Timothy Snyder: The war in Ukraine and the question of genocide

2022 Elie Wiesel Memorial Lecture with Timothy Snyder

2022 Elie Wiesel Memorial Lecture with Timothy Snyder

Source: Youtube

Transcription

  • 0:03
  • good evening everyone can you all hear me even in the back
  • 0:09
  • great welcome everyone thank you so much for being here I'm Professor Nancy herowitz
  • 0:14
  • I'm the director of the Ellie weasel Center for Jewish studies we're most pleased to welcome Professor Timothy
  • 0:20
  • Snyder to campus this is the launch event for our new major in Holocaust genocide and human rights studies but
  • 0:26
  • first let me welcome Gene Morrison our the Provost of the University who's been extremely supportive of our new program
  • 0:33
  • so thank you Jane the lecture tonight is also the first in
  • 0:39
  • this year's series of the Elie Wiesel Memorial lectures our theme this year is
  • 0:44
  • co-witnessing and social justice our responses to human humanitarian crises
  • 0:49
  • the second lecture will be November 9th Irene kakandez will be joining us from Dartmouth College to talk about social
  • 0:56
  • justice and co-witnessing a big thanks to those who made this program possible in particular Teresa
  • 1:03
  • Cooney who is the administrator of the Ellie Wiesel Center and Jeremy Solomon's our communications director they're
  • 1:08
  • probably not even in the room because they're out there still working but anyway foreign [Applause]
  • 1:16
  • I'm going to describe our new major for just a minute or two and then my colleague Professor Tim Longman will
  • 1:22
  • introduce Professor Snyder and our moderator for the evening we are very excited about offering this
  • 1:28
  • new major in Holocaust gen genocide and human rights studies at Boston University for quite a few reasons
  • 1:34
  • the subject of genocide is an uncomfortable one and yet we need to
  • 1:40
  • confront it trying to understand how atrocities of this magnitude can happen
  • 1:46
  • as well as genocide prevention are crucially important studies for all those who care about a just Society
  • 1:54
  • our program is founded on the belief that the comparative study of past and
  • 2:00
  • current acts of genocide and the Quest for human rights Belong Together
  • 2:06
  • and should be studied together in order to provide students with a constructive perspective on fundamental human
  • 2:13
  • concerns we added human rights to our Holocaust and genocide studies program because
  • 2:19
  • human rights violations dehumanization for example lie at the
  • 2:24
  • core of what makes atrocities possible and the study of human rights
  • 2:29
  • underscores so many other fields and endeavors students who take courses in Holocaust
  • 2:35
  • genocide human rights studies comment that the classes they take deepen their understanding of their own chosen field
  • 2:42
  • whether that be law Health Human Rights and many others
  • 2:48
  • this new program is truly interdisciplinary our faculty come from all over the
  • 2:54
  • university history political science film literature international relations
  • 3:00
  • anthropology sociology law and religion and my apologies have I forgotten any of
  • 3:05
  • the fields that our faculty come from Boston University is uniquely positioned
  • 3:11
  • to offer this program because of the tremendous social justice legacies of
  • 3:16
  • Elie Wiesel Martin Luther King Jr and Howard Thurman we are a university whose very
  • 3:23
  • Foundation rests on these great and enduring humanitarian philosophies
  • 3:28
  • please contact us at the aloiselle center if you are interested in learning more about the major or the minor in the
  • 3:35
  • program please now welcome Professor Timothy Longman associate Dean for academic
  • 3:40
  • Affairs at the party school for Global Studies and the associate director of our new program who will introduce Professor Snyder and our moderator
  • 3:47
  • Alexis Perry [Applause]
  • 4:02
  • good evening uh Timothy Snyder is one of those rare authors who has managed to be both
  • 4:08
  • widely respected by Scholars and actually sell books uh
  • 4:13
  • he earned his PhD at Oxford and he's published quite a number of books that focus on nationalism in Central and
  • 4:20
  • Eastern Europe uh opposition the Soviet Union the Holocaust among other topics but having very much earned his
  • 4:28
  • credentials as a legitimate traditional scholar he's also managed to write some
  • 4:33
  • books that have become best sellers in particular bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin in 2010 was widely
  • 4:40
  • praised by Scholars while also managing to attract a wider audience looking at brutality within modern European history
  • 4:49
  • uh more recently in 2017 in response to things that were happening in the United States and other parts of the world he
  • 4:55
  • wrote on tyranny which attracted an entirely new audience to him in which he reflected on the research that he had
  • 5:01
  • done in Central and Eastern Europe on the Holocaust and other topics on Stalin
  • 5:07
  • in order to think about issues of tyranny and authoritarianism and
  • 5:13
  • their spread and to provide 20 lessons for our society I think many of you may
  • 5:18
  • have read that book I know certainly I have and my parents have and just about everybody else I know who reads has read
  • 5:24
  • it is quite influential um tonight he's going to talk about something that's very much related to
  • 5:30
  • this and as you'll see this is someone who is uh talking about a wide variety of topics that are all deeply grounded
  • 5:37
  • in understanding of history and yet also continue to resonate in the Modern Age and and things that are happening right
  • 5:43
  • now um the format will be uh Professor Snyder will speak and then afterwards we
  • 5:50
  • have one of our professors in history Alexis Perry who will serve as a moderator she will ask some questions
  • 5:55
  • and we will also solicit questions from the audience so you should have been given an index card where you can write
  • 6:01
  • down the questions and if you have a question please after the talk sort of raise up your card and someone will come
  • 6:07
  • by and we'll we'll grab that card from you and uh we'll um sort of go through them and read them uh Alexis Perry got
  • 6:15
  • her PhD at Berkeley she focuses on the history of modern Russia and Eastern Europe especially the Soviet period uh
  • 6:21
  • her book The War within Diaries from the siege of Leningrad in 2017 won multiple prizes uh and uh also within Russian
  • 6:30
  • studies was somewhat controversial which is I always think a good thing you must be doing something right if some people get angry at what you write she's also
  • 6:37
  • an excellent teacher and that's one the Gerald and Dean Deanne gitner family prize for undergraduate teaching in 2019
  • 6:44
  • so I'm going to turn it over first to Timothy and then Alexis will come at the end and join him on stage Professor
  • 6:49
  • Snyder [Applause]
  • 7:09
  • we will kill one million we will kill 5 million
  • 7:16
  • we will obliterate them all we will drive the children into the
  • 7:22
  • Raging River we will throw the children into burning huts
  • 7:29
  • they should not exist at all we should execute them by firing squad
  • 7:36
  • it's an honor to be here at Boston University today to take part in the
  • 7:41
  • inauguration of this new major and Holocaust genocide and human rights
  • 7:48
  • I come to this program this University and this topic the topic being the war
  • 7:55
  • in Ukraine and the question of genocide as a historian genocide is a legal term
  • 8:03
  • I'm going to be speaking to you about that legal term but I'd also like to remind you and ask you to keep in mind
  • 8:08
  • that genocide is also a human test that the Legal character of the word genocide
  • 8:15
  • can also provide us ways of escaping what might seem to be the human obligations
  • 8:23
  • before I make this argument I want to acknowledge that I would not be speaking to you here today about this topic were
  • 8:30
  • not for the basic fact that ukrainians have chosen to resist a genocidal War
  • 8:36
  • this this discussion and all other discussions about genocide human rights
  • 8:41
  • and for that matter democracy and its future have been radically changed and indeed enabled by the fact that Ukraine
  • 8:48
  • is now resisting Russia and the arguments that I will make depend to a
  • 8:53
  • very large degree on the work of Ukrainian journalists who are working in conditions of great risk as well as the
  • 8:59
  • work of Ukrainian and other historians so history is many things it's the
  • 9:05
  • search for patterns it's the search for the telling detail it's the search for
  • 9:10
  • the patterns and the details that allow us to shake ourselves out of the everyday it's the search for the
  • 9:16
  • patterns and the details that allow us to see something maybe something very important that otherwise we might not
  • 9:22
  • see and seeing is important because if we do see for example a genocide that
  • 9:29
  • makes it impossible for us to be a bystander once you see a genocide you
  • 9:36
  • can no longer stand by either you were on the side of the perpetrators or you're on the side of the victims once
  • 9:42
  • you see it and therefore much of our mental energy goes into not seeing
  • 9:48
  • genocides my thesis in this lecture about the war
  • 9:54
  • in Ukraine and the question of genocide is that this war has been a genocidal war from the beginning that was
  • 10:01
  • announced as a genocidal war that has been prosecuted by as a genocidal war
  • 10:07
  • and indeed today as I speak to you right now it is being prosecuted as a genocidal War
  • 10:14
  • I'm going to structure this talk around the objections to this thesis because as
  • 10:19
  • I've just said the easier thing to do is not to see so what I'd like to do is
  • 10:25
  • address five of the ways that we tend to avoid seeing and as I do that make the
  • 10:31
  • case that what is happening is genocide and along the way I'll be speaking to that somehow very simple but
  • 10:38
  • nevertheless evasive question what is the word genocide actually mean
  • 10:44
  • so the first objection to saying that what is happening in Ukraine is genocide is to say
  • 10:51
  • but there are other crimes as well and that is of course true I agree
  • 10:57
  • um the great Philippe Sands speaks of the quartet of War of aggression war
  • 11:03
  • crimes crimes against humanity and genocide all of which are legally distinct Concepts
  • 11:09
  • I agree that it is possible to characterize the events in Ukraine in other ways I agree with Philippe Sands
  • 11:16
  • that war of aggression is probably the easiest to prosecute but the fact that
  • 11:22
  • something is the easiest to prosecute doesn't exclude the reality of other kinds of violations there is also
  • 11:29
  • genocide going on which leads me to the second objection which one very often hears to the thesis
  • 11:36
  • that what is happening in Ukraine now is genocide the second objection is that we
  • 11:41
  • can't prosecute um the there no one has jurisdiction there's no venue we'll never capture the
  • 11:48
  • perpetrators we can't prosecute it strikes me though that that's a that's an evasion that's a way of not
  • 11:54
  • seeing what is happening obviously you would care very much to know that there
  • 12:00
  • is a murderer loose in your neighborhood and that would be different than there is a manslaughter in the second degree
  • 12:06
  • loose in your so what might seem to be a simple legal distinction uh actually
  • 12:12
  • captures a very important difference whether we describe this as genocide now is a description of what is happening
  • 12:19
  • it's not just the the it's not just laying the foundations for some kind of future prosecution
  • 12:27
  • it also has to do with how we will remember this later because it's the sad truth as those of you who studied in
  • 12:33
  • this field know that most genocides are forgotten and the reason why they were forgotten is that they were never noted
  • 12:38
  • in the first place so if you don't note that a genocide is happening in the first place you're asking a lot of
  • 12:44
  • future generations to remember it to record it to evaluate it later on
  • 12:50
  • the third objection and again I'm hoping to crowd out all possible questions so that there will
  • 12:56
  • simply be silence at the end of this lecture the third possible objection is
  • 13:02
  • that this doesn't feel like genocide that when I say genocide there's a kind
  • 13:07
  • of Elemental objection that this doesn't this doesn't feel like a genocide
  • 13:13
  • um and it rarely does from the outside it rarely does I think
  • 13:19
  • almost never does it feel like genocide from the outside uh when when I was in
  • 13:26
  • Ukraine a month ago I was in a a school building an elementary school building in a
  • 13:33
  • little village called yahidne in Cherno blast north of Kiev where the Russians
  • 13:39
  • had occupied for about a month before being driven out in March and in this
  • 13:45
  • school building on the ground floor which the Russian soldiers had used as their local base there was their
  • 13:50
  • graffiti left behind and their graffiti said among other things ukrainians it was a slang term for
  • 13:56
  • ukrainians but ukrainians are devils ukrainians are Satan that's the ground
  • 14:02
  • floor in the basement of this school or I should say former school because after what happened there will never be used
  • 14:09
  • as a school again in the basement of of this former School of this school building all of the inhabitants of the
  • 14:16
  • village every man woman and child was held for a month without regular access to food or water or hygiene or toilets
  • 14:24
  • and those conditions many people died and during that time a number of people
  • 14:30
  • were executed so when I was in that building looking at the drawings of the
  • 14:36
  • children's left on children left on the wall looking at the notations that the adults made of the people who had been
  • 14:42
  • shot and the people who had died from exhaustion from that perspective it did feel more like genocide and I'm gonna
  • 14:50
  • I'm gonna submit that if we're talking about feelings we might want to privilege that perspective over over the
  • 14:56
  • one that we have from the outside more broadly if you're Ukrainian you're being
  • 15:02
  • told daily that you do not exist as a people that you have no right to exist as a people
  • 15:08
  • ukrainians have been deported in on the scale of the millions four mil according
  • 15:13
  • to the Russian's own boasts 4 million ukrainians have been deported from the territory of Ukraine they've been killed
  • 15:20
  • on the scale of hundreds of thousands their children have been kidnapped on the scale of at least the tens of
  • 15:25
  • thousands their water and their energy supplies are deliberately being destroyed but that's there
  • 15:31
  • that's not that's not here and what I'm trying to say in response to this objection is that it's that
  • 15:37
  • varied sense of distance that very lack of solidarity which is an
  • 15:42
  • integral element of genocide itself that feeling that somehow this isn't genocide
  • 15:48
  • can actually be part of the genocide it's a way in which it's impossible to
  • 15:53
  • be a bystander right if you choose not to see something that's happening you are taking part you are you are taking
  • 16:00
  • part but that feeling I know it's a pervasive feeling it takes many forms the feeling that
  • 16:06
  • we're not sure maybe it's complicated maybe the perpetrator is actually the
  • 16:13
  • victim who knows time will tell maybe our own consciences aren't perfectly
  • 16:18
  • clean maybe it can't be happening while we ignore it because we're not the sort of
  • 16:24
  • people who would ignore it while it's happening that kind of circular reasoning is very
  • 16:30
  • powerful we couldn't possibly be bystanders and therefore it's not a genocide is the way
  • 16:37
  • that we very often think it can't be a genocide because it
  • 16:42
  • doesn't feel to us like a genocide and we're not the kind of people who would be bystanders but we are of course
  • 16:49
  • we are of course we are the kind of people who would be bystanders and it's by this very logic
  • 16:56
  • that we become the bystanders so genocide's a test it's a legal term but it's also a human
  • 17:03
  • test my part here is to make the case as the historian who's honored to help open
  • 17:08
  • this major to make the legal case that this term genocide is actually describes
  • 17:14
  • the crime that's being committed my task is to show that a genocidal War has been underway for eight months that the
  • 17:21
  • experiences of ukrainians plus the intentions of Russians equal a genocide
  • 17:27
  • and then we can ask about ourselves the fourth objection would be to say
  • 17:33
  • would be to ask but are the Deeds genocidal are the Deeds genocidal are
  • 17:42
  • what Russians are doing in Ukraine does that actually amount to a genocide and
  • 17:49
  • here we run up against a dilemma which those of you who work in this field will be very familiar with namely the
  • 17:55
  • difference between vernacular understandings of genocide and legal understandings of genocide
  • 18:01
  • in the vernacular the word genocide is often used to mean they killed every
  • 18:06
  • single person but that's not what the word genocide means legally
  • 18:13
  • um and if by the way if genocide means they killed every single person uh that word wouldn't have much application I
  • 18:20
  • mean even the Holocaust doesn't come close to they killed every single person so if if um if the the definition of
  • 18:29
  • genocide and now I'm going to do the boring thing which is indispensable of reading to you
  • 18:34
  • a couple of paragraphs of law out loud um they're short genocide means
  • 18:39
  • according to the 1948 convention which codified Rafael limpkin's word in international law it means the following
  • 18:45
  • actions number one killing members of the group
  • 18:52
  • by the way genocide is met if any of the following crimes have been committed okay so the first one is killing members
  • 18:58
  • of the group this has obviously happened the war itself the bombing from the sky the missiles
  • 19:06
  • and the drones directed at civilians in mariupole alone it looks like more than 100 000 civilians were killed in
  • 19:14
  • one city alone the executions everywhere that Russia occupied territory the death pits which
  • 19:20
  • are found again and again in small and medium-sized places that the Russians occupied
  • 19:26
  • the targeted killings of people regarded as being active in Ukrainian Civil Society
  • 19:32
  • the filtration camps in which people regarded as politically active or simply men of a certain age are taken out and
  • 19:39
  • killed all of these things amount to killing members of a group
  • 19:44
  • second genocidal crime in the law I'm quoting again causing serious bodily or mental harm to
  • 19:51
  • members of the group here one could mention systematic torture
  • 19:56
  • everywhere that the Russians occupy and is deoccupied the ukrainians find
  • 20:02
  • torture chambers torture is an absolutely ordinary wet part of the Russian regime in Russia and used far
  • 20:10
  • more frequently in the occupied territories of Ukraine this has been true by the way since 2014 in the
  • 20:16
  • occupied territories of Ukraine it's just now that territories that are being de-occupied and the actual physical
  • 20:22
  • evidence can be can be recovered the bombings of Hospitals and Clinics and schools also cause serious bodily or
  • 20:30
  • mental harm to members of the group I would also say that deportation or to
  • 20:36
  • use a term we sometimes use ethnic cleansing is a form of bodily or mental harm and I'd like to emphasize the scale
  • 20:42
  • of these deportations according to claims that the Russians themselves make regularly about 4 million people have
  • 20:51
  • been deported four million Ukrainian citizens have been deported from Ukraine that is about 10 percent of the total
  • 20:58
  • population of the country if you'd like to imagine the scale of that imagine that all of New England
  • 21:05
  • all of New York State all of Pennsylvania have been entirely
  • 21:11
  • physically depopulated stripped clean of every single person
  • 21:17
  • then you have a sense of the scale the deportations in Ukraine that's the percentage ten percent
  • 21:24
  • so I think that's obviously met the third Criterion of genocide is a crime
  • 21:30
  • is deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
  • 21:36
  • destruction in whole or in part again this is obviously the case the
  • 21:43
  • deliberate destruction of whole cities The Campaign which is unfolding right
  • 21:48
  • now to deny ukrainians access to water and electricity over the winter those
  • 21:54
  • are the conditions of life and again Russian propagandists Russian
  • 22:00
  • politicians make no secret about this they boast that this is what they are
  • 22:05
  • doing they say it openly the fourth Criterion the fourth example of a genocidal crime imposing measures
  • 22:12
  • intended to prevent births within the group the genocide conviction Convention of
  • 22:19
  • 1948 does not explicitly mention rape but I would maintain that rape is an
  • 22:25
  • example of bodily or mental harm as above in the campaign of systematic rape
  • 22:31
  • inside Ukraine carried out by Russian soldiers in the voices of those Russian
  • 22:36
  • soldiers we often find a specific political overtone or specific genocidal
  • 22:42
  • purpose that after the trauma of rape Ukrainian women would not wish to raise
  • 22:48
  • Ukrainian children would never wish to Bear children imposing measures intended to prevent
  • 22:54
  • births within the group also applies to the filtration camps and the deportation in the filtration camps and the
  • 23:01
  • deportation that follows the Russians are screening for fertile women and children
  • 23:06
  • they are sending the fertile women and children preponderantly to Russia scattering them deep into Russia with
  • 23:14
  • the idea that this will prevent the birth of Ukrainian children but it will allow the birth of Russian children
  • 23:22
  • that is quite literally genocide according to this Criterion the fifth is
  • 23:29
  • and I quote again forcibly transferring Children of the group to another group
  • 23:35
  • hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children have been deported to the Russian Federation during this war for
  • 23:41
  • adoption by individual Russian families spread across the vast territory of the Russian Federation so that they can
  • 23:47
  • never form a Ukrainian Community again the New York Times referred to Children recently as the booty of War which I
  • 23:54
  • believe is correct Russia has been boasting about kidnapping Ukrainian children and
  • 24:00
  • assimilating them from the beginning of the war this has been an openly declared goal of the war
  • 24:06
  • as I am speaking to you children are being deported from Herson oblast as as
  • 24:11
  • Russia withdraws from her song thousands of children children are being deported right now
  • 24:18
  • objection so I hope I've made a case that all of the crimes of genocide the sub
  • 24:24
  • crimes of genocide are taking place and to remind you only one of them need to be taking place for this to be genocide
  • 24:30
  • but all of them are taking place the fifth objection would be what about
  • 24:35
  • intention genocide is about intention and that's true
  • 24:41
  • the language of the convention again to quote is the act must be committed with
  • 24:46
  • intent to destroy in whole or in part in National ethnical racial or religious group as such
  • 24:55
  • here we find an opportunity to look away because we
  • 25:00
  • can say how do we know about intention
  • 25:06
  • we can never get inside someone else's mind so how can we be a hundred percent
  • 25:11
  • sure about intention that's what we say when we're pushed when the when the evidence of the
  • 25:18
  • crimes is indisputable we move to saying but how can we be sure about intention
  • 25:24
  • and this is where a lot of the conversation about genocide is right now how can we know about intention
  • 25:32
  • but of course if we took this view of intention that intention requires my looking inside your mind
  • 25:38
  • no law no law involving for example murder or a number of other crimes that
  • 25:44
  • we prosecute every day would be possible we make we make all the time in everyday
  • 25:50
  • jurisprudence and everyday trials we make judgments about intention and we do it without telepathy all the time I
  • 25:58
  • think there's a reason why we applied the telepathy standard to genocide and not to other crimes which is that we
  • 26:04
  • would prefer to think that it's not genocide we would prefer to think that a genocide is not happening as we look
  • 26:11
  • away if the telepathy standard were the right standard then the 1948 genocide
  • 26:17
  • convention would of course be meaningless there would be no sense in having a law forbidding genocide if
  • 26:23
  • intention really meant that you have to make mental contact with someone else
  • 26:28
  • I'll talk more and this will be the rest of the talk in fact I'll talk more about how as a historian we do establish
  • 26:35
  • intention around Mass crimes around mass murders but here I want to make I want
  • 26:41
  • to I want to note another way that people deal with intention or try to resist intention people will say
  • 26:47
  • there is no piece of paper where the leader of the country specifically confesses to the detailed intention to
  • 26:55
  • carry out exactly the crime that has taken place right there's no there's no piece of paper which proves it and
  • 27:01
  • that's true there's not there never is
  • 27:06
  • there isn't one for the Holocaust there's no order from Hitler where he says this is such and such exactly
  • 27:12
  • should happen from the Jews but there are all kinds of other pieces of evidence
  • 27:17
  • which using basic historical or legal judgment we can I think quite reasonably
  • 27:23
  • establish that Hitler had this sort of intention that many other people did too
  • 27:29
  • the case I want to make in the rest of this talk is the pro is that the problem is not that we lack
  • 27:36
  • evidence of intention I think if anything the problem is that
  • 27:41
  • we are overwhelmed by the evidence of intention and that what happens is that
  • 27:48
  • as we hear more and more evidence of intention some of which I've already supplied you with as we hear more and
  • 27:55
  • more of it what we do is we ratchet up the standard for what would actually qualify as intention right that's the
  • 28:02
  • Temptation the more the more we hear about Russian intentions the more we say
  • 28:08
  • well I just got used to that and so now I want something even more shocking right
  • 28:14
  • to prove that it was genocidal
  • 28:21
  • they should not exist at all we should execute them by firing squad
  • 28:28
  • we will kill one million we will kill 5 million we will obliterate them all
  • 28:35
  • we will drown the children in the Raging River we will throw the children into burning wooden huts
  • 28:42
  • you might have thought these quotations were from some distant historical case
  • 28:49
  • they're all from Russian State television in the last few days Russian
  • 28:55
  • State television is controlled directly by the president of the Russian
  • 29:00
  • Federation there are thousands of similar statements made to tens of
  • 29:07
  • millions of Russians on a regular basis on media that they and we know is
  • 29:13
  • controlled personally by the president of the Russian Federation as I say the
  • 29:19
  • problem is not the lack of intent it's the super abundance of evidence of genocidal intent which makes us raise
  • 29:26
  • the standard and that becomes another way of looking away
  • 29:34
  • what I want to do rather than bombard you with more quotations of this kind of
  • 29:39
  • which there is in fact a kind of unending Supply is to take a different
  • 29:45
  • tack I want to give you nine examples of how a historian would evaluate intention
  • 29:53
  • I could just for the rest of my time read a list of statements that are similar to the one that I just read but
  • 29:58
  • rather than doing that I want to respond to the challenge that I've set which is how do you actually evaluate intent how
  • 30:04
  • could you become comfortable with saying that someone intended to do something different sorts of people judges
  • 30:11
  • psychologists and so on would do this in different ways I'm going to do it as a historian who has written about Mass
  • 30:17
  • killing so the nine classifications that I would choose
  • 30:23
  • the nine ways of thinking about the language that's been used and seeing it
  • 30:28
  • and understanding this genocidal that I propose are going to be number one
  • 30:34
  • um and it's going to be an Earnest undergraduate indeed who writes these all down and no doubt you will get extra
  • 30:39
  • credit if you do number one I can promise that because I don't teach here
  • 30:47
  • um number one Colonial number two apologist number three
  • 30:54
  • dehumanizing number four narcissistic number five escalatory
  • 31:01
  • number six metaphysical number seven fascist number eight replacement and number nine
  • 31:09
  • exceptionalist let me try to make sense of this Colonial language
  • 31:16
  • much of historical genocide is associated with the phenomenon of European and other colonialism
  • 31:23
  • the language that Putin has used since 2011 about Ukraine has specifically
  • 31:28
  • invoked the category of civilization the central category of colonialism
  • 31:35
  • in for the last 10 years but with greater intensity in the last two or so Putin has has made the claim that Russia
  • 31:43
  • of course exists as a state and Nation but Ukraine of course does not exist as
  • 31:48
  • a state of State a nation that is the absolutely predictable normal way that
  • 31:54
  • European Colonial Powers referred to the political and social groups that they encounter
  • 32:00
  • the power of the Imperial stance allows you to say who exists and who
  • 32:06
  • doesn't exist it also allows you to declare always and never so the Russian language which far too
  • 32:13
  • many people take on and still use to the effect that Crimea was always Russia
  • 32:20
  • or that Ukraine and Russia were always together is an example of this sort of
  • 32:26
  • Imperial usage with these these always is imply Nevers
  • 32:34
  • if Ukraine was always together with Russia then we can dismiss not only the ukrainians and their their
  • 32:39
  • self-conscious political history which actually goes back hundreds of years but we can dismiss anything that that
  • 32:45
  • doesn't that seems to challenge a Russian narrative if Crimea were always Russia then we can forget about the 600
  • 32:52
  • years in which there was a different state in Crimea which by the way is longer than the United States has lasted
  • 32:57
  • or any Russian entity has lasted we can dismiss that we can forget entirely about the indigenous people of the
  • 33:03
  • Crimean Peninsula the Crimean tatars who were dispersed in the late 18th century when Russia absorbed For the First Time
  • 33:09
  • The Peninsula and who were forcibly ethnically cleansed every single one of them in the spring of 1944 under Stalin
  • 33:16
  • if Crimea and Russia were always together then we can just forget about those people upon whom what we would Now
  • 33:22
  • call genocide was very often perpetrated which leads me to the second point or
  • 33:27
  • the second kind of classification which is apology or apology apologism where
  • 33:34
  • your attitude towards a specific event in the past reveals your specific intent
  • 33:40
  • to change the future what do I mean the example of neo-nazis will be familiar I'm sure to many people what do
  • 33:45
  • neo-nazis often say about the Holocaust they often say about the Holocaust that it didn't happen what do they mean when
  • 33:53
  • they say the Holocaust didn't happen they mean they would like for it to happen again that is the meaning of that
  • 34:00
  • when you deny a specific crime that people with whom you identify carried out in the past you are affirming that
  • 34:06
  • crime and the victims always understand that the victims never get that one wrong right or the intended victims so
  • 34:14
  • in in this war Russia Begins the war by reaffirming a memory law which makes
  • 34:21
  • a crime in Russia to recall that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies in 1939.
  • 34:27
  • um thereby exporting any possible naziness to other people during the course of the war
  • 34:34
  • um Russia has destroyed monuments to the halodomor which is the mass political
  • 34:40
  • famine in Ukraine of 1932 and 1933. the way that the Russians discussed that
  • 34:47
  • political famine while taking down the monuments is very interesting because what they say is there was no intention there
  • 34:53
  • it was just nature there was a famine maybe there were some administrative mistakes
  • 34:59
  • and during the very days that they take down the monuments they are also deliberately trying to destroy Ukrainian
  • 35:06
  • water supply and Ukrainian power supply and of course once you do that anything that happens afterwards it's just nature
  • 35:13
  • it's just nature there was no intention there it was just nature taking its course just like it did in 1932 and 1933
  • 35:20
  • when four million ukrainians starved to death right so the way that you talk
  • 35:25
  • about specific mass killings in the past is also a revelatory of specific
  • 35:32
  • intentions in the present the third kind of language that helps us
  • 35:37
  • to identify intent could be called dehumanizing language and there's a very specific way in which
  • 35:44
  • Putin claims that ukrainians don't exist so the colonial bit is they're not there they're not a state they're not a nation
  • 35:50
  • but there's a very specific way and it's going to be familiar I think to Scholars of the Holocaust that Putin talks about
  • 35:56
  • ukrainians not existing they don't exist because the people who claim to be
  • 36:02
  • ukrainians are not really from here they're not really attached to the land
  • 36:09
  • they are alienated from the soil the people who call themselves ukrainians
  • 36:14
  • who mistakenly believe themselves to be ukrainians and it's a mistake because there's no such thing as Ukraine or
  • 36:19
  • ukrainians these people have been seduced by habsburgs or Germans or poles
  • 36:28
  • or the European Union or the Americans or the Jews they've been seduced by some
  • 36:35
  • Outsider and that is where the sense of ukrainian-ness comes from they misunderstand themselves they have false
  • 36:41
  • consciousness they don't know who they are they have ideas which come from the
  • 36:48
  • outside and that makes them very dangerous no there is a there is an echo here of
  • 36:56
  • Hitler's version of the Jews which is that they don't they're not attached to the land they come from outside they
  • 37:03
  • don't have a real Homeland they don't belong here and as with the logic of the
  • 37:08
  • Jews so with the logic of the ukrainians as Putin sees them where do they belong then
  • 37:14
  • where do they belong they belong nowhere they belong nowhere
  • 37:20
  • and this kind of logic where you say that the people I'm talking about only
  • 37:25
  • exist because of an alien threat that is the source of their existence the source
  • 37:31
  • of their existence is the Habsburg polish German EU American Jewish whatever it might be foreign threat the
  • 37:37
  • only there they are only instantiate themselves as as a foreign threat
  • 37:43
  • um that means that we have to destroy the top level of society and that was in
  • 37:49
  • fact the Russian war plan the Russian war plan in the very beginning was genocidal specifically in
  • 37:55
  • the intent to of killing and rounding up the elite ukrainians the people who were
  • 38:01
  • thought to be the ones who made who who ran everything and the idea of course was that there were not that many of
  • 38:06
  • these people and it would be relatively easy to do right this is what Putin meant when he talked about
  • 38:12
  • de-ukreanization that we can just wipe clear the top of society and then the rest of the happy masses
  • 38:19
  • who do know who they are and who are attached to the land and so on they will remember that their Russians and
  • 38:24
  • everything will spring back into a natural reality this is what Russian
  • 38:29
  • propaganda said at the time STI which is a very popular official tabloid published accidentally
  • 38:37
  • um not long after the war started a long essay about about the Russian Victory
  • 38:42
  • it was a tech texts which had been prepared on the assumption that Russia would win the war in three days an
  • 38:47
  • assumption which was widely shared not just in Moscow
  • 38:52
  • um and what what this text which was accidentally published said is that we have destroyed the top level the aliens
  • 38:58
  • the elites and the happy Ukrainian masses who were attached to the land or joyfully joining this larger Russian
  • 39:04
  • state right the genocidal logic was spelled out absolutely absolutely clearly
  • 39:10
  • the fourth Criterion the fourth way to interpret some of this language is what I would call the the narcissistic
  • 39:19
  • um I would call it the gerardian but that's really obscure um the what I mean by the narcissistic
  • 39:25
  • is you don't know who you are until you look at someone else so it's
  • 39:33
  • all genocide is all about you and it's all about your need for self definition
  • 39:38
  • and this may seem rather harsh but it is quite possible to Define yourself in
  • 39:44
  • opposition to others and perpetrating a genocide is a way of defining yourself
  • 39:51
  • when when Putin says that he's carrying out de-ukreanization or denotification or
  • 39:58
  • desatonization which I'll I'll return to that later it's a fruitful term
  • 40:04
  • um what he is saying is that we Russians exist insofar as we're carrying out this
  • 40:11
  • project of correcting some other people or destroying some other people in none
  • 40:16
  • of these terms and indeed in none of this war can one find the language about what Russia
  • 40:23
  • is there's been a lot of head waving and like hand wranging about what is Ukraine
  • 40:29
  • I think there are some pretty easy answers to that but what's really in doubt during this
  • 40:35
  • war on the basis of official Russian statements is what is Russia
  • 40:41
  • what's the Russian future what are Russian purposes during this war the definition of Russia has been narrowed
  • 40:48
  • by the Russian leadership itself to the project of destroying Ukraine
  • 40:54
  • so this is what I mean by the narcissism that we need the genocide is necessary because it teaches us who we are and you
  • 41:02
  • can't take it away from us for that reason this is of course also what Scholars of
  • 41:07
  • fascism would call A A politics of us and them and I'm going to return to that theme we know who we are when we destroy
  • 41:14
  • someone else when we name the enemy as Carl Schmidt put it politics beat Carl
  • 41:19
  • Schmidt the most famous and the most talented Nazi legal theorist politics begins when we name the enemy we can
  • 41:27
  • name him Satan we can name him Nazi it doesn't really matter we name the other in some firm way and then we aim to
  • 41:34
  • destroy the other and that's how politics begins if you're the leading Nazi legal theorist that's how politics begins and
  • 41:41
  • that's not an idle reference because the the 1948 genocide convention was designed to
  • 41:49
  • Anchor and restrengthen another kind of legal tradition right the Nazi legal
  • 41:55
  • tradition was very real and very powerful and very persuasive in its context and in its time and the
  • 42:00
  • convention that we're talking about from 1948 just a few years after the war was meant to do something entirely different
  • 42:07
  • the fifth kind of of contextual argument of contextualization is what I would
  • 42:13
  • call the the the escalatory and again this will be familiar to
  • 42:18
  • Scholars of the Holocaust and to others the when when Hitler in late 1941 and
  • 42:24
  • early 1942 made a whole cluster of statements about the necessity of Exterminating all of the Jews of
  • 42:31
  • resolving the Jewish question once and for all the overall context was the defeat the the coming defeat of the
  • 42:37
  • Vermont and in particular the alliance between the British the Americans and the Soviets which Hitler argued could
  • 42:45
  • only be the work of the Jews it's so improbable how could the capitalists the Communists Wall Street Fleet Street the Kremlin how
  • 42:52
  • could they all be together it's because of the Jews says Hitler there is there is something slightly
  • 42:58
  • similar going on in the way that Russian officials describe Ukraine
  • 43:05
  • we we weren't able to defeat them right away and what does that mean it confirms what
  • 43:11
  • we said before it just proves that these ukrainians are agents of international Powers because look the international
  • 43:18
  • Powers have hastened to help them and that only proves that they're not really ukrainians but agents of international
  • 43:25
  • powers and therefore we are all the more correct in seeking to destroy them
  • 43:32
  • there's another escalatory logic which goes like this we thought in the beginning we could win this war by killing the top level of
  • 43:39
  • Ukrainian Society it turns out that there are more of these self-conscious ukrainians than we
  • 43:44
  • thought that does not lead us to question our initial assumption
  • 43:50
  • instead it simply means that we have to kill more ukrainians and that by the way is what Pavel gubarov the soldier that I
  • 43:57
  • quoted earlier specifically meant when he said we'll kill one million we'll kill 5 million
  • 44:04
  • we'll obliterate them all what he meant was the more people there are who continue to say they're
  • 44:10
  • ukrainians the more of them we will have to kill so there are more than you think but you
  • 44:16
  • don't adjust your assumptions you just continue to kill or you kill more people
  • 44:22
  • these assumptions and here I'm going to get into some of the deeper parts of the argument the assumptions are and this is
  • 44:27
  • my sixth way of interpreting the assumptions are metaphysical that reality is not really what it seems
  • 44:36
  • to be um I mean we've already gone pretty far with this with the idea that Ukraine isn't a state and Ukraine is not a
  • 44:42
  • nation but there is a kind of alternative reality which not everyone can see and again here you find some interesting
  • 44:48
  • Nazi themes like the idea that Jews spread mental illness all right the Jews
  • 44:55
  • are the cause of mental of mental illness a frequent argument in Russian propaganda is that the ukrainians are
  • 45:01
  • Russians who are mentally ill um and can only be cured of this mental
  • 45:07
  • illness by the application of of violence um they do not know who they are which
  • 45:13
  • of course is an imperial claim if I say you do not know who you are right I'm asserting my my power to Define Who You
  • 45:20
  • Are but alongside the mental illness idea there's there's a related idea which has
  • 45:26
  • a quasi-religious source and that is the idea that the ukrainians are possessed
  • 45:32
  • by Sate now I say that and some of you chuckle um but this is actually a fairly
  • 45:39
  • mainstream argument um gubarov who I quoted before who was
  • 45:45
  • who appeared by the way in front of millions and millions of people saying this when he said we'll kill one million
  • 45:50
  • five million obliterate them all the justification that he gave was that the
  • 45:55
  • ukrainians are possessed by Satan and that is the reason why they don't
  • 46:00
  • know their Russians and so we can try to exercise Satan but if we fail we then
  • 46:07
  • have no choice but to kill them that's what that's what he said you
  • 46:12
  • might think this is some kind of outlier as an argument but it's not it's actually rather mainstream
  • 46:19
  • I admit it didn't fit into all those arguments about how Putin is really a rational technocrat that we heard for a
  • 46:24
  • long time but in Putin's own discussions about Ukraine for 10 years
  • 46:30
  • there has been this idea that Russia and Ukraine were United by God
  • 46:37
  • and therefore anyone who challenges this connection must be on the other side
  • 46:44
  • Putin said when he visited Kyo for the last time in 2013 that Ukraine and Russia were connected as a matter of
  • 46:51
  • God's will in his historical discussions of Ukraine I hesitate to use the word historical
  • 46:57
  • but in his discussions of the Ukrainian past he repeatedly makes the argument
  • 47:02
  • that Russia and Ukraine must be together forever because of a baptism which took
  • 47:07
  • place in the year 988. now as a historian this pains me and it forces me
  • 47:13
  • into long explanations about how in the year 988 there weren't really modern Nations and the person who was baptized
  • 47:20
  • maybe the person who was baptized was a Scandinavian warlord who was from a clan
  • 47:26
  • that was fresh off a career in slave trading and so on and so forth but I don't want to be forced into that now
  • 47:31
  • the point that I want to make about this is slightly different which is that this the appeal to baptism as a ritual of
  • 47:39
  • cleansing which determines who is always right forever is what is what matters
  • 47:46
  • here the idea is that it's not that Russians go to church which by the way statistically speaking they don't
  • 47:52
  • whereas statistically speaking ukrainians do which is like the 75th irony in all of this
  • 47:58
  • um the the the the point is that when you make this kind of Claim about Russia
  • 48:03
  • and Associate it with eternal Purity what you're saying is that the other side is Satanist and when I say what
  • 48:10
  • you're saying I'm not I'm not I'm not extracting this logic myself this is deep in the thinking of the most
  • 48:17
  • important Russian Christian fascist thinker a man called divanilin who Putin has been citing regularly for more than
  • 48:24
  • a decade who he cited most recently on September 30th during his speech about
  • 48:30
  • annexation it is deep in Russian media culture um solovil who's perhaps the most
  • 48:36
  • important television propagandist a couple of weeks ago at the end of his program said what are we fighting against we're fighting against Satanism
  • 48:45
  • um a member of the security Council of Russia which is the highest organ of the Russian State reported on in toss of all
  • 48:53
  • places and those of you who are old Soviet hands and remember what toss used to be you know this will be all the more
  • 48:58
  • extraordinary but toss reported um yesterday I think it was that a member of the security Council of Russia
  • 49:05
  • has has assigned um has defined the task of the Russian army in Ukraine as
  • 49:10
  • desatonization desatonization
  • 49:15
  • um the same or the same description of the war was echoed by ramzan kadirov who is the the leader of chechnya in Russia
  • 49:22
  • and one of the most important political figures in Russia who also said that the problem in Ukraine is Satanism
  • 49:29
  • um and followed that up with the claim that all of the Ukrainian cities have to be destroyed
  • 49:35
  • so that's the metaphysic and the metaphysic there's a word for this metaphysic which is a familiar word
  • 49:41
  • that is a that is a fascist metaphysic so one doesn't have to have fascism to
  • 49:46
  • have genocide there can be genocide without fascism but part of the interpretive context
  • 49:52
  • here is I'm afraid fascism um those of you who work on Russia or on
  • 49:58
  • fascism or on the Holocaust or on the Jews will of course know perfectly well what the reference to Satan is all about
  • 50:05
  • and who is meant in that reference to Satan um specifically in the tradition of
  • 50:11
  • Russian anti-Semitism but also in in in um in in deschtoma and in all visual
  • 50:19
  • Nazi propaganda the association of Satan with the Jew is front and center
  • 50:25
  • um to say that our our mission is desatonization in describing a country whose president is Jewish is a resonance
  • 50:33
  • which no one at least in that part of the world is going to miss
  • 50:38
  • um but this this metaphysic is also fascist in a deeper way which speaks to
  • 50:45
  • a tradition of Christian fascism which is um interesting intellectually it
  • 50:50
  • appears in Romania it also appears in in in Russia and in this in this tradition which as
  • 50:56
  • I've already said Putin reads and and cites the idea is that the world has
  • 51:02
  • been fragmented the world is spoiled right
  • 51:07
  • and there's only one way to heal this and what does spoiled mean spoiled means there are facts
  • 51:14
  • and there are values and you can't bring everything together into one beautiful whole right
  • 51:20
  • Russia's mission as the only unspoiled country is to bring the world back to a kind of
  • 51:27
  • totality this is what this fascist tradition says and what this means in practice and
  • 51:33
  • you'll see immediately the relevance for Russian practice and especially propaganda in this what this means in practice is that no matter what Russia
  • 51:39
  • seems to be doing it's good or at least forgivable because it's part of this mission to restore the
  • 51:46
  • entire world right another thing that which is which Miss which this which this means is that since there's no such
  • 51:52
  • thing as true it's fine to lie right and so this this post this thing about
  • 51:57
  • Russia Today which we describe I think perfectly correctly as post-modern um this idea the weaponization of the
  • 52:04
  • idea that there is no truth actually has another origin which is not post-modern at all
  • 52:09
  • um which is which is this fascist view that that there is there is no truth to begin with and therefore if you're lying
  • 52:15
  • in the service of Russia what you're doing is actually good and I'll repeat something I said earlier because I think it's important in this
  • 52:22
  • kind of argument Russia is always innocent right it's not just that Russia is Forgiven Russia is always innocent
  • 52:28
  • because Russia is the only hope for the restoration of the world and once you believe that then a whole lot of other
  • 52:34
  • things start to fall into place number eight is replacement Theory
  • 52:41
  • so replacement theory is I mentioned this because it's a present day Theory um which is very well known in the in
  • 52:48
  • the far right in this country and elsewhere President Putin is a replacement theorist he worries aloud and often that
  • 52:55
  • his race is going to be overwhelmed by the numbers of non-russians and non-orthodox and so on
  • 53:00
  • um in the in the telegram channels of the mercenary group Wagner Wagner is
  • 53:06
  • named Wagner by the way because the person who named it thinks that thought that Hitler's favorite composer was Wagner but at this point the talk you
  • 53:12
  • will not be surprised by that um the um the in the telegram channels of the Wagner mercenaries replacement
  • 53:19
  • Theory talk is ubiquitous in the practice of this war there is in
  • 53:25
  • fact an attempt to undo what fascists call replacement
  • 53:30
  • it is not just as I said before that a Russian war aim is the kidnapping amas
  • 53:36
  • of fertile Ukrainian women and Ukrainian children who can be assimilated into Russia
  • 53:42
  • right that is of course to undo the notion that there aren't enough Russians
  • 53:47
  • by taking white people who you can call Russian it is also the case simultaneously that
  • 53:54
  • Russia in hugely disproportionate numbers sends the young men of its own indigenous groups from the Caucasus and
  • 54:01
  • from Asia to die in Ukraine so the attempt to undo what they see as replacement goes in both directions and
  • 54:09
  • you could also point out that the genocidal intent here is not directed only at ukrainians if the young men from
  • 54:15
  • these what are already often very small groups are being sent to die in disproportionate numbers this will
  • 54:21
  • affect the future of those groups specifically I mean all these cases are sad but one that I find specifically sad
  • 54:27
  • is the case of the Crimean tatars who were targeted for complete ethnic cleansing under Stalin
  • 54:33
  • after 1991 many of them made their way back or rather the children the grandchildren made their way back to
  • 54:39
  • what was then Ukrainian Crimea Crimea was then invaded by Russia in 2014 and the Crimean tatars lost all of
  • 54:47
  • the rights they enjoyed in the Ukrainian State and were suffered to and were subject to specific forms of Oppression
  • 54:52
  • which now after this invasion in 2022 include being mobilized to go and die in
  • 54:57
  • Ukraine right so the the specific attack on the indigenous males of the
  • 55:03
  • non-russian nationalities I think is also an example of the of the operationalism of operationalization of
  • 55:09
  • replacement Theory number nine and here I'm I'm coming to enclose is the idea of
  • 55:17
  • exceptionalism that the rules don't apply to us
  • 55:22
  • so uh that you might say that this is a genocide but who made the rules anyway
  • 55:31
  • that's a quotation from Mr Putin's speech of September 30th
  • 55:36
  • who made the rules anyway who made those rules the rules do not
  • 55:42
  • apply to Russia because Russia is a millennial civilization that is also a
  • 55:47
  • quotation from that speech now this kind of talk is consistent with
  • 55:55
  • the Nazi legal Theory which I referred to earlier which says that law is not
  • 56:00
  • about Universal rules um law oh this is a different point same theorist Carl Schmidt
  • 56:07
  • Carl Schmidt says power begins from the ability to make an exception right he who can make an
  • 56:15
  • exception is he who rules says Carl Schmidt so what is Putin doing when he stands up in September 30th and says
  • 56:21
  • what are these rules anyway and who made them and they don't apply to us because that we're a millennial civilization
  • 56:28
  • he's trying to make an exception and that kind of exceptionalism opens the
  • 56:33
  • way for the perpetration of genocide it's also Imperial it's also fascistic fascistic it's also narcissistic but
  • 56:40
  • it's but it's it's exceptionalism because the genocide convention is of course a rule
  • 56:46
  • so in conclusion what I want to say I mean first of all I hope that I've made the case that both parts of the genocide
  • 56:53
  • convention are should be seen as applying here that the we can see the intention not because we can see into
  • 57:00
  • somebody's mind because we can't not because there's a confessional letter from the ruler which there isn't and
  • 57:05
  • there never has been never will be but because with the help of historical and other forms of interpretation we can
  • 57:11
  • make reasonable arguments about what is actually intended I hope also that I've made the case that
  • 57:16
  • the facts on the ground in Ukraine correspond to all of the forums of genocidal crimes as defined in the
  • 57:23
  • convention if we are resisting all of this um I I suspect that it's because there's
  • 57:30
  • just too much evidence and that we have become jaded or one
  • 57:36
  • final thought if we are resisting this it might be because we're saying to ourselves at some level well
  • 57:43
  • it's not the Holocaust isn't it it's not it's not the Holocaust and of course it isn't but I think it's
  • 57:51
  • very important as we speak about in sequence the Holocaust genocide and human rights
  • 57:58
  • to think of the Holocaust not as a tool of forgetting but as a tool of remembrance not as a
  • 58:05
  • way of dismissing other events but as a way of helping to see other events as they take place
  • 58:11
  • if we place the Holocaust outside of History by saying that it's Unique or
  • 58:17
  • special then what we're doing is we're trying to demonstrate our own virtue
  • 58:24
  • we're virtuous because we we say that the Holocaust is outside of History but that's the opposite of virtuous
  • 58:30
  • because once we say the Holocaust is outside of History what we're really doing is we're saying nothing's like it
  • 58:37
  • there's no genocide going on right now and therefore I'm not responsible and in that way in a few quick
  • 58:45
  • psychologically appealing bits of reasoning um we we find ourselves ignoring the
  • 58:51
  • genocides that happen before our eyes history is meant I think to help us with this to resist these kinds of
  • 58:56
  • Temptations history is the search for patterns it's a search for the telling detail the search for self-awareness
  • 59:04
  • it's the knowledge that allows us to see or not see and then once we see then we know that we're doing
  • 59:11
  • one way or another on one side or another we're doing like the Holocaust the category of
  • 59:17
  • genocide can offer us ways out we can say
  • 59:23
  • surely not now surely not here surely not on my watch
  • 59:29
  • surely the intention is not clear surely the actions are insufficient
  • 59:34
  • but in this case everything is absolutely clear and sufficient and has been from the
  • 59:40
  • beginning All That Remains Is Us and what we do next
  • 59:50
  • they should not exist at all we should execute them by firing squad
  • 59:55
  • we will drive the children into the Raging River we will throw the children into burning wooden huts
  • 1:00:01
  • we will kill one million we will kill 5 million we will obliterate them all
  • 1:00:07
  • thank you [Applause]
  • 1:00:42
  • thank you I'm sure there are a lot of questions after such a stimulating talk so again
  • 1:00:48
  • if you have a question you're more than welcome to ask it there are pieces of paper index cards going around that will
  • 1:00:55
  • help us to collect the questions and then I'm happy to Repose them for you to
  • 1:01:01
  • Professor Snyder so um if you have anything you'd like to share please take a moment there's a
  • 1:01:06
  • couple of ushers and so forth going around to see some questions up in the air here be happy to collect them and
  • 1:01:13
  • then and then pose them for you and maybe in the interim I'll ask a
  • 1:01:19
  • question or two uh just to get us started uh had a lot of thoughts and really felt very stimulated by what you
  • 1:01:25
  • presented here um I have I have to confess some historians questions which maybe might
  • 1:01:32
  • take you into that down that pathway that you didn't the weeds you were trying to avoid but
  • 1:01:38
  • we do have a number of students here who are students of History both in Imperial
  • 1:01:44
  • Russia and also in the history of the Soviet Union and one thing that I that
  • 1:01:49
  • almost anyone paying attention noticed of course is the way that history is being leveraged and weaponized
  • 1:01:57
  • in order to justify this war of course as you said you hesitate to use the word
  • 1:02:03
  • history because it is very selective it's relying on historical Amnesia in
  • 1:02:09
  • order to Rally support for this war but I wonder just to get us started if you might talk a little bit about two of the
  • 1:02:17
  • larger narratives that are being leveraged one is the sort of Russian World uruzuki Mir concept and then as
  • 1:02:25
  • the second is the mythology of the Great Patriotic War and maybe more specifically to some of the themes you
  • 1:02:31
  • were raising here uh one of I think you said 77 ironies or 76 this might be the
  • 1:02:37
  • 78th the relationship between desatanization and denotsification in
  • 1:02:43
  • the in the discourse that's being leveraged as a justification for the war maybe I'll just start with that and
  • 1:02:49
  • we'll we'll take some of your questions um foreign
  • 1:02:57
  • thank you for that and I'm I'm really happy to talk about the history um the the or the the relationship
  • 1:03:03
  • between the history and the political use of the past my my own feeling about
  • 1:03:09
  • this is that we have to make sure we say something about the history before we say what other people are doing with it
  • 1:03:15
  • because if we don't then we run the risk that every all everyone remembers is what other people are doing with it it
  • 1:03:21
  • actually takes a lot of work like I had these conversations with a colleague that I really admired called Tony jutt
  • 1:03:27
  • and we did a book together um which was a talking book and one of the chapters was about history and memory and Tony referred to history as
  • 1:03:35
  • the weak sister and there's something in that that you know history generally gets defeated by memory and we're we
  • 1:03:42
  • takes a lot of work like the kind of work that I was trying to do today to get to to get out from under the kinds
  • 1:03:48
  • of psychological appeals and simplifications that political memory memory makes so without with that long
  • 1:03:54
  • prologue um let me I'll start with the second world War so the the the myth the the
  • 1:04:02
  • the the the the the story of the second World War in Russia Today
  • 1:04:08
  • is largely a result of a cult of the great Fatherland War as it's called
  • 1:04:14
  • which was created in began in late 60s but really in the 1970s under Leonid
  • 1:04:20
  • Brezhnev which is an important move in the history of the Soviet Union because it shifted the promise of the Soviet
  • 1:04:27
  • Union from the future to the Past the the communism was a promise of a
  • 1:04:32
  • transformation in the future but as after the staliness transformation was complete and
  • 1:04:38
  • socialism didn't arrive and you know Harmony was not achieved and an economic growth slowed down and social
  • 1:04:44
  • mobilization slowed down as my teacher Tom Simons once taught me in that situation bresnov I think very
  • 1:04:52
  • intelligently pivoted to the past and the second world war and at a time when
  • 1:04:57
  • of course the event itself was already a quarter Century or more in the past a quote was created in which
  • 1:05:05
  • the Soviets or the Russians were innocent and Victorious which is a
  • 1:05:12
  • wonderful combination right innocent and Victorious and maybe Victorious because
  • 1:05:17
  • innocent or maybe innocent because Victorious but innocent and Victorious
  • 1:05:22
  • and this was very this worked in the Soviet Union under communism because it
  • 1:05:28
  • allowed it allowed Soviet leaders to blur Nazi Germany into the larger concept of fascism and fascism into the
  • 1:05:34
  • larger concept of the West and therefore NATO and the Americans and so on could be the same kind of Western enemy that
  • 1:05:40
  • the Germans were in 1941. but it also began this pattern and I'm glad you
  • 1:05:46
  • asked this question because it's a very important it's very important to what's happening now it began this pattern of saying that everything that Russians did
  • 1:05:52
  • during the second world war was fine hence the memory law today which
  • 1:05:58
  • criminalizes talking about the molotov rib and Trope act because of course the second world war as it actually began in
  • 1:06:04
  • Europe in 1939 began with a Soviet German Alliance and it's not really very
  • 1:06:10
  • clear how it could have begun without that Soviet German Alliance but the
  • 1:06:15
  • problem with the Soviet German Alliance of course is that it really calls into question the idea that Russians or Soviets were always innocent the entire
  • 1:06:22
  • time and that innocence and the righteousness of struggle is so very important now that innocence and
  • 1:06:27
  • righteousness has to be taken as an absolute Axiom because then it allows you to invade
  • 1:06:35
  • Ukraine and say that all you're doing is replaying the second world war right which is one of the things that they're
  • 1:06:41
  • saying they're saying that you so when they say I'm getting into the denotification but when they say we're invading Ukraine and denotifying what
  • 1:06:49
  • they're doing is they're saying we're replaying the second world war and because we're always the good guys
  • 1:06:55
  • the other side must be the bad guys and therefore they must be the Nazis and
  • 1:07:01
  • no this is not an empirical claim it's not really about how many you know it's
  • 1:07:07
  • like people in the west work really hard to say okay look there were in fact you know the Ukrainian far right got 1.5
  • 1:07:13
  • percent of the elections and that must be the people the Russians are talking about they must be really concerned about the Russians must really be
  • 1:07:19
  • concerned about azov they have this deep concern about fascism no it's not an empirical claim at all it's an us them
  • 1:07:26
  • claim we are always innocent therefore they are the Nazis and this is important that's actually really important because
  • 1:07:32
  • people get all caught up on the idea that actually Russia might be concerned about there being Nazis no they're not
  • 1:07:38
  • concerned about there be Nazis in the world if they were there wouldn't be so many Nazis in Russia what they're concerned about is a politics of us and
  • 1:07:45
  • them right and that's a serious point they're an awful lot of Nazis fighting on the Russian side right now they're
  • 1:07:52
  • concerned about a politics of us and them in which they are permanently innocent the other side is permanently guilty and the politics of Us and Them
  • 1:07:58
  • is itself fascist but when they when they say when they make the them the
  • 1:08:04
  • Nazis we get confused for days months weeks years right like that move of
  • 1:08:11
  • saying the them is the Nazis because we try to act in good faith and let's listen to both sides and maybe they
  • 1:08:17
  • really are concerned about the Nazis and like let's think about this for a long time right that that confuses the whole
  • 1:08:22
  • issue of what they're really doing which is they're taking from this traditional idea of innocence and the politics of us and them I'm going to stop there because
  • 1:08:28
  • I talk for too long and I know there are a lot of questions there are indeed a lot of questions so thank you for that I appreciate it um very much
  • 1:08:36
  • um especially the the distinction you started off with um there are quite a few questions I'm just sorting through some of them so
  • 1:08:41
  • that I sort of remove a couple of the duplicates but maybe I'll just start uh with this one which
  • 1:08:48
  • um you already touched on a bit but would be is a request for elaboration and that is sort of what is at stake
  • 1:08:54
  • historically culturally and legally enabling in labeling Russian action as
  • 1:08:59
  • genocide in other words what will the label allow and what is not already allowed
  • 1:09:05
  • so I have to admit that my like my aims here are really simple
  • 1:09:11
  • I don't I don't like people saying that it's not genocide because we can't prosecute it that doesn't make any sense
  • 1:09:17
  • to me it seems to me to be a Dodge I mean a crime can be committed and the fact that you can't prosecute it doesn't
  • 1:09:23
  • mean that it's not a crime and if it's a crime I mean if the crime is like shoplifting some apricots okay but if
  • 1:09:30
  • the crime is genocide then the fact that we can't prosecute it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be
  • 1:09:35
  • interested in it so I really I don't I don't like where we are in this discussion because where we are in the
  • 1:09:41
  • discussion is basically yeah it looks like genocide but we can't prosecute it
  • 1:09:47
  • because we're you know we're not going to occupy Moscow um you know there isn't jurisdiction so
  • 1:09:52
  • therefore let's not talk about genocide I don't like that I think that Muddy's the issue of what's actually happening
  • 1:09:58
  • in the world and the the second so so my my purpose is just to take genocide here
  • 1:10:03
  • as a descriptive concept and argue that it is genocide um what is at stake I'm I all I want is
  • 1:10:10
  • a is a richer understanding of the situation because I think genocide is a is a word that functions in society and
  • 1:10:16
  • in politics and when we deny that it's genocide because we can't prosecute it or slightly more sophisticatedly we
  • 1:10:23
  • denies genocide because we say we can't be sure about the intent I think that that denial or that hedging is moving us
  • 1:10:30
  • away from seeing what's actually happening so for for me the stakes are let's see what's actually happening as I
  • 1:10:36
  • said in the talk I also think it's very important to to name things by name while they're happening because you can't remember what you never saw in the
  • 1:10:44
  • first place and whether or not this can be prosecuted or not later on I think this kind of discussion will help get
  • 1:10:50
  • people to think about how we should be reacting in other ways because after all prosecution you know that's not how that
  • 1:10:56
  • that's prosecution is not the only way to stop a genocide right one another way is to help the victim
  • 1:11:03
  • help the victim give weapons
  • 1:11:09
  • sorry there's some of the first two we already didn't hear me so no it's a serious point though
  • 1:11:14
  • another way to react to an ongoing genocide if you can is to help the victim and one of the things which is
  • 1:11:20
  • unusual about the present situation is that helping the victim is actually possible that isn't always possible but
  • 1:11:26
  • it is possible in this case yes and we had a number of questions uh
  • 1:11:32
  • from from folks in the room about what what personally can be done to help both
  • 1:11:38
  • what can be done by American citizens and then an additional question asking you if you could give a critique a
  • 1:11:45
  • critique rather of the present American response oh I mean as far as Citizens go
  • 1:11:56
  • it's we're we're in this I think weirdly luxurious position
  • 1:12:01
  • if we recognize what's going on we can spend 15 seconds
  • 1:12:06
  • on the internet and do something about it um that in that sense we're in a very
  • 1:12:12
  • privileged position helping other victims of other ongoing genocides past and present was not this easy but right
  • 1:12:19
  • now there are a lot of ukrainians who are going to have trouble with heating over the winter soldiers and civilians
  • 1:12:24
  • we can go on the internet we can go to to razom r-a-z-o-n or one of any other many ngos
  • 1:12:31
  • and we can give a hundred dollars and we can give tents or sweaters or gloves
  • 1:12:37
  • that's meaningful um it's we're actually in a very privileged situation where we can all do
  • 1:12:43
  • something which is to give some a little tiny bit of our wealth to what is in fact an incredibly poor country that's
  • 1:12:50
  • by the way a point which is very often forgotten a lot of folks look at Ukraine and they say well that's Europe and
  • 1:12:55
  • they're white people and therefore this must be a rich country but it's not it's actually I mean respectfully to the
  • 1:13:01
  • ukrainians here it's not a rich country it's a country it's it's a very small economy the GDP per capita is about the
  • 1:13:08
  • same as Algeria um and so in giving what might seem to you to be a small amount of help you can actually make a considerable difference
  • 1:13:15
  • so give money um there are all kinds of organized ways to to do this you can do it through
  • 1:13:20
  • razon um if you look on my sub stack page there are like there are a number of times I'll write another one because of
  • 1:13:27
  • this question where I list ways you can give money on my Twitter feed I announced like some of the ways that you can give money and as Citizens we can
  • 1:13:34
  • talk about the moral Stakes of this which is part of why I'm giving this kind of talk we can talk about the moral
  • 1:13:39
  • Stakes of this instead of all pretending to be geopoliticians um and all caring about Putin's like
  • 1:13:45
  • what's inside Putin's mind which I find to be a strange honestly a strange object of interest but it's kind of the
  • 1:13:51
  • American way like maybe his feelings are hurt um we could we could uh
  • 1:13:56
  • their feelings are always hurt that's what it means to be a tyrant you're very sensitive
  • 1:14:03
  • no it's true like everyone always asks like how can we make how can we make men emotionally sensitive and the answer is
  • 1:14:08
  • you just give them all the power and suddenly they become incredibly sensitive to pretty much everything
  • 1:14:14
  • um and so and then we get caught up in this fascination with the Tyrant like oh wow how is he feeling today and like oh
  • 1:14:20
  • maybe we should do something to make him feel better and how about an off ramp or you know maybe some flowers
  • 1:14:26
  • um or maybe let's agree a little bit that ukrainians don't exist right it's all dangerous that way of
  • 1:14:32
  • thinking um so so so so we can talk about the moral Stakes of this we can and we can
  • 1:14:38
  • we can give money and we can tell our elected representatives that we think the
  • 1:14:43
  • Ukrainian Army should be helped so that this is working in quickly because that's that's the way that that is the
  • 1:14:48
  • op I mean sometimes there are a lot of folks especially on the left who don't you know don't like to see that it might
  • 1:14:54
  • be as simple as winning a war but where ukrainians deoccupy territory the torture stops and the deportation stops
  • 1:15:01
  • in the execution stop where they deoccupy territory and our country is in a position to help them deoccupy
  • 1:15:07
  • territory and if I can just add two for those of you who are interested in helping we do
  • 1:15:13
  • have a number of initiatives here at bu which are organized currently through the center on this for the study of
  • 1:15:19
  • Europe so if you go to that webpage as well you can see a variety of ways to
  • 1:15:24
  • donate to help out we've as a community here organized to send tourniquets to
  • 1:15:30
  • send other supplies to send money to provide housing to connect with Scholars and students who are refugees there's a
  • 1:15:37
  • number of resources there so I just wanted to put in a plug for some local efforts very apropos of what you were
  • 1:15:43
  • just saying Professor Snyder in terms of sort of the American approach we have a related sort of follow-up question
  • 1:15:50
  • um which is as follows as Americans how do we recognize Putin's evil without falling into very comfortable and
  • 1:15:57
  • familiar Cold War binaryism do you see a Way Beyond yeah I mean I think genocide's always
  • 1:16:05
  • bad and I think invading countries without provocation is always bad
  • 1:16:11
  • so I think it was wrong for America to invade Iraq
  • 1:16:18
  • I don't see the logical issue here I mean I think if we take a standard principle and then we just apply it
  • 1:16:25
  • consistently we don't actually have problems so I don't I really
  • 1:16:31
  • I I mean I take the point because I you know I spoke about exceptionalism at the end and like we are the capital of
  • 1:16:37
  • exceptionalism like we have so much exceptionalism we try to export it to everybody else um and we have our own Imperial Wars and
  • 1:16:44
  • our own Imperial traditions and we have our own under investigated history of genocidal Wars in Latin America I think
  • 1:16:50
  • the answer is that like if you care about these things in principle like if you care about imperialism in principle and you care about genocide in principle
  • 1:16:56
  • then you always care about them and you don't say well because America did it therefore it's okay I'm not saying that
  • 1:17:02
  • that's the questioner's view I'm just saying that's the way that that's the argument often goes that that like
  • 1:17:08
  • Russia you know sure Russia might be bombing an orphanage but look at you know look at Vietnam yeah you know one
  • 1:17:14
  • should look at Vietnam and one should say well that was bad and this is also bad and we can say so because we have
  • 1:17:20
  • principles and that's why I kind of like that's why I keep returning to the word ethics and that's why you know I'm
  • 1:17:25
  • attracted to the genocide convention because it's not about The Who and the whom it's it's about it's about laying out principles which then we can apply
  • 1:17:31
  • to specific situations so I actually think I mean this is I'm going to be hopeful now I actually think this this
  • 1:17:37
  • Russian war is an opportunity for us to get away from um the to get away from the American Us
  • 1:17:44
  • and Them because the look it's not us it's the ukrainians
  • 1:17:49
  • right we're just helping a little bit and it's us with the Europeans and others the Australians the Japanese it's
  • 1:17:57
  • us with many others helping the ukrainians and to be clear we didn't
  • 1:18:02
  • think that the ukrainians were on our side until eight months ago because none of us had ever heard of them I mean except for like the Specialists and so
  • 1:18:09
  • on but if you'd ask Americans and you know a year ago whether Ukraine was going to be at the center of our
  • 1:18:15
  • attention or like we were no I mean the Ukraine Ukraine has been discovered by the United States here this is my
  • 1:18:22
  • hopeful side it's been discovered by the United States because of basic issues of decency it's not because Americans had
  • 1:18:29
  • some kind of long-standing you know attachment to Ukraine or even like thought that Ukraine was some kind of
  • 1:18:35
  • strategic marker I mean sure there are some Americans who think that but when I you know when when I go to my
  • 1:18:40
  • neighborhood in New Haven and I see the Republicans who have the Ukrainian flags and the Democrats who have the Ukrainian
  • 1:18:46
  • Flags it's it's not because they knew anything about Ukraine a year ago they didn't
  • 1:18:53
  • it's because in both cases they think something has happened which is indecent right and and that's that's kind of what
  • 1:19:00
  • you build on right you build on the sense that this was indecent like that this this is something that is some root level you wouldn't want to have happen
  • 1:19:07
  • and then sure you can apply that that sense of decency to things in America too you can apply it to American mass
  • 1:19:13
  • incarceration you can apply it to a lot of things but it's the sense that something has gone very wrong which
  • 1:19:18
  • motivates I think American Assistance or the American attitude towards towards you crying so that's that's how I see
  • 1:19:24
  • that question yes and answering that you preempted a couple of questions we got about
  • 1:19:29
  • um about Iraq and Afghanistan um which are important questions but I will I will skip asking them since you
  • 1:19:36
  • already addressed them there are a few questions I have to deal with um post-soviet space and looking at a
  • 1:19:43
  • pattern asking you to talk about a pattern of Putin's aggressive policies
  • 1:19:48
  • in the in the former Soviet space with regard to former Soviet republics so one
  • 1:19:54
  • of the questions apropos of your opening about history is a practice of seeing
  • 1:19:59
  • patterns and Discerning patterns the question is can you parse a little bit the relationship between some of Putin's
  • 1:20:06
  • earlier acts of aggression and Invasion vis-a-vis former Soviet republics on the border so whether Georgia or Kyrgyzstan
  • 1:20:13
  • other places chechnya and and Ukraine and what you see is really the key
  • 1:20:18
  • similarities and key differences and then the second question related to that is to what extent do the effects of
  • 1:20:26
  • um sorry let me see if I got this question right
  • 1:20:32
  • to what extent is the effect of this what effect does this war have rather on
  • 1:20:37
  • other post-soviet nations that are also run through autocratic style States
  • 1:20:44
  • um so Belarus is a particular example that's given here Etc all right I'm just going to kind of
  • 1:20:49
  • skate across the question I'm sorry I'm having a little trouble with the handwriting even though I'm a historian I should be able to tackle it but anyway
  • 1:20:55
  • please so on the first question let me just make two points I think that there is a
  • 1:21:02
  • trajectory here which includes places that are not in the post-soviet world I think Syria is very important I don't
  • 1:21:08
  • think you can really understand Ukraine without Syria without what the what it's not just that the Russians are doing
  • 1:21:13
  • many of the same things in Ukraine that they did in Syria and by the way it was very often syrians who in February and
  • 1:21:19
  • March were some of the early pattern recognizers of what was going on um it's it's also that the the impunity
  • 1:21:27
  • of the Russian actions in Syria I think were one of the one of the things that made them think that Ukraine was going
  • 1:21:33
  • to be possible and that was a misjudgment in many ways but I think Syria is an important like maybe the most important or the second most
  • 1:21:40
  • important where the most important would be the first Ukraine invasion of 2014.
  • 1:21:45
  • so we don't have to look elsewhere in the Soviet space if I think that if if if you know Western if if we had been
  • 1:21:52
  • less confused in 2014 and it's a whole other lecture about why we were confused in 2014 but if we were less confused in
  • 1:21:59
  • 2014 and had reacted somewhat like we're reacting now then there wouldn't have been a
  • 1:22:05
  • 2022 so so the fact that Putin got away with invading Ukraine D and he did I
  • 1:22:10
  • mean there were some sanctions and so on but he got he got away with violating you know annexing territory invading the
  • 1:22:16
  • neighboring country and Annex the most fundamentally International Norms were violated and he has basically got away with it I think that's that in Syria are
  • 1:22:24
  • the two most important examples there is an escalating trajectory which includes also um hybrid war against or cyber war
  • 1:22:31
  • against Estonia and the intervention in Georgia but those would be the two points that I would I would emphasize also the impunity of the cyber attacks
  • 1:22:38
  • against the United States in 2016. I think that probably also plays a certain role here I think January 6 plays a
  • 1:22:44
  • certain role um that is to say after that I think he was pretty confident that one more crisis in the U.S will
  • 1:22:51
  • have had it or the Biden Administration will crack you know just a little just knock the bideness ration a little bit and it will and it will crack so I think
  • 1:22:57
  • there's a there's a trajectory but it also involves things beyond the Soviet space and the second question was oh let
  • 1:23:03
  • me just talk about Belarus Belarus is really interesting and I think Ukrainian leaders are are making a mistake in the
  • 1:23:09
  • way that they talk about Belarus if it were not for the fact that that there that there had been Mass opposition to
  • 1:23:16
  • lukashenko two years ago it would be much more likely that the BL Russian army would be intervening in Ukraine now
  • 1:23:22
  • and I think Ukrainian leaders are not taking this officially into account and are not distinguishing clearly enough
  • 1:23:28
  • between the yellow Russian leadership and the blo Russian people um I think that I I think that if this
  • 1:23:34
  • war goes the way I think it's going to go which is that Russia is going to lose that may that may present an opportunity
  • 1:23:41
  • for political change in Belarus as well I think that I think that these events
  • 1:23:46
  • of the last few years Belarus Ukraine Russia are all tied together and the way that it ends up I mean I think chain you
  • 1:23:52
  • know key of Minsk in Moscow are very close right now in the Senate causally close that the outcome of this war will
  • 1:23:59
  • affect Moscow and Minsk and not just the territory of of Ukraine
  • 1:24:04
  • thank you and then we we got a couple of questions um asking um is war essentially genocide and maybe
  • 1:24:11
  • I'll read the wording of one of these questions um as an introduction if genocide is
  • 1:24:16
  • committed when any member of a particular group is killed or even harmed with the intent to destroy even a
  • 1:24:22
  • part of that group wouldn't that mean that nearly every act of violence should be considered genocidal with respect for
  • 1:24:28
  • this to the scale of the Ukrainian case specifically would this quote water down the term why are we applying the term
  • 1:24:35
  • genocide to Ukraine and not to all other acts what is accomplished by colonists a genocide
  • 1:24:41
  • yeah I mean I think I think that the point is well taken that genocide applies to more things than we think it
  • 1:24:47
  • does um but you know that there are clear and less clear cases recently clear cases
  • 1:24:53
  • would involve the rohingya the yazidi you know it happened very recently perhaps not noted Perhaps Perhaps
  • 1:24:58
  • already forgotten um I I I agree with that I agree and you know to some extent at least with the
  • 1:25:04
  • drift of the question that there are more cases of genocide going around than than in general we would like to think
  • 1:25:09
  • and that there's a certain problem with you know as I say this as a historian
  • 1:25:14
  • the Holocaust there's a certain problem with with the Holocaust and genocide as a pairing because then we ask is it not
  • 1:25:21
  • it's not it's not the Holocaust therefore maybe it's not genocide and then we can then rush to the Other Extreme and say well okay well then
  • 1:25:27
  • maybe Everything is Everything is genocide um if if we if we if we go from this if we drop this standard that that doesn't
  • 1:25:34
  • have to be like the Holocaust well then maybe it's anything I think the intention to destroy a group in whole or
  • 1:25:40
  • in part is a is a is a grander sort of standard than just than violence
  • 1:25:45
  • happening to people because there has to be the intention so a war can certainly be fought without the intention of
  • 1:25:52
  • destroying a civilian population in whole or in part that's why I spent a lot of time on intentionality here
  • 1:25:57
  • because again with intentionality you can go two ways you can say as the questioner does you can say well what about any violence maybe that's bad you
  • 1:26:04
  • can also say what about we need to have telepathy and the truth that like the standard has to be somewhere in the
  • 1:26:10
  • middle and I was trying to generate that these kind of the standard that could be somewhere where in the middle between any violence right maybe any violence
  • 1:26:16
  • would be genocide but there are Wars that are prosecuted without the intention of destroying another group that does that does in fact happen
  • 1:26:23
  • routinely so um I'm against War too and War like War
  • 1:26:29
  • itself almost always does more harm to civilians than is anticipated or than is than is remembered I take that point but
  • 1:26:35
  • not every war involves an intention so I did a lot of work trying to show the intention and I think it actually does I
  • 1:26:40
  • think it does require a lot of work like I wouldn't want to go all the way to the other side and say that every you know every invasion is is definitionally
  • 1:26:47
  • genocidal terrific um we have so many questions but I'm being told just time for one
  • 1:26:53
  • more so I'm going to actually let you choose I'll post two questions that are both quick and you can put you on the
  • 1:26:58
  • spot and deciding which one you'd like to answer um so one of the questions is about the role that the Orthodox Church is playing
  • 1:27:05
  • you spoke to about religion um to a degree during your talk but specific question about the role of the Orthodox
  • 1:27:10
  • church and the leveraging of the church's institutional history Office of the patriarch in particular
  • 1:27:16
  • um and then this the second question is in your opinion is there a specific event in the past that triggers Putin
  • 1:27:23
  • and those before him to eliminate Ukraine uh
  • 1:27:30
  • so I'm gonna I'm gonna answer both of course um that's what I was secretly hoping put
  • 1:27:36
  • the pressure on yeah so on the on the so the triggering thing
  • 1:27:42
  • gets kind for me gets a little gets uncomfortably close to the let's talk about Putin psychology and I I hesitate
  • 1:27:49
  • to do that because I think we in this country are massively over invested in
  • 1:27:54
  • Psychology I say this is someone coming from University where the president is is a psychologist so you know hi Peter
  • 1:28:00
  • um the uh but I think we're massively over investigated over invested in psychology as an explanation and I think
  • 1:28:06
  • if you follow the coverage of this war I'm gonna now say something very conservative if all the coverage of this
  • 1:28:11
  • war it's striking how much of it is about what is Putin feeling and what's he going to do on the assumption that
  • 1:28:16
  • what he's going to do is related to what he's feeling so like both we think we know what he's feeling and we associate action with
  • 1:28:23
  • with the feeling and that has tended to block out a number of things but one of them is
  • 1:28:29
  • Battlefield reality so in the commentators on this has got the conservative part in the comment in the
  • 1:28:34
  • commenting on this war we have really really missed the military historians there are just not enough military historians out there writing in the
  • 1:28:41
  • world and the ones that have done so in a prominent way like Lawrence Friedman for example who's outstanding they have
  • 1:28:48
  • tended to say from the beginning I think Lawrence Freeman wrote this wrote a column three or four days in to the war
  • 1:28:53
  • where he said Ukraine is winning Ukraine is going to win the military historians who don't know anything I mean okay Lori
  • 1:29:00
  • Friedman knows something about Russia but it's like it doesn't actually require expertise about Russia or
  • 1:29:05
  • Ukraine or Putin even to look at the battlefield situation and say look we know something about regularities on the
  • 1:29:11
  • battlefield and this war for these reasons is probably going to go this this way so I've I realize I'm answering
  • 1:29:19
  • the question but I'm going to just make a pitch for like old-fashioned military history and why we need more of it
  • 1:29:25
  • because there are still Wars and we need the military historians to talk about the wars they're they're
  • 1:29:32
  • indispensable okay end of conservative pitch but I'm sure there are like provosts out there who are listening to
  • 1:29:38
  • this um the um so so so I I think with with
  • 1:29:43
  • Stalin and Ukraine there was life experience and the life
  • 1:29:48
  • experience was the failure of the Red Army to defeat Poland in the Polish
  • 1:29:54
  • Bolshevik war and in particular um some mistakes that Stalin made on the
  • 1:30:00
  • Ukrainian front of that war and I think in general he lived through the late 19
  • 1:30:05
  • teens and early 1920s with the realization that Ukraine is real um that's something that a lot of the
  • 1:30:11
  • Bolsheviks discovered during the so the period of what we think of as the Russian Civil War but which is actually a multi-sided confrontation which was
  • 1:30:18
  • actually centered in Ukraine they the Bolsheviks understood as a result of that that Ukraine was real and they
  • 1:30:24
  • responded to that in different ways so I do think in Stalin's life there was a moment of actual encounter with Ukraine
  • 1:30:30
  • and Putin's life I don't think so in Putin's life I think it's I think it's highly theoretical and um so I depart
  • 1:30:37
  • from some of my colleagues in that I believe that Putin actually reads books and um I think that you know I think
  • 1:30:43
  • that's I think he reads archival documents too I think that's highly selected and so on I think he reads I
  • 1:30:48
  • think he I in fact I'm quite sure that he reads Yvonne Elin and other right-wing Russians and his ideas come
  • 1:30:55
  • from somewhere right but they don't come from personal experience so I think for him if we have to be psychological it's
  • 1:31:03
  • more like the non-existence of Ukraine is something he's personally invested in
  • 1:31:08
  • um and he at this late stage in his tyrannical life you know he doesn't want to be challenged on the things that he's sure are actually true okay on the
  • 1:31:16
  • Orthodox church it's really really interesting and and this could be a whole lecture like there's a really
  • 1:31:22
  • interesting history of the Eastern Church and its foundation in key of you
  • 1:31:27
  • know in the centuries when it was centered in Kiev and then early 18th century it gets it the it's it's for
  • 1:31:34
  • reasons of power moved to Moscow there's a very interesting sociological story to be told here which I hinted at which is
  • 1:31:40
  • about Ukrainian Church going so ukrainians actually do go to church um you know
  • 1:31:46
  • as opposed to other people who like talk about Christianity Ukrainian just as a
  • 1:31:52
  • matter of like sociological record do go to church and Russians don't which is interesting right um but the in Russian Orthodoxy unlike
  • 1:32:00
  • Ukrainian or so the church in Ukraine is as many of you will know is plural there are multiple versions of Orthodoxy in
  • 1:32:07
  • Ukraine plus the Greek Catholics plus some Roman Catholics um plus you know a fair number of
  • 1:32:12
  • Muslims and Jews but the church in Ukraine is plural and it's not it's not at all closely connected to the state
  • 1:32:18
  • which means that it's often very hard to understand what's going on um but it's different than in Russia
  • 1:32:23
  • where the church is not only connected to the state but the church is essentially an arm of the state so
  • 1:32:28
  • actual Church going versus non-actual Church going pluralism and confusion versus a close connection to to the
  • 1:32:36
  • state and in in in the rhetoric of all the stuff about Satan I guess I should
  • 1:32:41
  • mention the as many of you will know what ramzan karyov is obviously a Muslim so this notion that Ukraine is Satan is
  • 1:32:47
  • coming from both a Christian and a Muslim Direction at the same time I don't mean Christians generally in Muslims generally I just mean that in
  • 1:32:54
  • the Russian public rhetoric The prominent people talking about this are not all Christians at least one of them is is a Muslim
  • 1:33:00
  • um but the the Orthodox argument about you know the argument about Satanism
  • 1:33:06
  • um is is I believe an example of self-worship um this is why I was talking about
  • 1:33:12
  • Christian fascism because when you when you talk about the other as Satan and yourself that means you are The Exorcist
  • 1:33:19
  • you are the one who actually has the divine power to carry out through this cleansing act of violence you know the purge that must take place so that the
  • 1:33:26
  • alien Spirits are dispelled and I know this sounds like exaggerated rhetoric but today I think it was there was
  • 1:33:33
  • actually an exorcism carried out in the city of the occupied city of mariupole the principle of which was that the The
  • 1:33:39
  • Satanist spirits of the ukrainians who used to live there have to be purged from the city right so when we ask about
  • 1:33:46
  • Orthodoxy I mean I'm not going to claim to be enough of a student of this to know where this comes from exactly but a
  • 1:33:52
  • lot of what is passing for religious practice looks to me to be like a kind of political self-worship where you're
  • 1:33:58
  • claiming for yourself the position of the internal innocent as a nation and you're claiming for yourself the power
  • 1:34:03
  • to cleanse to cleanse others and the Orthodox Church takes part in this um I mean they they they they they they
  • 1:34:10
  • bless the soldiers they bless these missions you know they they talk about Satanism
  • 1:34:16
  • um so that's about as far as I can go with that they ask God to punish the resistors yes that's true um please join
  • 1:34:22
  • me in welcome and thanking I'm Professor Snyder for his talk and thank you to all of you for your questions
  • 1:34:28
  • thank you everyone for coming this has been a wonderful presentation so thank you very much let's have another round
  • 1:34:34
  • of applause shall we [Applause]