of Europe’s liberator. Turkey uses criminal sanctions against those who call the 1915 mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire genocide as these statements are said to be a ‘public denigration’ of the Turkish state and nation.

In Dink v. Turkey  and Akçam v. Turkey the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) recognized that criminal prosecution for expression of an ‘unfavorable’ opinion on the Armenian issue violates Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The ECtHR stressed that Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code (public denigration) is ‘too wide and vague’ and ‘constitutes a continuing threat to the exercise of the right to freedom of expression’ as ‘any opinion or idea that is regarded as offensive, shocking or disturbing’ can easily be the subject of criminal punishment. This can be said about any attempt of a state to whitewash its past and ensure historical loyalty under the threat of punishment. In this sense, the best way to judge a state’s overall attitude towards human rights is to observe its attitude towards history .

In general, criminal sanctions are called to demarcate and protect fundamental values of society. Doubtfully, that preservation of state-sponsored historical narratives is a social interest worthy of being granted the highest level of protection. The proliferation of memorial laws with criminal sanctions reflects an escalation of memory wars in which historians, journalists and civil activists are the first victims. Indeed, ‘remembering the past and writing about it no longer seem the innocent activities they once were taken to be’ .

When assessing memorial laws (laws through which states regulate historical narratives) with criminal sanctions one should keep in mind their purposes. The laws aimed to condemn the past and protect dignity of victims (particularly, the Holocaust denial ban) can be, if not accepted, at least explained based on the theory of ‘militant democracy’. While criminal punishment for challenging ‘glory of the past’ is a univocal violation of freedom of speech, there is no difference in being punished for criticizing a state’s current policy or disclosing its past wrongdoings.

The Polish-Ukrainian case proves well that a clash of historical narratives should not be solved with the use of criminal sanctions, that limitation of historical discussion by the threat of punishment makes it impossible to have reconciliation through a dialog on dark legacy of the past. The conflict over the history of the Second World War raises a question about a set of the European principles of mnemopolitics to stop current memorial wars ( all is not quite on the European memory ‘front’ ) and prevent them in future.

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Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia (New Studies in European History)

• ISBN-10 9781108410168
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• Publisher Cambridge University Press
• Publication date October 12, 2017
• Language English
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Blurring Distinctions

As Timothy Snyder rises from academic hotshot to intellectual celebrity, the quality of his work declines.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder rose to prominence on the strength of two books: Bloodlands , which treated the Holocaust and Stalin’s terror as dimensions of a single event; and Black Earth , seemingly conceived in response to criticisms that he had denigrated the specificity of the Holocaust, and entirely about that dark hole in history. Though both books were bestsellers, the scholarly response was mixed, ranging from glowing praise to assertions that Snyder is adept merely at giving a clever gloss to the work of others. In his second book, where he claimed that Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was an act of “ecological panic” because Hitler regarded the Jews as a threat to the harmony of the planet, some critics threw up their hands: “it is here that [the book] really goes off the rails,” wrote one. Snyder argues that the Holocaust should serve as a warning that climate change could cause food shortages, which would trigger the collapse of states and a revival of fascism.

An honest appraisal of Snyder would have to acknowledge that he writes about horrific events with scrupulous mastery of his material. But a skeptic might add that he knows opportunity when he sees it. Snyder draws crowd-pleasing connections: just as he turned the Holocaust into a lesson on global warming, he made his experience of a nearly fatal bout of sepsis into a thundering indictment of the American health-care system, filled with heavy platitudes and seemingly oblivious to the irony that the source of his illness was his misdiagnosis by German doctors in a German hospital.

It was the advent of Donald Trump—mentioned no less than 100 times in Snyder’s latest book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America —that catapulted Snyder from academic star to intellectual celebrity. Shortly after the 2016 election, he published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century , in which he warned Americans that Trump could launch a fascist revolution. The book disturbed many historians, who believed that Snyder was trafficking in alarmism. But Snyder reaped a small fortune from his prophecy, despite the gathering authoritarian gloom, establishing himself as the liberal media’s resident credentialed doomsayer. This distinguished Yale historian has become a kind of American apparatchik, validating and enforcing the elite media’s party line in such snappy articles as “ How Hitler Pioneered ‘Fake News ’” ( New York Times ), “ Trump’s Big Election Lie Pushes America Toward Autocracy ” ( Boston Globe ), and “ Trump’s ‘Delay the Election’ Tweet Checks All Eight Rules for Propaganda ” ( Washington Post ).

My grandfather, Menka, who escaped the 1905 pogrom in Odessa in which most of his family was killed, liked to tell the following joke. Two Jews are standing blindfolded against a wall facing a firing squad. One turns to the other and says, “I’m going to ask for a cigarette.” “No, no!” whispers the other. “Don’t make trouble!” The joke mocks what it regarded as a certain Jewish tendency toward passivity. Its force consists of its ironic self-awareness. Groupthink is an intellectual somnambulism, and, lacking self-awareness, it is humorless, but when looked at with detachment, it often possesses the stunning ironic turn that is at the heart of the greatest jokes, like the one my grandfather liked to tell.

For what could be more darkly funny than imagining, in 1940, at the height of Hitler’s reign, the publication in Germany of a bestseller called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Nineteenth Century ? Or the publication, in a Berlin newspaper, in 1938, of an article that helpfully informed readers how Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland “Checked All Eight Rules for Dangerous Irredentism”? Snyder has made a lucrative career of commodifying historical analogies, but no precedents exist for a popular historian leading his country away from political disaster via bestselling books and newspaper articles. For a historian of the Holocaust, Snyder is remarkably at ease while living through history, even as he cries that it is closing in around him. As he told the Yale Daily News : “The bad news is that our republic is in a lot of trouble. The good news is that On Tyranny is a practical guide for how to defend a republic, how to defend individual freedoms, so if a lot of people are reading it, that’s good news.”

Snyder has become a one-man industry of panic, a prophet whose profitability depends on his prophecies never coming true. He could flourish only in a country so far removed from “totalitarianism”—a word he freely applies to America—as to seem historically blessed with eternal freedom. Yet while he remakes himself into a media functionary, genuine figures of intellect and principle in actual authoritarian countries suffer when they speak the truth. As Snyder draws facile analogies between America and Russia from his aerie in New Haven, Alexei Navalny struggles to survive each day and night in Vladimir Putin’s asphyxiating universe.

Snyder’s articles in the New York Times Magazine , the publisher of the 1619 Project, have become increasingly irresponsible. His most recent, “ The War on History is a War on Democracy ,” first invokes the Soviet Union’s and Putin’s attempts to erase historical accounts of the Holodomor (or Great Famine) and to rewrite the history of Russia’s early alliance with Nazi Germany in the Second World War—what Snyder calls “memory laws”—before drawing an analogy between this monstrous suppression of history and the current fight in the United States over public school curricula. “Last November,” he writes portentously, “five days after the latest Russian memory law emerged from a presidential committee, the American president, Donald Trump, created the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.” He spends the rest of the article arguing that the “1776 Report” and Republican efforts to ban the teaching of critical race theory from public school curricula prove that American conservatives are, like Putin and his Communist predecessors, rewriting history as a strategy to destroy democracy.

In making such an argument, Snyder does his own injury to logic and reality. He describes the 1619 Project as “an attempt to bring the history of slavery closer to the center of national narratives.” But that is not true. The 1619 Project is an effort to make slavery the master narrative of American history. Jake Silverstein, the editor of the New York Times Magazine , described the premise of the 1619 Project like this: “Out of slavery—and the anti-Black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” Since the 1619 Project is a Times production, the paper has a proprietary interest in defending it; it also has a proprietary interest in publishing an asset-protector like Snyder.

When Snyder accuses Putin and his forerunners of gross intellectual dishonesty, he knows whereof he speaks. Snyder argues, absurdly, that an exact moral equivalence exists between Putin’s memory laws and efforts to teach The 1776 Report instead of the New York Times Magazine ’s version of history in American public schools. Yet it is hardly undemocratic for two competing versions of history to clash, especially when it comes to what should be taught to young children. No one is assigning Fifty Shades of Grey , Casanova’s memoirs, or Mein Kampf in American public schools; no one is teaching the McGuffey Readers anymore, either. The decision not to teach these texts is the result of a rational process of moral discrimination, one that involves teachers, parents, school boards, and state and federal departments of education. Putin’s unilateral diktats are hardly the equivalent of leaving the decision to teach critical race theory to a contentious democratic process or to democratically elected state legislatures responding to the desires of their constituents—not every parent in America teaches at Yale or works at the New York Times . Putin is not traveling around Russia appealing to local PTAs. Despite Snyder’s flashy equivalences—Stalin and Hitler, Putin and Trump—comparing Russia’s memory laws to America’s culture wars is, as the British philosophers say, a category mistake.

The mark of a good historian is his ability to make fine moral distinctions. Does Snyder pass the test? In his recent Times Magazine essay, he finds it “shocking” that The 1776 Report should place progressivism alongside slavery as one of the “challenges to American principles.” But the original Progressives were ardent defenders of Jim Crow and eugenics. Woodrow Wilson was an impassioned supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, along with being a vigorous enforcer of racial segregation in the federal work force. Presenting the original Progressive movement as a challenge to democracy is certainly debatable—it also humanized an often-cruel capitalism—but it is an intellectually serious argument.

The anxious editors of the New York Times Magazine , however, consider any alternative version of history to the 1619 Project heresy (here is where an analogy to Putin might be apt). Yet The 1776 Report encourages the teaching of slavery in all its aspects. What it does not do is make white racism fundamental to the Constitution or to American society. For Snyder’s editors at the Times , though, the very idea that there would be vigorously democratic opposition to the 1619 Project is proof of the antidemocratic nature of the opposition. Enter Snyder, whose status as a historian of authoritarianism means that anything he calls authoritarian must be, by virtue of his authority, what he says it is.

Lee Siegel ’s seventh book, Why Argument Matters , will be published next year.

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Why Is the Country Panicking About Critical Race Theory?

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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Last month, the Florida Department of Education voted to restrict what public-school children can learn about the past. From now on, teachers may not define U.S. history “as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” One concept, in particular, was singled out for prohibition: critical race theory.

Florida’s education system exists to create opportunity for our children. Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other. It is state-sanctioned racism and has no place in Florida schools. pic.twitter.com/ludv7ARgNP — Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) June 10, 2021

Florida is one of six states in recent months that have passed such pedagogical regulations — which in some cases apply to public universities — and 20 others are considering measures to the same effect, often explicitly targeting critical race theory. Where did this movement come from, and what are the underlying disputes? Here’s what people are saying.

Why is everyone suddenly talking about critical race theory?

The furor over critical race theory owes its greatest debt to Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and documentarian. Rufo came to prominence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, which compelled millions of Americans — many of them white — to attend racial justice protests , read up on racial inequality and register for webinars on how to raise antiracist children .

Many felt newfound hope that the injustices of 400 years of white supremacy — injustices manifest in policing, health care, infant mortality, wealth, unemployment, education, housing and water quality — could be remedied, but only if Americans were willing to confront the immensity of the challenge. “The marching feet say what the Congress cannot yet hear: Our national history and character carved these scars into our body politic,” William Barber II, Liz Theoharis, Timothy B. Tyson and Cornel West wrote last June. “Policy tinkering will not heal them.”

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The Moral Panic over CRT Bans: A Semiotic Play in Three Acts

• Published: 07 December 2023

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This article offers a semiotic perspective on the debate over critical race theory (CRT) bans in the United States. It presents the debate as unfolding in three stages. In the first stage, CRT is created by an opportunistic journalist as a catchall category for white grievances, and the bans themselves are seen as consistent with freedom of speech, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a colorblind society. A semiotic rupture, occasioned by Timothy Snyder’s 2021, New York Times Magazine article “The War on History is a War on Democracy,” ushered in a second stage. By comparing CRT bans to Vladimir Putin’s use of law to deny Soviet past crimes (especially regarding Ukraine), Snyder exposed the CRT bans as willful acts of forgetting past crimes, while indirectly highlighting Putin’s own anti-woke initiatives. This led to the third stage, in which some CRT ban supporters began to view critical race theory as form of communism. Sometimes this use was tactical; in other instances, it reflected a belief that a conspiracy theory, one consistent with white nationalism, according to which cultural Marxists were destroying American society from within.

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In what follows, I will generally use “critical race theory” to refer to the intellectual concept that evolved from the 1980s to the present and CRT as the sign used by race reactionaries to silence discussions about systematic racism in the United States.

Fior, Lukin and Martin [ 13 ] describe a semiotic explosion as a “moment…when a certain unsuspected event involves a rupture or discontinuity in the causal logic of the story giving rise to change” [ 13 , p. 343]. At the same time, when viewed from the perspective of the past, the event is seen “as the only possible form of development” [ 13 , ibid.]. For example Fior, Lukin and Martin describe how the outbreak of the Ukraine war in February 2022 shattered the previous illusion that war was “virtually impossible”—a view that held sway right up to the moment hostilities began. [ 13 ibid.] What the Ukraine and Snyder examples share is a sense that, once events have changed on the ground, it is very difficult to return to the previous way of perceiving things.

There is a similar symbolic battle going on over intersectionality, the idea that a person can experience discrimination across multiple identities (for example as African American and female) and that addressing one type of discrimination necessarily leads to taking up other types of discrimination as well. Initially, conservatives largely ignored intersectionality but in recent years the concept has come under fire as “identity politics” and a promoting a “cult of victimhood” [ 19 ]. As with CRT, intersectionality has become both a tool to understand the world in which we live and a symbol of white male grievance.

These ideas have continued to influence American legal education. According to an author writing in the American Bar Association journal Human Rights in 2021, the goal of critical race theory is to promote: (1) a recognition that race is socially constructed, (2) a greater appreciation of the normal, embedded nature of racism in American public life, (3) a challenge to notions such as “colorblindness” and “meritocracy” and (4) an appreciation of the lived experiences of people of color [ 23 ]. At the same time, the author concedes that critical race theory can “be misunderstood and misapplied” (presumably by supporters) [ 23 ]. From a semiotic perspective, this shows how critical race theory/CRT is a malleable symbol that is constantly being (re)negotiated by both friend and foe.

For example, Rufo used fragments of a 900-page curriculum plan to argue that a Los Angeles public school teacher was calling on students to honor an Aztec God of human sacrifice [ 9 ]. In another instance, Rufo claimed that an Oregon school district, motivated by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed , called on students to denounce the revolution’s enemies and annunciate the “liberated masses’ [ 9 ]. According to Sarah Jones, reporting for New York Magazine , the document Rufo offered as proof said nothing of the sort [ 9 ].

The structure of the book combines essays on specific topics (“fear”, “dispossession”, “capitalism”) with poetry, and works of fiction by African Americans. Even the essays themselves combine political arguments with stories celebrating African American life [ 30 ]. The year 1619 in the title refers to the date the first slaves were brought to colonial America.

These books include On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe and America (2018) [ 31 ].

Snyder records how in 2008 then Russian President Dmitri described the Holodomor as a crime against “the entire Soviet people” [ 3 ].

In 2023, Lowry would face accusations from Putin supporting conservatives that his concerns about the “risky proxy war” the United States is fighting in Ukraine, and his call for “a negotiated settlement” were insufficiently critical of the war and overly reliant on a twenty-first century version of the domino theory [ 38 ].

Not only that, but Putin could also stand opposed to “Russian Lives Matter,” a group of liberal opponents seeking to call attention to Russian police violence against “ethnic Russians,” complete with dismissive comments about African Americans and a negative comparison between the Euromaidan protesters “who really risk their lives” and Black Lives Matter protesters who do not [ 39 ].

For instance, Rafael Kadaris, writing on behalf of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, while supportive of critical race theory, and firmly opposed to CRT bans, questions “the idea that people of color have a special grasp and authority to speak about issues of race and racism that others don’t have” [ 48 ]. Christopher Rufo might find something to agree with here. On the other hand, not all communists take this position. For example, Joel Wendland-Liu noted approvingly that the main tenets of critical race theory were already present in 1964 when Gus Hall, President of the Communist Party of the USA, argued that “white supremacy…is a central pillar in the ideology of U.S. capitalism” [ 49 ].

The failure for Antifa to resonate is particularly interesting given the prominent prosecutions of Antifa leaders for protest activities [ 50 ].

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Ukraine Holds the Future

The war between democracy and nihilism, by timothy snyder.

Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy. A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete. Should Russia continue its illegal blockade of the Black Sea, it could starve Africans and Asians, who depend on Ukrainian grain, precipitating a durable international crisis that will make it all but impossible to deal with common threats such as climate change. A Russian victory would strengthen fascists and other tyrants, as well as nihilists who see politics as nothing more than a spectacle designed by oligarchs to distract ordinary citizens from the destruction of the world. This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.

Discussions of democracy often begin with the ancient city-states of Greece. According to the Athenian legend of origin, the deities Poseidon and Athena offered gifts to the citizens to win the status of patron. Poseidon, the god of the sea, struck the ground with his trident, causing the earth to tremble and saltwater to spring forth. He was offering Athenians the power of the sea and strength in war, but they blanched at the taste of brine. Then Athena planted an olive seed, which sprouted into an olive tree. It offered shade for contemplation, olives for eating, and oil for cooking. Athena’s gift was deemed superior, and the city took her name and patronage.

The Greek legend suggests a vision of democracy as tranquility, a life of thoughtful deliberation and consumption. Yet Athens had to win wars to survive. The most famous defense of democracy, the funeral oration of Pericles, is about the harmony of risk and freedom. Po­­seidon had a point about war: sometimes the trident must be brought down. He was also making a case for interdependence. Prosperity, and sometimes survival, depends on sea trade. How, after all, could a small city-state such as Athens afford to devote its limited soil to olives? Ancient Athenians were nourished by grain brought from the north coast of the Black Sea, grown in the black earth of what is now southern Ukraine. Alongside the Jews, the Greeks are the longest known continuous inhabitants of Ukraine. Mariupol was their city, until the Russians destroyed it. The southern region of Kherson, where combat is now underway, bears a Greek name borrowed from a Greek city. In April, the Ukrainians sank the Russian flagship, the Moskva , with Neptune missiles—Neptune being the Roman name for Poseidon.

As it happens, Ukraine’s national symbol is the trident. It can be found among relics of the state that Vikings founded at Kyiv about a thousand years ago. After receiving Christianity from Byzantium, the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire, Kyiv’s rulers established secular law. The economy shifted from slavery to agriculture as the people became subject to taxation rather than capture. In subsequent centuries, after the fall of the Kyiv state, Ukrainian peasants were enserfed by Poles and then by Russians. When Ukrainian leaders founded a republic in 1918, they revived the trident as the national symbol. Independence meant not only freedom from bondage but the liberty to use the land as they saw fit. Yet the Ukrainian National Republic was short lived. Like several other young republics established after the end of the Russian empire in 1917, it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks, and its lands were incorporated into the Soviet Union. Seeking to control Ukraine’s fertile soil, Joseph Stalin brought about a political famine that killed about four million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Ukrainians were overrepresented in the Soviet concentration camps known as the gulag. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler’s goal was control of Ukrainian agriculture. Ukrainians were again overrepresented among the civilian victims—this time of the German occupiers and the Red Army soldiers who defeated the Germans. After World War II, Soviet Ukraine was nevertheless subjected to a slow process of Russification in which its culture was degraded.

When the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, Ukrainians again seized on the trident as their national symbol. In the three decades since, Ukraine has moved, haltingly but unmistakably, in the direction of functional democracy. The generation that now runs the country knows the Soviet and pre-Soviet history but understands self-rule as self-evident. At a time when democracy is in decline around the world and threatened in the United States, Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression provides a surprising (to many) affirmation of faith in democracy’s principles and its future. In this sense, Ukraine is a challenge to those in the West who have forgotten the ethical basis of democracy and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, ceded the field to oligarchy and empire at home and abroad. Ukrainian resistance is a welcome challenge, and a needed one.

THE APPEASEMENT TEST

The history of twentieth-century democracy offers a reminder of what happens when this challenge is not met. Like the period after 1991, the period after 1918 saw the rise and fall of democracy. Today, the turning point (one way or the other) is likely Ukraine; in interwar Europe, it was Czechoslovakia. Like Ukraine in 2022, Czechoslovakia in 1938 was an imperfect multilingual republic in a tough neighborhood. In 1938 and 1939, after European powers chose to appease Nazi Germany at Munich, Hitler’s regime suppressed Czechoslovak democracy through intimidation, unresisted invasion, partition, and annexation. What actually happened in Czechoslovakia was similar to what Russia seems to have planned for Ukraine. Putin’s rhetoric resembles Hitler’s to the point of plagiarism: both claimed that a neighboring democracy was somehow tyrannical, both appealed to imaginary violations of minority rights as a reason to invade, both argued that a neighboring nation did not really exist and that its state was illegitimate.

In 1938, Czechoslovakia had decent armed forces, the best arms industry in Europe, and natural defenses improved by fortifications. Nazi Germany might not have bested Czechoslovakia in an open war and certainly would not have done so quickly and easily. Yet Czechoslovakia’s allies abandoned it, and its leaders fatefully chose exile over resistance. The defeat was, in a crucial sense, a moral one. And it enabled the physical transformation of a continent by war, creating some of the preconditions for the Holocaust of European Jews.

The war in Ukraine is a test of whether a tyranny that claims to be a democracy can triumph.

By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II, Czechoslovakia no longer existed, and its territories and resources had been reassigned according to German preferences. Germany now had a longer border with Poland, a larger population, Czechoslovak tanks, and tens of thousands of Slovak soldiers. Hitler also now had a powerful ally in the Soviet Union, which joined in the destruction of Poland after invading from the east. During Germany’s invasion of France and the Low Countries in 1940 and during the Battle of Britain later that year, German vehicles were fueled by Soviet oil and German soldiers fed by Soviet grain, almost all of which was extracted from Ukraine.

This sequence of events started with the easy German absorption of Czechoslovakia. World War II , at least in the form that it took, would have been impossible had the Czechoslovaks fought back. No one can know what would have happened had the Germans been bogged down in Bohemia in 1938. But we can be confident that Hitler would not have had the sense of irresistible momentum that gained him allies and frightened his foes. It would certainly have been harder for the Soviet leadership to justify an alliance. Hitler would not have been able to use Czechoslovak arms in his assault on Poland, which would have begun later, if at all. The United Kingdom and France would have had more time to prepare for war and perhaps to help Poland. By 1938, Europe was emerging from the Great Depression, which was the main force attracting people to the political extremes. Had Hitler’s nose been bloodied in his first campaign, the appeal of the far right might have declined.

POSTMODERN TYRANTS

Unlike Czechoslovak leaders, Ukrainian leaders chose to fight and were supported, at least in some measure, by other democracies. In resisting, Ukrainians have staved off a number of very dark scenarios and bought European and North American democracies valuable time to think and prepare. The full significance of the Ukrainian resistance of 2022, as with the appeasement of 1938, can be grasped only when one considers the futures it opens or forecloses. And to do that, one needs the past to make sense of the present.

The classical notion of tyranny and the modern concept of fascism are both helpful in understanding the Putin regime, but neither is sufficient. The basic weaknesses of tyrannies are generic and long known—recorded, for example, by Plato in his Republic . Tyrants resist good advice, become obsessive as they age and fall ill, and wish to leave an undying legacy. All of this is certainly evident in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Fascism, a specific form of tyranny, also helps to explain today’s Russia, which is characterized by a cult of personality, a de facto single party, mass propaganda, the privileging of will over reason, and a politics of us-versus-them. Because fascism places violence over reason, it can be defeated only by force. Fascism was quite popular—and not just in fascist countries—until the end of World War II. It was discredited only because Germany and Italy lost the war.

Although Russia is fascist at the top, it is not fascist through and through. A specific emptiness lies at the center of Putin’s regime. It is the emptiness in the eyes of Russian officials in photographs as they look into a vacant middle distance, a habit they believe projects masculine imperturbability. Putin’s regime functions not by mobilizing society with the help of a single grand vision, as fascist Germany and Italy did, but by demobilizing individuals, assuring them that there are no certainties and no institutions that can be trusted. This habit of demobilization has been a problem for Russian leaders during the war in Ukraine because they have educated their citizens to watch television rather than take up arms. Even so, the nihilism that undergirds demobilization poses a direct threat to democracy.

The Putin regime is imperialist and oligarchic, dependent for its existence on propaganda that claims that all the world is ever such. While Russia’s support of fascism, white nationalism, and chaos brings it a certain kind of supporter, its bottomless nihilism is what attracts citizens of democracies who are not sure where to find ethical landmarks—who have been taught, on the right, that democracy is a natural consequence of capitalism or, on the left, that all opinions are equally valid. The gift of Russian propagandists has been to take things apart, to peel away the layers of the onion until nothing is left but the tears of others and their own cynical laughter. Russia won the propaganda war the last time it invaded Ukraine , in 2014, targeting vulnerable Europeans and Americans on social media with tales of Ukrainians as Nazis, Jews, feminists, and gays. But much has changed since then: a generation of younger Ukrainians has come to power that communicates better than the older Russians in the Kremlin.

The defense of Putin’s regime has been offered by people operating as literary critics, ever disassembling and dissembling. Ukrainian resistance, embodied by President Volodymyr Zelensky , has been more like literature: careful attention to art, no doubt, but for the purpose of articulating values. If all one has is literary criticism, one accepts that everything melts into air and concedes the values that make democratic politics possible. But when one has literature, one experiences a certain solidity, a sense that embodying values is more interesting and more courageous than dismissing or mocking them.

Tyrants resist good advice.

Creation comes before critique and outlasts it; action is better than ridicule. As Pericles put it, “We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands.” The contrast between the sly black suits of the Russian ideologues and propagandists and the earnest olive tones of Ukrainian leaders and soldiers calls to mind one of the most basic requirements of democracy: individuals must openly assert values despite the risk attendant upon doing so. The ancient philosophers understood that virtues were as important as material factors to the rise and fall of regimes. The Greeks knew that democracy could yield to oligarchy, the Romans knew that republics could become empires, and both knew that such transformations were moral as well as institutional. This knowledge is at the foundation of Western literary and philosophical traditions. As Aristotle recognized, truth was both necessary to democracy and vulnerable to propaganda. Every revival of democracy, including the American one of 1776 with its self-evident truths, has depended on ethical assertions: not that democracy was bound to exist, but that it should exist, as an expression of rebellious ethical commitment against the ubiquitous gravitational forces of oligarchy and empire.

This has been true of every revival of democracy except for the most recent one, which followed the eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. At that point, as Russia and Ukraine emerged as independent states, a perverse faith was lodged in “the end of history,” the lack of alternatives to democracy, and the nature of capitalism. Many Americans had lost the natural fear of oligarchy and empire (their own or others’) and forgotten the organic connection of democracy to ethical commitment and physical courage. Late twentieth-century talk of democracy conflated the correct moral claim that the people should rule with the incorrect factual claim that democracy is the natural state of affairs or the inevitable condition of a favored nation. This misunderstanding made democracies vulnerable, whether old or new.

The current Russian regime is one consequence of the mistaken belief that democracy happens naturally and that all opinions are equally valid. If this were true, then Russia would indeed be a democracy, as Putin claims. The war in Ukraine is a test of whether a tyranny that claims to be a democracy can triumph and thereby spread its logical and ethical vacuum. Those who took democracy for granted were sleepwalking toward tyranny. The Ukrainian resistance is the wake-up call.

EARNEST STRUGGLE

On the Sunday before Russia began its latest invasion of Ukraine, I predicted on American television that Zelensky would remain in Kyiv if Russia invaded. I was mocked for this prediction, just as I was when I predicted the previous Russian invasion, the danger that U.S. President Donald Trump posed to American democracy, and Trump’s coup attempt. Former advisers to Trump and President Barack Obama disagreed with me in a class at Yale University, where I teach. They were doing nothing more than reflecting the American consensus. Americans tend to see the war in Ukraine in the long shadow of the 9/11 attacks and the American moral and military failures that followed. In the Biden administration, officials feared that taking the side of Kyiv risked repeating the fall of Kabul. Among younger people and on the political left, a deeper unease arose from the lack of a national reckoning over the invasion of Iraq, justified at the time with the notion that destroying one regime would create a tabula rasa from which democracy would naturally emerge. The idiocy of this argument made a generation doubt the possibility that war and democracy could have something to do with each other. The unease with another military effort was perhaps understandable, but the resemblance between Iraq and Ukraine was only superficial. Ukrainians weren’t imposing their own vision on another country. They were protecting their right to choose their own leaders against an invasion designed to undo their democracy and eliminate their society.

The Trump administration had spread cynicism from the other direction. First Trump denied Ukraine weapons in order to blackmail Zelensky. Then he showed that a U.S. president would attempt a coup to stay in power after an electoral defeat. To watch fellow citizens die in an attempt to overthrow democracy is the opposite of risking one’s life to protect it. Of course, if democracy is only about larger forces and not about ethics, then Trump’s actions would make perfect sense. If one believes that capitalist selfishness automatically becomes democratic virtue, and that lying about who won an election is just expressing an opinion like any other, then Trump is a normal politician. In fact, he brazenly personifies the Russian idea that there are no values and no truth.

Americans had largely forgotten that democracy is a value for which an elected official—or a citizen, for that matter—might choose to live or die. By taking a risk, Zelensky transformed his role from that of a bit player in a Trump scandal to a hero of democracy. Americans assumed that he would want to flee because they had convinced themselves of the supremacy of impersonal forces: if they bring democracy, so much the better, but when they don’t, people submit. “I need ammunition, not a ride” was Zelensky’s response to U.S. urgings to leave Kyiv. This was perhaps not as eloquent as the funeral oration of Pericles, but it gets across the same point: there is honor in choosing the right way to die on behalf of a people seeking the right way to live.

For 30 years, too many Americans took for granted that democracy was something that someone else did—or rather, that something else did: history by ending, alternatives by disappearing, capitalism by some inexplicable magic. (Russia and China are capitalist, after all.) That era ended when Zelensky emerged one night in February to film himself saying, “The president is here.” If a leader believes that democracy is just a result of larger factors, then he will flee when those larger factors seem to be against him. The issue of responsibility will never arise. But democracy demands “earnest struggle,” as the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said. Ukrainian resistance to what appeared to be overwhelming force reminded the world that democracy is not about accepting the apparent verdict of history. It is about making history; striving toward human values despite the weight of empire, oligarchy, and propaganda; and, in so doing, revealing previously unseen possibilities.

“LIVING IN TRUTH”

On the surface, Zelensky’s simple truth that “the president is here” was meant to undo Russian propaganda, which was claiming that he had fled the city. But the video, shot in the open air as Kyiv was under attack, was also a recovery of the meaning of freedom of speech, which has been forgotten. The Greek playwright Euripides understood that the purpose of freedom of speech was to speak truth to power. The free speaker clarifies a dangerous world not only with what he says but by the risk he takes when he speaks. By saying “the president is here” as the bombs fell and the assassins approached, Zelensky was “living in truth,” in the words of Vaclav Havel, or “walking the talk,” as one of my students in prison put it. Havel’s most famous essay on the topic, “The Power of the Powerless,” was dedicated to the memory of the philosopher Jan Patocka, who died shortly after being interrogated by the communist Czechoslovak secret police. Putin, a KGB officer from 1975 until 1991, extends the sadistic tradition of interrogators: nothing is true, nothing is worthy of sacrifice, everything is a joke, everyone is for sale. Might makes right, only fools believe otherwise, and they should pay for being fools.

After 1991, the nihilism of late communism flowed together with the complacent Western idea that democracy was merely the result of impersonal forces. If it turned out that those forces pushed in different directions, for example, toward oligarchy or empire, what was there then to say? But in the tradition of Euripides or Havel or now Zelensky, it is taken for granted that the larger forces are always against the individual, and that citizenship is realized through the responsibility one takes for words and the risks one takes with deeds. Truth is not with power, but a defense against it. That is why freedom of speech is necessary: not to make excuses, not to conform, but to assert values into the world, because so doing is a precondition of self-rule.

Those who took democracy for granted were sleepwalking toward tyranny.

In their post-1989 decadence, many citizens of North American and European democracies came to associate freedom of speech with the ability of the rich to exploit media to broadcast self-indulgent nonsense. When one recalls the purpose of freedom of speech, however, one cares less about how many social media followers an oligarch has and more about how that oligarch became wealthy in the first place. Oligarchs such as Putin and Trump do the opposite of speaking truth to power: they tell lies for power. Trump told a big lie about the election (that he won); Putin told a big lie about Ukraine (that it doesn’t exist). Putin’s fake history of eastern Europe, one of his justifications for the war, is so outrageous that it provides a chance to recall the sense of freedom of speech. If one of the richest men in the world, in command of a huge army, claims that a neighboring country does not exist, this is not just an example of free expression. It is genocidal hate speech, a form of action that must be resisted by other forms of action.

In an essay published in July 2021, Putin argued that events of the tenth century predetermined the unity of Ukraine and Russia. This is grotesque as history, since the only human creativity it allows in the course of a thousand years and hundreds of millions of lives is that of the tyrant to retrospectively and arbitrarily choose his own genealogy of power. Nations are not determined by official myth, but created by people who make connections between past and future. As the French historian Ernest Renan put it, the nation is a “daily plebiscite.” The German historian Frank Golczewski was right to say that national identity is not a reflection of “ethnicity, language, and religion” but rather an “assertion of a certain historical and political possibility.” Something similar can be said of democracy: it can be made only by people who want to make it and in the name of values they affirm by taking risks for them.

The Ukrainian nation exists. The results of the daily plebiscite are clear, and the earnest struggle is evident. No society should have to resist a Russian invasion in order to be recognized. It should not have taken the deaths of dozens of journalists for us to see the basic truths that they were trying to report before and during the invasion. That it took so much effort (and so much unnecessary bloodshed) for the West to see Ukraine at all reveals the challenge that Russian nihilism poses. It shows how close the West came to conceding the tradition of democracy.

If one forgets that the purpose of free speech is to speak truth to power, one fails to see that big lies told by powerful people weaken democracy. The Putin regime makes this clear by organizing politics around the shameless production of fiction. Russia’s honesty, the argument goes, consists of accepting that there is no truth. Unlike the West, Russia avoids hypocrisy by dismissing all values at the outset. Putin stays in power by way of such strategic relativism: not by making his own country better but by making other countries look worse. Sometimes, that means acting to destabilize them—for instance, in Russia’s failed electoral intervention in Ukraine in 2014, its successful digital support of Brexit in the United Kingdom in 2016, and its successful digital support of Trump in 2016.

This philosophical system enables Putin to act but also to protect himself. Russians can be told that Ukraine is the center of the world and then that Syria is the center of the world and then again that Ukraine is the center of the world. They can be told that when their armed forces intervene in Ukraine or Syria, the other side starts killing its own people. They can be told one day that war with Ukraine is impossible and the next that war with Ukraine is inevitable, as happened in February. They can be told that Ukrainians are really Russians who want to be invaded and also Nazi satanists who must be exterminated. Putin cannot be backed into a corner. Because Russian power is equivalent to control over a closed media system, he can simply declare victory and change the subject. If Russia loses the war with Ukraine, he will just claim that he has won, and Russians will believe him or pretend to do so.

For such a regime to survive, the notion that democracy rests on the courage to tell the truth must be eliminated with violence if it cannot be laughed out of existence. Night after night, Kremlin propagandists explain on television that there cannot be a person such as Zelensky, a nation such as Ukraine, or a system such as democracy. Self-rule must be a joke; Ukraine must be a joke; Zelensky must be a joke. If not, the Kremlin’s whole story that Russia is superior because it accepts that nothing is true falls to pieces. If Ukrainians really can constitute a society and really can choose their leaders, then why shouldn’t Russians do the same?

Russians must be deterred from such thoughts by arguments about Ukraine that are as repulsive as they are untrue. Russian war propaganda about Ukraine is deeply, aggressively, deliberately false, and that is its purpose: to make grotesque lying seem normal and to wear down the human capacity to make distinctions and check emotions. When Russia murders Ukrainian prisoners of war en masse and blames Ukraine, it is not really making a truth claim: it is just trying to draw Western journalists into reporting all sides equally so they will ignore the discoverable facts. The point is to make the whole war seem incomprehensible and dirty, thereby discouraging Western involvement. When Russian fascists call Ukrainians “fascists,” they are playing this game, and too many others join in. It is ridiculous to treat Zelensky as part of both a world Jewish conspiracy and a Nazi plot, but Russian propaganda routinely makes both claims. But the absurdity is the point.

Democracy and nationhood depend on the capacity of individuals to assess the world for themselves and take unexpected risks; their destruction depends on asserting grand falsehoods that are known to be such. Zelensky made this point in one of his evening addresses this March: that falsehood demands violence, not because violence can make falsehood true, but because it can kill or humiliate people who have the courage to speak truth to power. As the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin has observed, to live inside a lie is to become the tool of someone else. To kill or die inside a lie is even worse, in that it enables a regime such as Russia’s to reconstitute itself. Killing for lies has generational consequences for Russia, even beyond the tens of thousands of dead and mutilated young citizens. An older Russian generation is forcing a younger one through a gauntlet, leaving the political terrain so slippery with blood that the young can never advance, and the old can hold their places until death. Ukraine is already governed by a generation that is accustomed to choosing its own leaders, an experience Russians have never had. In this sense, too, the war is generational. Its violence, in all its forms, is meant to eliminate the Ukrainian future. Russian state media has made Moscow’s genocidal aspiration plain, over and over again. In occupied territories, Russians execute male Ukrainian citizens or force them to go and die at the front. Russians rape Ukrainian women to prevent them from wishing to have children. The millions of Ukrainians forcibly deported to Russia, many of them women with young children or of child-bearing age, have to accept what they know to be false to avoid prison and torture. Less dramatic but still significant is Russia’s deliberate destruction of Ukrainian archives, libraries, universities, and publishing houses. The war is fought to control territory but also wombs and minds—in other words, the future.

Russia embodies fascism while claiming to fight it; Russians commit genocide while claiming to prevent it. This propaganda is not entirely ineffective: the fact that Moscow claims to be fighting Nazis does distract many observers from the fascism of Putin’s regime. And before North Americans and Europeans praise themselves for winning the battle of narratives, they should look to the global South. There, Putin’s story of the war prevails, even as Asians and Africans pay a horrible price for the war that he has chosen.

FAMINE AND FICTION

Putin’s propaganda machine, like the rest of his regime, is funded by revenue from oil and gas exports. The current Russian order, in other words, depends for its existence on a world that has not made the transition to sustainable energy. Russia’s war on Ukraine can be understood as a kind of preview of what uncontrolled climate change will look like: petulant wars waged by mendacious hydrocarbon oligarchs, racial violence instead of the pursuit of human survival via technology, shortages and famine in much of the world, and catastrophe in parts of the global South.

In Ukrainian history, political fiction accompanies political famine. In the early 1930s, when Stalin undertook what he called an “internal colonization” of the Soviet Union, much was expected of Ukraine’s fertile soil. And when his plan for rapid collectivization of agriculture failed, Stalin blamed a long list of ready scapegoats: first Ukrainian communists, then imaginary Ukrainian nationalists whom the communists supposedly served, then imaginary Polish agents whom the nationalists supposedly served. The Politburo, meanwhile, enforced requisitions and other punitive measures that ensured that about four million Ukrainians perished. Those abroad who tried to organize relief, including the Ukrainian feminist Milena Rudnytska, who happened to be of Jewish origin, were called Nazis. This list of fantasy enemies from 1933 is startlingly similar to Russia’s list today.

There is a larger historical pattern here, one in which the exploitation of the fruits of Ukrainian soil is justified by fantasies about the land and the people. In ancient times, the Greeks imagined monsters and miracles in the lands that are now Ukraine. During the Renaissance, as Polish nobles enserfed Ukrainian peasants, they invented for themselves a myth of racial superiority. After the Russian empire claimed Ukrainian territory from a partitioned Poland, its scholars invented a convenient story of how the two lands were one, a canard that Putin recycled in his essay last year. Putin has copied Stalin’s fantasies—and Hitler’s, for that matter. Ukraine was the center of a Nazi hunger plan whereby Stalin’s collective farms were to be seized and used to feed Germany and other European territories, causing tens of millions of Soviet citizens to starve. As they fought for control of Ukrainian foodstuffs, Nazis portrayed Ukrainians as a simple colonial people who would be happy to be ruled by their superiors. This was also Putin’s view.

It appears that Putin has his own hunger plan. Ukraine is one of the most important exporters of agricultural goods in the world. But the Russian navy has blockaded Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, Russian soldiers have set fire to Ukrainian fields, and Russian artillery has targeted grain silos and the rail infrastructure needed to get grain to the ports. Like Stalin in 1933, Putin has taken deliberate steps to risk the starvation of millions. Lebanon relies heavily on Ukrainian grain, as do Ethiopia, Yemen, and the fragile nations of the Sahel. Yet the spread of hunger is not simply a matter of Ukrainian food not reaching its normal markets. The anticipation of shortages drives up food prices everywhere. The Chinese can be expected to hoard food, driving prices higher still. The weakest and the poorest will suffer first. And that is the point. When those who have no voice die, those who rule by lethal spectacle choose the meaning of their deaths. And that is what Putin may do.

A Ukrainian victory would give democracy a fresh wind.

Whereas Stalin covered up the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s with propaganda, Putin is using hunger itself as propaganda. For months now, Russian propagandists have blamed a looming famine on Ukraine. The horror of telling such a lie to vulnerable African and Asian populations is easier to understand in light of the Putin regime’s racist, colonial mindset. This is, after all, a regime that allowed an image of Obama fellating a banana to be projected onto the wall of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and whose media declared the last year of the Obama administration “the year of the monkey.” Putin, like other white nationalists, is obsessed with demography and fears that his race will be outnumbered.

The war itself has followed a racial arithmetic. Some of the first Russian soldiers to be killed in battle were ethnic Asians from eastern Russia, and many of those who have died since were forcibly conscripted Ukrainians from the Donbas. Ukrainian women and children have been deported to Russia because they are seen as assimilable, people who can bolster the ranks of white Russians. To starve Africans and Asians, as Putin sees it, is a way to transfer the demographic stress to Europe by way of a wave of refugees fleeing hunger. The Russian bombing of Syrian civilians followed a similar logic.

Nothing in the hunger plan is hidden. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2022, Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the state-run network RT, said that “all of our hope lies in famine.” As the skilled propagandist understands, the point of starving Africans and Asians is to create a backdrop for propaganda. As they begin to die, Ukrainians will be scapegoated. This might or might not work. All past fantasies about Ukraine and its foodstuffs were at one time believed by influential people. Russian propaganda today has an edge in the global South. In much of Africa, Russia is a known quantity, whereas Ukraine is not. Few African leaders have publicly opposed Putin’s war, and some might be persuaded to parrot his talking points. Across the global South, it is not widely known that Ukraine is a leading exporter of food—nor that it is a poor country with a GDP per capita comparable to that of the countries it feeds, such as Egypt and Algeria.

There is some reason for hope. Ukrainians have been trying to communicate the reality of their position to people in the global South, so that they can speak the truth about Moscow’s hunger plan and thereby make it impossible. And as Ukraine has gained better weapons from the United States and Europe, Russia’s hold on the Black Sea has weakened. In July, Ukraine and Russia signed agreements with Turkey that should, in principle, allow some Ukrainian grain to leave the Black Sea and feed Africans and Asians. Yet the day after it signed the agreement, Russia fired missiles at the port of Odessa, from which Ukraine ships much of its grain. A few days after that, Russia killed Ukraine’s leading agribusinessman in a missile strike. The only sure way to feed the world is for Ukrainian soldiers to fight their way through the province of Kherson to the Black Sea and to victory.

THE LAST IMPERIAL WAR

Ukraine is fighting a war against a tyranny that is also a colonial power. Self-rule means not just defending the democratic principle of choosing one’s own rulers but also respecting the equality of states. Russian leaders have been clear that they believe that only some states are sovereign, and that Ukraine is nothing more than a colony. A Ukrainian victory would defend Ukrainian sovereignty in particular and the principle of sovereignty in general. It would also improve the prospects of other post-colonial states. As the economist Amartya Sen has argued, imperial famines result from political choices about distribution, not shortages of food. If Ukraine wins, it will resume exporting foodstuffs to the global South. By removing a great risk of suffering and instability in the global South, a victorious Ukraine would preserve the possibility of global cooperation on shared problems such as climate change.

For Europe, it is also essential that Ukraine win and Russia lose. The European Union is a collection of post-imperial states: some of them former imperial metropoles, some of them post-imperial peripheries. Ukrainians understand that joining the European Union is the way to secure statehood from a vulnerable peripheral position. Victory for Ukraine will have to involve a prospect of EU membership. As many Russians understand, Russia must lose, and for similar reasons. The European states that today pride themselves on their traditions of law and tolerance only truly became democracies after losing their last imperial war. A Russia that is fighting an imperial war in Ukraine can never embrace the rule of law, and a Russia that controls Ukrainian territory will never allow free elections. A Russia that loses such a war, one in which Putinism is a negative legacy, has a chance. Despite what Russian propaganda claims, Moscow loses wars with some frequency, and every period of reform in modern Russian history has followed a military defeat.

Most urgently, a Ukrainian victory is needed to prevent further death and atrocity in Ukraine. But the outcome of the war matters throughout the world, not just in the physical realm of pain and hunger but also in the realm of values, where possible futures are enabled. Ukrainian resistance reminds us that democracy is about human risk and human principles, and a Ukrainian victory would give democracy a fresh wind. The Ukrainian trident, which adorns the uniforms of Ukrainians now at war, extends back through the country’s traditions into ancient history, providing references that can be used to rethink and revive democracy.

Athena and Poseidon can be brought together. Athena, after all, was the goddess not only of justice but of just war. Poseidon had in mind not only violence but commerce. Athenians chose Athena as their patron but then built a fountain for Poseidon in the Acropolis—on the very spot, legend has it, where his trident struck. A victory for Ukraine would vindicate and recombine these values: Athena’s of deliberation and prosperity, Poseidon’s of decisiveness and trade. If Ukraine can win back its south, the sea-lanes that fed the ancient Greeks will be reopened, and the world will be enlightened by the Ukrainian example of risk-taking for self-rule. In the end, the olive tree will need the trident. Peace will only follow victory. The world might get an olive branch, but only if the Ukrainians can fight their way back to the sea.

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• TIMOTHY SNYDER is Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and the author of Bloodlands and On Tyranny .
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The Experiment

Memory Laws

There is a german word for what we've got to do.

Welcome to The Experiment—especially all you new subscribers! This week we’re talking about Hypocritical Race Theory, which is what happens when the people complaining about cancel culture want to get you kicked out of the state history museum. Also, Matt Zeller has a plan to save the lives of Afghan interpreters in “ Guam or Bust ,” and Jack Hughes has a twisted history lesson about the unintended consequences of court-packing proposals in “ The Second Hughes Court .”

As always, we have recommendations on what to do (use storytelling to promote social change ), read (Timothy Snyder’s NYT essay, “ The War on History is a War on Democracy ” is a must), watch (the surprisingly clever Peacock’s Girls5eva ), and listen to ( blkswn by Smino). Y’all, spend some time on the clips this week. Lots of good stuff to read.

But first, have you ever heard about memory laws?

Terry Snyder’s essay in The New York Times introduced me to the concept of memory laws, which he defined as “government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past. Such measures work by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship.”

This sounds horrible, right? The government telling you the correct way to think? Except I’ve got one word for you:

In Germany, Holocaust denial is a crime. The law states that Nazis were bad full stop. You can’t say Hitler wasn’t all bad, hang a Nazi flag in your rumpus room, or otherwise relitigate the Third Reich. All of which makes sense except the government is still telling you what to think.

Memory Laws were a part of Germany’s Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which awkwardly translates to “working off the past.” In her Washington Post essay, Michele L. Norris quotes a professor as saying that “there isn’t a native equivalent for this word in any other language,” which doesn’t mean Germany is the only country that’s ever needed to pick up trash along its historical highway.

South Africa’s post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a near equivalent, but this is ongoing. When I was a foreign exchange student in West Germany, my host family took me to visit a concentration camp and a whole troop of conscripts wearing army greens moved in brisk formation into a building.

Puzzled, I looked at my host father.

“Are they exercising?” I asked.

He cringed, thinking, no doubt, that the stupid American who can’t even do math also didn’t know something as basic as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Who doesn’t know that military conscripts are educated in the country’s sins so they are never repeated?

Well, Americans, that’s who. “A tourist from a foreign land might well conclude that the Confederacy had actually won the Civil War,” writes Norris. “The real truth of our shared history was a casualty of that war and, like any wound left untended, the results can be catastrophic.”

We are not just living through history but the catastrophic effects of corrupting our memory of events as they happen. Most Republicans think Trump won the election. January 6 was just a bunch of tourists who got confused. Historical fact is objective, but memories are not recordings of them. They are creative acts as our brain retells the story but never the same way.

The collective memory is told the same way, a collection of imperfect human brains, facing things or explaining them away. The latter is how we end up with politicians who at first condemn the insurrection and then refuse to investigate it. Our collective memory is written over on a corrupted hard drive. Is there a German word for this or just comparisons to Nazis?

“This spring,” writes Snyder, “memory laws arrived in America.”

If Germany used the legal construct of memory laws to force reconciliation, Texas and other states are using these laws to prevent it.

“The  Texas law forbids teachers from requiring students to understand the 1619 Project ,” wrote Snyder. “It is a perverse goal: Teachers succeed if students do not understand something.”

And now this has come to my doorstep. Tonight, Thursday, about an hour from now, my co-authors Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson were scheduled to speak at a virtual event hosted by the Bullock Museum, the state history museum. It seemed like a perfectly natural thing for it to host a chat about a book that covers the state’s creation story, but the Bullock doesn’t call itself the state history museum but the Official Texas History Museum, which, if you read carefully, could be a completely different flavor of ice cream.

Let’s level set on the book, which has been getting quite a bit of attention. An adapted excerpt ran on  the cover of Texas Monthly , it got a good review from the  New York Times , which even put it on a  list of 15 upcoming books in June .  Kirkus  called it “brilliant," and  Publisher's Weekly  called it “essential.” Excerpts ran in the San Antonio Express-News , the Houston Chronicle,  Vanity Fair (which included it on the list of books you should read in July) and  LitHub (which included it on a list of the 13 best book covers in June). Bryan and I co-wrote essays in  Time   and the  Washington Post .  The Diane Rehm Show  and  Fresh Air   featured the book. Which, neat.

The only reviews that mattered (other than yours, of course) came from the Wall Street Journal and the  Washington Post , who hired actual Texas history professors to give it a read. SMU’s Andrew R. Graybill wrote for the Journal , and UT’s H.W. Brands for the Post , neither of whom quibbled at all on our historical interpretation. We were right on the facts.

“At numerous points in their account of the siege and battle, the authors challenge the traditional view. In doing so they follow historians who abandoned the traditional view decades ago,” sniffed Brands. “They sometimes appear to be beating a horse that, if not dead, was put to pasture awhile back, at least outside the political classes.”

It’s in the political classes that we fail. This week a higher-up at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a rightwing think tank based in Austin, called our Bullock Museum event “a travesty” and our book a “trashy non-history book” (actually makes it sound kinda good). “Our glorious history deserve [ sic. ] better,” he tweeted, tagging the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker, a senator, and a state representative, who together comprise the Texas State Preservation Board , which has oversight over, you guessed it, the Bullock Museum.  

Our sin, of course, was that Forget the Alamo lays bare slavery’s role in the creation story of Texas. It might be Texas history, but it’s definitely not Official Texas History. As one conservative writer (who, coincidentally, was quoted favorably in the book) noted, “The event gives them a platform, a place to stand on the Bullock’s own credibility, to declare that the Texas Revolution was really about slavery, not freedom.”

“Does the Bullock Texas History Museum Want Texans to Forget the Alamo, Too?” was his headline.

Apparently, that answer was no.

Three and a half hours before the event, we got an email from the publisher saying the Bullock had pulled out.

“The Bullock was receiving increased pressure on social media about hosting the event, as well as to the museum’s board of directors (Gov Abbott being one of them) and decided to pull out as a co-host all together,” went the email.

If conservatives are upset that the state history museum might host an online chat for Forget the Alamo , they’re going to be outright shocked when they see what’s in the museum. One of the current exhibitions is “ Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow ,” which covers 1865 to 1919, when apparently Woodrow Wilson won Black people the right to vote or something. Also, on display is the Declaration of Independence printed in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6, 1776. That’s got some pretty radical stuff in it, including my favorite line, “Let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The real lie is that there is a platonic ideal of perfect collective memory. Memories are not recordings but creations, and government has always played a role in shaping that even in this country, if not especially so. Through monuments, public school curricula, and yes, attacks on attempts to right the historical record, the political classes have always fought for a favorable collective memory.

That they would try to do so is inevitable. That they would succeed is not. Norris recounts the 1985 speech by West German President Richard von Weizsäcker on the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. His father was the top Nazi diplomat. He was a Wehrmacht captain. “And yet,” writes Norris, “there he was, gray-haired and solemn before the Bundestag, shifting the conventional narrative by asking his country to reconsider and  remember the true nature of the nation’s past .’

“We need to look truth straight in the eye,” said Weizsäcker.

I might get a little criticism that I’m drawing a line from our cancelled book event to Nazis. Godwin be damned. I’m drawing a longer line than that. This should not be surprising for Americans since, as Snyder points out, “Hitler admired Jim Crow and the myth of the Wild West.” It is not ridiculous to connect racism back to the Holocaust since we’re merely retracing Hitler’s own steps.

America needs therapy.

In lieu of us getting to talk tonight, I’ll give the last word to someone who has looked truth straight in the eye and on more than one occasion winked. On the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, President Joe Biden said we’re capable of much more than closing our ears to facts that contradict “our glorious history.”

“We should know the good, the bad, everything,”  he said . “That’s what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation.”

Texas was once its own country. Whether it was a great nation is a matter for others to discuss. Perhaps they can have a chat about it at the state history museum.

Guam or Bust

by Matt Zeller

An Afghan interpreter named Janis Shinwari saved Capt.  Matt Zeller ’s life in combat with the Taliban. After his return, Zeller fought to save the lives of his interpreter, his interpreter’s family, and hundreds more just like him has drawn the attention of  CNN ,  The Atlantic , and  PBS . Now he’s trying to save the rest of them before the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan later this year, and he’s hit upon an unusual idea about where the interpreters should be relocated.

Read it here .

The Second Hughes Court

by Jack Hughes

What to do when there’s no Dan Quayle news for  Jack Hughes  to riff on? Knowing him, he could either draw a surprising pop culture parallel or burrow deep into a historical rabbit hole. Hughes clearly chose the latter in this deep dive into how the Supreme Court helmed by Charles Evan Hughes (no relation) responded to FDR’s court-expansion threat — and how that could play out today.

How we’re getting through this

Making at least one best-of list

Telling stories to promote social change (h/t M.S. )

Accepting that UFOs not only exist but are common

Deciding whether I’m an Order Muppet or a Chaos Muppet (h/t J.P. )

Getting book recommendations from Lena Waithe and Riley Keough

What I’m reading

Karen Attiah : “The challenge for educators amid the critical race theory backlash: How do you fight hot air?” - How do you obey an unspecific law?

Indeed, it is darkly ironic that laws designed to suppress the teaching of America’s history are producing scenes around America that look like something out of the 1950s and ’60s, as mostly White parents disrupt school board meetings. Groups in some states  are beginning to call  for McCarthy-esque surveillance measures.  In Nevada , some groups want teachers to wear body cameras to monitor whether they are teaching about racial justice.

Chris Mooney : “ The Psychology of How We Learn Prejudice: Are We Natural-Born Racists?” - No, but our brains are vulnerable to racism.

But here’s the good news: Research suggests that once we understand the psychological pathways that lead to prejudice, we just might be able to train our brains to go in the opposite direction.

Michele L. Norris : “Germany faced its horrible past.Can we do the same?” - This one is a doozy.

The United States does not yet have the stomach to look over its shoulder and stare directly at the evil on which this great country stands. That is why slavery is not well taught in our schools. That is why the battle flag of the army that tried to divide and conquer our country is still manufactured, sold and displayed with defiant pride. That is why any mention of slavery is rendered as the shameful act of a smattering of Southern plantation owners and not a sprawling economic and social framework with tentacles that stamped almost every aspect of American life.

Ross Ramsey : “A majority of Texas voters isn’t enough to sway a Republican state government” - Democracy is not foolproof. Not even close.

Texans  want to legalize marijuana and don’t think everybody should be able to carry a gun without training or a license . So the state Legislature  passed a “constitutional carry” bill earlier this year — and the governor signed it . And the marijuana bills that were filed in the recent regular session never came to a vote.

Timothy Snyder : “The War on History Is a War on Democracy” - We’re living though history again, only this time it’s a pandemic of state-sponsored forgetting.

History is not therapy, and discomfort is part of growing up. 

Dan Zak: “‘Nothing ever ends’: Sorting through Rumsfeld’s knowns and unknowns” - How does a touch this light leave a mark so dark?

What something is, and what it isn’t. What is known, and what is unknown. It sounds sort of Buddhist, until you see how the dogma is applied.

What I’m watching

I should not have been surprised that we loved Girls5eva on Peacock. Meredith Scardino, who wrote The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is the brains behind this, and Tina Fey has upped the joke density as executive producer. If you like jokes and pop music stories and underdogs and people growing TF up, you’ll dig this.

What I’m listening to

My youngest says he and his friends are into Smino now; it’s good stuff.

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Swimsuit season’s coming. Try Noom, and you’ll quickly learn how to change your behavior and relationship with food. This app has changed my life. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works.

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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth  by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.

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