All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 13, 2021 - Lex Fridman Podcast
02:18:25
Norman Naimark: Genocide, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Absolute Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #248
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The following is a conversation with Norman Namark, a historian at Stanford specializing in genocide, war, and empire.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, here's my conversation with Norman Namark.
Did Stalin believe that communism is good not just for him, but for the people of the Soviet Union and the people of the world?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, Stalin believed that, you know, socialism was the be-all and end-all of, you know, human existence.
He was a true Leninist, and in Lenin's tradition, this was...
You know, what he believed.
I mean, that set of beliefs didn't exclude other kinds of things he believed or thought or did.
But no, the way he defined socialism, the way he thought about socialism, he absolutely thought it was the interests of the Soviet Union and of the world.
And in fact, that the world was one day going to go socialist.
In other words, I think he believed eventually in the international revolution.
So, given the genocide in the 1930s that you described, was Stalin evil, delusional, or incompetent?
Evil, delusional, or incompetent.
Well, you know, evil is one of those words, you know, which has a lot of kind of religious and moral connotations.
And in that sense, yes, I think he was an evil man.
I mean, he, you know, eliminated people absolutely unnecessarily.
He tortured people, had people tortured.
He was completely indifferent to the suffering of others.
He couldn't have cared a whit, you know, that millions were suffering.
And so yes, I consider him an evil man.
I mean, you know, historians don't like to use the word evil.
It's a, you know, it's a word for moral philosophers, but I think it certainly fits who he is.
I think he was delusional.
And there is a wonderful historian at Princeton, a political scientist actually named Robert
Tucker, who said he suffered from a paranoid delusional system.
And I always remember that of Tucker's writing because what Tucker meant is that he was not just paranoid, meaning You know, I'm paranoid, I'm worried you're out to get me, right?
But that he constructed whole plots of people, whole systems of people who were out to get him.
So, in other words, his delusions were that there were all of these groups of people out there Who were out to diminish his power and remove him from his position and undermine the Soviet Union, in his view.
So, yes, I think he did suffer from delusions.
And this had a huge effect because whole groups then were destroyed by his activities, which he would construct.
Based on these delusions.
He was not incompetent.
He was an extremely competent man.
I think most of the research that's gone on, especially since the Stalin Archive It was opened at the beginning of the century.
And I think almost every historian who goes in that archive comes away from it with the feeling of a man who is enormously hardworking, intelligent, with an acute sense of politics, a really excellent sense of political rhetoric, a fantastic editor, in a kind of agitational sense.
I mean, he's a real agitator, right?
And of a, you know, a really hard worker.
I mean, somebody who works from morning till night, a micromanager in some ways.
So his competence, I think, was really extreme.
Now, there were times when that fell down, you know, times in the 30s, times in the 20s, times during the war, where he made mistakes.
It's not as if he didn't make any mistakes.
But I think, you know, you look at his stuff, you know, you look at his archives, you look what he did.
I mean, this is an enormously competent man who, in many, many different areas of enterprise, because he, you know, he had this notion that he should know everything and did know everything.
I remember one archive, it's called, you know, a kind of folder that I looked at where he actually went through the wines that were produced in his native Georgia and wrote down how much they should make of each of these wines, you know, how many, you know, barrels they should produce of these wines, which grapes were better than the other grapes, sort of correcting, in other words, what people were putting down there.
So he was, you know, his competence ranged very wide, or at least he thought his competence ranged very wide.
I mean, both things I think are the case.
If we look at this paranoid delusional system, Stalin was in power for 30 years.
He is, many argue, one of the most powerful men in history.
Did, in his case, absolute power corrupt him or did it reveal the true nature of the man?
And maybe just in your sense, as we kind of build around this genocide of the early 1930s, This paranoid delusional system, did it get built up over time?
Was it always there?
It's kind of a question of did the genocide, was that always inevitable essentially in this man or did power create that?
It's a great question, and I don't think you can say that it was always kind of inherent in the man.
I mean, the man, without his position and without his power, wouldn't have been able to accomplish what he eventually did in the way of murdering people, murdering groups of people, which is what genocide is.
So, you know, I don't—it wasn't sort of in him.
I mean, there were—and again, you know, the new research has shown that, you know, his childhood was, you know, not a particularly nasty one.
People used to say, you know, the father beat him up, and it turns out actually it wasn't the father, it was the mother once in a while.
But basically, you know, he was not an unusual young Georgian kid or student even— And, you know, it was the growth of the Soviet system and him within the Soviet system, I mean, his own development within the Soviet system, I think that led, you know, to the kind of mass killing that occurred in the 1930s.
You know, he essentially achieved complete power by the early 1930s.
And then as he rolled with it, as you would say, or people would say, it increasingly became murderous.
And there were no checks and balances, obviously, on that murderous system.
And not only that, people supported it.
In the NKVD and elsewhere, he learned how to manipulate people.
I mean, he was a superb, you know, political manipulator of those people around him.
And, you know, we've got new transcripts, for example, of, you know, Politburo meetings in the early 1930s.
And you read those things, and he uses humor, and he uses sarcasm especially.
He uses verbal ways to undermine people, to control their behavior and what they do.
And he's a real, I guess, manipulator is the right word.
And he does it with a kind of skill.
On the one hand...
Is admirable, and on the other hand, of course, is terrible, because it ends up creating the system of terror that he creates.
I mean, I guess just to linger on it, I just wonder how much of it is a slippery slope.
In the early 20s, 1920s, did he think he was going to be murdering even a single person, but thousands and millions?
I just wonder, maybe the murder of a single human being, just to get them, you know, because you're paranoid about them potentially threatening your power, does that murder then open a door?
And once you open the door, you become a different human being.
A deeper question here is the Solzhenitsyn You know, the line between good and evil runs in every man.
Are all of us, once we commit one murder in this situation, does that open a door for all of us?
And I guess even the further deeper question is how easy it is for human nature to go on this slippery slope that ends in genocide.
There are a lot of questions in those questions.
And, you know, the slippery slope question, I would answer, I suppose, by saying...
Stalin wasn't the most likely successor of Lenin.
There were plenty of others.
There were a lot of political contingencies that emerged in the 1920s that made it possible for Stalin to seize power.
I don't think of him as a...
You know, if you would just know him in 1925, I don't think anybody would say, much less himself, that this was a future mass murderer.
I mean, Trotsky mistrusted him and thought he was, you know, a mindless bureaucrat.
You know, others were less mistrustful of him.
But, you know, he managed to gain power in the way he did through this bureaucratic and political maneuvering that was very successful.
The slippery slope, as it were, doesn't really begin until the 1930s, in my view.
In other words, once he gains complete power and control of the Politburo, once the programs that he institutes of the Five-Year Plan and collectivization go through, Once he reverses himself and is able to reverse himself or reverse the Soviet path to give various nationalities their ability to develop their own cultures and sort of internal politics, once he reverses all that, You have the Ukrainian famine in 32-33.
You have the murder of Kirov, who is one of the leading figures in the political system.
You have the suicide of his wife.
You have all these things come together in 32-33 that then make it more likely, in other words, that bad things are going to happen.
And people start seeing that too around him.
They start seeing that it's not a slippery slope.
It's a dangerous situation which is emerging.
And some people really understand that.
So I really do see a differentiation then between the 20s.
I mean, it's true that Stalin during the Civil War, there's a lot of good research on that.
It shows that he already had some of these characteristics of being, as it were, murderous and being dictatorial and pushing people around and that sort of thing.
That was all there. But I don't really see that as kind of the necessary stage for the next thing that came, which was the 30s, which was really...
Terror of the worst sort, you know, where everybody is afraid for their lives and most people are afraid for their lives and their families' lives and where torture and that sort of thing becomes a common part, you know, of what people had to face.
So it's a different world.
And, you know, people will argue.
They'll argue this kind of Lenin-Stalin Continuity debate, you know, that's been going on since I was an undergraduate, right?
That argument, you know, was Stalin the natural sort of next step from Lenin, or was he something completely different?
Many people will argue, you know, because of Marxism-Leninism, because of the ideology, that, you know, it was a kind of natural next step.
I don't think so.
You know, I would tend to lean the other way.
Not absolutely. I mean, I won't make an absolute argument, but That what Stalin became had nothing to do with Lenin and nothing to do with Marxism.
Lenin doesn't have a lot to do with it.
But, you know, he takes it one major step further.
And again, that's why I don't like the slippery slope, you know, metaphor, because that means it's kind of slow and easy.
It's a leap. And we call, you know, I mean, historians talk about the Stalin Revolution, you know, in 28 and 29, you know, that he, in some senses...
Creates a whole new system, you know, through the five-year plan, collectivization, and seizing political power the way he does.
Can you talk about the 1930s?
Can you describe what happened in Haldimor, the Soviet terror famine in Ukraine in the 32 and 33?
Yes. That killed millions of Ukrainians?
Right. It's a long story, you know, but let me try to be as succinct as I can be.
I mean, the Halodomor, the terror famine of 32-33 comes out of, in part...
An all-union famine that is the result of collectivization.
You know, collectivization was a catastrophe.
You know, the more or less of the so-called kulaks, the more or less richer farmers—I mean, they weren't really rich, right— Anybody with a tin roof and a cow was considered a kulak, you know, and other people who had nothing were also considered kulaks if they opposed collectivization.
So these kulaks, we're talking millions of them, right?
And Ukraine, it's worth recalling, and I'm sure you know this was a, you know, heavily agricultural area, and Ukrainian peasants, you know, were in the countryside and resisted More than even Russian peasants resisted collectivization suffered during this collectivization program.
And they, you know, burned sometimes their own houses.
They killed their own animals.
They were shot, you know, sometimes on the spot.
Tens of thousands and others were sent into exile.
So there was a conflagration in the countryside.
And the result of that conflagration in Ukraine was terrible famine.
And again, there was famine all over the Soviet Union, but it was especially bad in Ukraine, in part because Ukrainian peasants resisted.
Now, in 32-33, a couple of things happened.
I've argued this in my writing, and I've also worked on this.
I continue to work on it, by the way, with a museum in Kiev that's going to be about the Holodomor.
They're building the museum now, and it's going to be a very impressive set of exhibits and talk with historians all the time about it.
So what happens in 32, 33, a couple of things.
First of all, the Stalin...
It develops an even stronger, I say even stronger because they already had an antipathy for the Ukrainians, an even stronger antipathy for the Ukrainians in general.
First of all, they resist collectivization.
Second of all, he's not getting all the grain he wants out of them and which he needs.
And so he sends in then people to expropriate the grain and take the grain away from the peasants.
These teams of people, you know, some policemen, some urban thugs, some party people, some poor peasants, you know, take part too, go into the villages and forcibly seize grain and animals from the Ukrainian peasantry.
They're seizing it all over.
I mean, let's remember again, this is all over the Soviet Union, in 32 especially.
Then, you know, in December of 1932, January of 1933, February of 1933, Stalin is convinced the Ukrainian peasantry needs to be shown who's boss, that they're not turning over their grain, that they're resisting the expropriators, that they're hiding the grain, which they do sometimes, right?
And That they're basically not loyal to the Soviet Union, that they're acting like traitors, that they're ready.
And he says this, you know, I think it's Kaganovich he says it too.
You know, they're ready to kind of pull out of the Soviet Union and join Poland.
I mean, he thinks Poland is, you know, out to get Ukraine.
And so he's going to then essentially break the back of these peasantry.
And the way he breaks their back...
Is by going through another expropriation program, which is not done in the rest of the Soviet Union.
So he's taking away everything they have.
Everything they have.
There are new laws introduced where they will actually punish people, including kids, with death if they steal any grain.
You know, if they take anything from the fields.
So, you know, you can shoot anybody.
You know, who is looking for food.
And then he introduces measures in Ukraine, which are not introduced into the rest of the Soviet Union.
For example, Ukrainian peasantry are not allowed to leave their villages anymore.
They can't go to the city to try to find some things.
I mean, we've got pictures of, you know, Ukrainian peasants dying on the sidewalks in Kharkiv and in Kiev and places like that who've managed to get out of the village and get to the cities.
But now they can't leave.
They can't leave Ukraine to go to Belarus.
Belarus today, or to Russia, you know, to get any food.
There's no...
He won't allow any relief to Ukraine.
A number of people offer relief, including the Poles, but also the Vatican offers relief.
He won't allow any relief to Ukraine.
He won't admit that there's a famine in Ukraine.
And instead, what happens...
Is that Ukraine turns into, the Ukrainian countryside turns into what my now past colleague who died several years ago, Robert Conquest, called a vast belson.
And by that, you know, the image is of bodies just lying everywhere.
You know, people dead and dying, you know, of hunger, which is, by the way, I mean, as you know, I've spent a lot of time studying genocide.
I don't think there's anything worse than dying of hunger from what I have read.
I mean, you see terrible ways that people die, right?
But dying of hunger is just such a horrible, horrible thing.
And so, for example, We know there were many cases of cannibalism in the countryside because there wasn't anything to eat.
People were eating their own kids, right?
And Stalin knew about this.
And again, you know, we started with this question a little bit earlier.
There's not a sign of remorse, not a sign of pity, right?
Not a sign of any kind of human emotion that normal people would have.
What about the opposite of joy for teaching them a lesson?
I don't think there's joy.
I'm not sure Stalin really understood what joy was.
I think he felt it was necessary to get those SOBs, right?
That they deserved it.
He says that several times.
This is their own fault, right?
This is their own fault. And as their own fault, you know, they get what they deserve, basically.
How much was the calculation?
How much was it reason versus emotion?
You said he was competent.
Was there a long-term strategy or was this strategy based on emotion and anger?
No, well, I think actually the right answer is a little of both.
I mean, usually the right answer in history is something like that.
A little of both. You can't, you can't, it wasn't just, I mean, first of all, you know, the Soviets had it in for Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalism, which they really didn't like.
And by the way, Russians still don't like it, right?
So they had it in for Ukrainian nationalism.
They feared Ukrainian nationalism.
As I said, you know, Stalin writes, you know, we'll lose Ukraine, you know, if these guys win.
You know, so there's a kind of long-term determination, as I said, you know, to kind of break the back of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian nationalism as any kind of separatist force whatsoever.
And so there's that rational calculation.
At the same time, I think Stalin is annoyed.
And peeved and angry on one level with the Ukrainians for resisting collectivization and for being difficult and for not conforming to the way he thinks peasants should act in this situation.
So you have both things.
He's also very angry at the Ukrainian party.
And eventually purges it for not being able to control Ukraine and not be able to control the situation.
You know, Ukraine is in theory the breadbasket, right, of Europe.
Well, how come the breadbasket isn't turning over to me all this grain so I can sell it abroad and, you know, build new factories and support the workers in the cities?
So there's a kind of annoyance, you know, when things fail.
And this is absolutely typical of Stalin.
When things fail, he blames it on other people, and usually groups of people, right?
Not individuals, but groups, again.
So, a little bit of both, I think, is the right answer.
This blame, it feels like there's a playbook that dictators follow.
I just wonder if it comes naturally or just kind of evolves.
Because blaming others and then telling these narratives and then creating the other and then somehow that leads to hatred and genocide.
It feels like there's too many commonalities for it not to be a naturally emergent strategy that works for dictatorships.
I mean, it's a very good point, and I think it's one that has its merits.
In other words, I think you're right, that there's certain kinds of strategies by dictators that are common to them.
A lot of them do killing, not all of them, of that sort that Stalin did.
I've written about Mao and Pol Pot and Hitler, and there is a sort of, as you say, a kind of playbook For political dictatorship, also for a kind of communist totalitarian way of functioning.
And that way of functioning was described already by Hannah Arendt early on when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism.
And she more or less writes the playbook.
And Stalin does follow it.
The real question, it seems to me, is to what extent, you know, and how deep does this go and how often does it go in that direction?
I mean, you can argue, for example, I mean, Fidel Castro was not a nice man, right?
He was a dictator. He was a terrible dictator.
But he did not engage in mass murder.
Ho Chi Minh was a dictator, a communist dictator who grew up, you know, in the communist movement, went to Moscow, you know, spent time in Moscow in the 30s and went to find found the Vietnamese Communist Party.
You know, he was a horrible dictator.
I'm sure he was responsible for a lot of death and destruction, but he wasn't a mass murderer.
And so you get those, you know.
I mean, I would even argue, others will disagree, that Lenin wasn't a mass murderer.
You know, that he didn't kill the same way, you know, that Stalin killed.
Or people after him.
They're communist dictators too, after all.
Khrushchev was a communist dictator, but he stopped this killing.
And, you know, he's still responsible for a gulag and people sent off into a gulag and imprisonment and torture and that sort of thing.
But it's not at all the same thing.
So there are some, you know, like Stalin, like Mao, like Pol Pot, you know, who commit these horrible, horrible atrocities, extensively engaging, in my view, in genocide, and And there's some who don't.
And, you know, what's the difference?
Well, you know, the difference is partly in personality, partly in historical circumstance, you know, partly in, you know, who is it that controls the reins of power?
How much do you connect the ideas of communism or Marxism or socialism to Holodomor, to Stalin's rule?
How naturally, as you kind of alluded to, does it lead to genocide and It's also...
I mean, in some ways, I've just addressed that question by saying it doesn't always lead to genocide.
You know, in the case, again, Cuba is not pretty, but it didn't have...
There was no genocide in Cuba.
And same thing in North Vietnam.
You know, even North Korea, as awful as it is, is a terrible dictatorship, right?
And people's rights are totally...
Destroyed, right? They have no freedom whatsoever.
You know, is not, as far as we know, genocidal.
Who knows whether it could be or whether if they took over South Korea, you know, mass murder wouldn't take place and that kind of thing.
But my point is, is that the ideology doesn't necessarily dictate genocide.
In other words, it's an ideology, I think, that makes genocide sometimes too easily possible.
Given, you know, the way it thinks through history as being, you know, you're on the right side of history and some people are on the wrong side of history and you have to destroy those people who are on the wrong side of history.
I mean, there is something in, you know, Marxism-Leninism which, you know, has that kind of language and that kind of thinking.
But I don't think it's necessarily that way.
There's a wonderful historian at Berkeley named Martin Melia who wrote a number of books on this subject.
And he was convinced that the ideology itself played a crucial role in the murderousness of the Soviet regime.
I'm not completely convinced.
When I say not completely convinced, I think you could argue it different ways.
With equally valid arguments.
I mean, there's something about the ideology of communism that allows you to decrease the value of human life, almost like this philosophy, if it's okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.
Right. So maybe that, if you can reason like that, Then it's easier to take the leap of, for the good of the country, for the good of the people, for the good of the world, it's okay to kill a few people.
And then that's where...
I wonder about the slippery slope.
Yeah, no, no. Again, I don't think it's a slippery slope.
I think it's... I think it's dangerous.
In other words, I think it's dangerous.
But I don't consider, you know, I don't like Marxism, Leninism any better than the next
guy and I've lived in plenty of those systems to know how they can beat people down and how they can
you know destroy human aspirations and human interaction between people. But
they're not necessarily murderous systems. They are systems that contain people's autonomy, that
force people to into work and labor and lifestyles that they don't want to live.
I spent a lot of time, you know, with with East Germans and Poles,
you know, who lived in and even and even in the Soviet Union,
you know, in the post-Stalin period where people lived lives they didn't want to live,
and didn't have the freedom to choose.
And that was terrifying in and of itself.
But these were not murderous systems.
And they, you know, ascribe to Marxism down this.
So I suppose it's important to draw the line between mass murder and genocide and mass murder versus just mass violation of human rights.
Right, right.
And the leap to mass murder, you're saying...
Maybe easier in some ideologies than others, but it's not clear that somehow one ideology definitely leads to mass murder or not.
Exactly. I wonder how many factors, what factors, how much of it is a single charismatic leader?
How much of it is the conflagration of multiple historical events?
How much of it is just dumb, the opposite of luck?
Do you have a sense where if you look at a moment in history, predict Looking at the factors, whether something bad is going to happen here.
When you look at Iraq, when Saddam Hussein first took power, or you can go even farther back in history, would you be able to predict?
So you said, you already kind of answered that with Stalin saying there's no way you could have predicted that in the early 20s.
Is that always the case?
You basically can't predict.
It's pretty much always the case.
In other words, I mean, history is a wonderful, you know, discipline and way of looking at life and the world in retrospect, meaning it happened.
It happened. And we know it happened.
And it's too easy to say sometimes it happened because it had to happen that way.
It almost never has to happen that way.
And, you know, things...
So I very much...
I'm of the school that emphasizes contingency and choice and difference and different paths and not necessarily a path that has to be followed.
And, you know, sometimes you can warn about things.
I mean, you can think, well, something's going to happen.
And usually the way it works, let me just give you one example.
I'm thinking about an example right now, which was the war in Yugoslavia, you know, which came in the 1990s and eventually eventuated in genocide in Bosnia.
And, you know, I remember very clearly, you know, the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia and people would say, you know, there's trouble here and, you know, something could go wrong.
But no one in their wildest imagination thought that there would be outright war between them all.
Then the outright war happened, genocide happened, and afterwards people would say, I saw it coming.
Yeah. So you get a lot of that, especially with pundits and journalists.
I saw it coming. I knew it was happening.
Well, I mean, what happens in the human mind, and it happens in your mind too, is you go through a lot of alternatives.
Think about January 6th in this country and all the different alternatives which people had in their mind or before January 6th, after the lost election.
Things could have gone in lots of different ways and there were all kinds of people choosing different ways it could have gone, but nobody really knew.
How it was going to turn out.
Wasn't it smart people really understood that there'd be this cockamamie uprising on January 6th, you know, that almost, you know, caused this enormous grief.
So all of these kinds of things in history, you know, are deeply contingent.
They depend on, you know, factors that we cannot predict.
And, you know, and it's the joy of history that it's open.
You know, you think about how people are now, I mean, let me give you one more example and then I'll shut up.
But, you know, there's the environmental example.
You know, we're all threatened, right?
We know it's coming. We know there's trouble, right?
We know there's going to be a catastrophe at some point.
But when? What's the catastrophe?
Yeah, what's the nature of the catastrophe?
Everyone says catastrophe. Is it going to be wars because of resource constraints?
Is it going to be hunger? Is it going to be mass migration of different kinds that leads to some kind of conflict and immigration?
Maybe it won't be that big of a deal and a total other catastrophic event will completely challenge the entirety of the human civilization.
That's my point. That's my point.
That's my point. You know, we really don't know.
I mean, there's a lot we do know.
I mean, the warming business and all this kind of stuff, you know, it's scientifically there.
But how it's going to play out.
And everybody's saying, you know, different things.
And then you get somewhere in 50 years or 60 years, which I won't see, and people say, aha, I told you it was going to be X or it was going to be Y or it was going to be Z. So I just don't think in history you can...
Well, you can't predict.
You simply cannot predict what's going to happen.
It's kind of when you just look at Hitler in the 30s, for me, oftentimes when I kind of read different accounts, It is so often, certainly in the press, but in general, me just reading about Hitler, I get the sense like, this is a clown.
There's no way this person will gain power.
Which one? Hitler or Stalin?
Hitler. No, no, no.
With Stalin, you don't get a sense he's a clown.
He's a really good executive.
You don't think it would lead to mass murder, but you think he's going to build a giant bureaucracy, at least.
With Hitler, it's like, Like a failed artist who keeps screaming about stuff, there's no way he's going to...
I mean, you certainly don't think about the atrocities, but there's no way he's going to gain power, especially against Kami.
I mean, there's so many other competing forces that could have easily beat him.
But then... You realize event after event where this clown keeps dancing and all of a sudden he gains more and more power and just certain moments in time he makes strategic decisions in terms of cooperating or gaining power over the military, all those kinds of things that eventually give him the power.
I mean, this clown is one of the most impactful in a negative sense human beings in history.
Right? And even the Jews who are there and are being screamed at and discriminated against and who's, you know, their series of measures taken against them incrementally during the course of the 1930s.
And very few who leave.
Yeah. I mean, some pick up and go and say, I'm getting the hell out of here, you know.
And, you know, some Zionists, you know, try to leave too and go to the United States and stuff.
But I go to Israel and Palestine at the time.
But... Or to Britain or France.
But in general, even the Jews, who should have been very sensitive to what was going on, didn't really understand the extent of the danger.
And it's really hard for people to do that.
It's almost impossible, in fact, I think.
So most of the time in that exact situation...
Nothing would have happened.
Or there'd be some drama and so on.
It'd be there's some bureaucrat.
But every once in a while in human history, there's a kind of turn.
And maybe something catalyzes something else and just it accelerates, escalates, escalates.
And then war breaks out or totally, revolutions break out.
Right. Can we go to the big question of genocide?
What is genocide?
What are the defining characteristics of genocide?
Dealing with genocide is a difficult thing when it comes to the definition.
There is a definition, the December 1948 UN convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide is considered the sort of major Document of definition and the definitional sense of genocide.
And it emphasizes, you know, the intentional destruction, you know, of an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group.
Those are the four groups, again.
Comma as such.
And what that means basically is destroying the group as a group.
In other words, there's a kind of beauty in human diversity and different groups of people,
you know, Estonians, you know, a tribe of Native Americans, South African tribes,
you know, the Rohingya in Myanmar. There's a kind of beauty humanity recognizes in the distinctiveness of those groups.
Oops.
You know, this was a notion that emerges really with romanticism after the French Revolution in the beginning of the 19th century, with Herder, mostly.
And this beauty of these groups, then, you know, is what is under attack in genocide.
Yeah. And it's with intent.
You know, the idea is that it's intentional destruction.
So this is a kind of, you know, analogy to first degree, second degree, and third degree murder, right?
First degree murder, you know, you're out to kill this person and you plan it and you go out and you do it, right?
That's intent, right?
Manslaughter is not intent.
You end up doing the same thing, but it's different.
So, you know, the major person behind the definition is a man named Raphael Lemkin.
I don't know if you heard his name or not, but he was a Polish-Jewish jurist who came, you know, from Poland, came to the United States during the war, and had been a kind of crusader.
For recognizing genocide.
It's a word that he created, by the way.
And he coined the term in 1943 and then published it in 1944 for the first time.
Geno meaning people and side meaning killing, right?
And so Lemkin then had this term and he pushed hard to have it recognized and it was in the UN Convention.
So that's the rough definition.
The problem with it is the definition, the problems with the definition are several.
You know, one of them is, is it just these four groups, you know, racial, religious, ethnic, or national?
See, this comes right out of the war.
And what's in people's minds in 1948 are Jews, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs sometimes, who were killed by the Nazis.
That's what's in their mind. But there are other groups, too, if you think about it, you know, who are killed, social groups or political groups.
And that was not allowed in the convention, meaning for a lot of different reasons.
The Soviets were primary among them.
They didn't want other kinds of groups, let's say kulaks, for example, to be considered.
That's a social group.
Or peasants, which is a social group.
Or a political group.
I mean, let's take a group, you know, communists killed groups of people.
But non-communists also killed groups of people.
In Indonesia in 1965-66, they killed, you know, I don't know exactly, but roughly 600,000 Indonesian communists.
Well, is that genocide or not?
You know, and my point of view, it is genocide, although it's Indonesians killing Indonesians.
And we have the same problem with the Cambodian genocide.
I mean, we talk about a Cambodian genocide, but most of the people killed in the Cambodian genocide were other Cambodians.
They give it the name, they're ready to recognize this genocide because they also killed some other peoples, meaning the Vietnamese, the Ham people who are, you know...
Muslim, Muslim, smaller Muslim people in the area, and a few others.
So the question then becomes, well, does it have to be a different nationality or ethnic group or religious group for it to be genocide?
And my answer is no. You know, you need to expand the definition.
It's a little bit like with our Constitution.
You know, we got a Constitution. But we don't live in the end of the 18th century, right?
We live in the 21st century.
And so you have to update the Constitution over the centuries.
And similarly, the Genocide Convention needs updating, too.
So that's how I work with the definition.
So this is this invention...
Was it an invention, this beautiful idea, romantic idea that there's groups of people, and the group is united by some unique characteristics?
That was an invention in human history, this idea?
Not to see us as individuals?
Yes, in some senses it was. There are things that are always constructed in one fashion or another, and the construction more or less represents the reality.
And what the reality is always much more complicated than the construction or the invention of a term or a concept or a way of thinking about a nation, right?
And this way of thinking of nations, you know, as again, you know, groups of religious, linguistic, not political necessarily, but cultural entities is something that was essentially invented.
There are no Germans in the 17th century.
There are no Italians in the 17th century.
They're only there after the invention of the nation, which comes, again, mostly out of the French Revolution and in the Romantic movement.
A man named Johann Gottfried von Herder, right, who was really the first one who sort of went around, collected people's languages and collected their sayings and their dances and their folk ways and stuff and said, isn't this cool, you know, that they're Estonians and that they're Latvians and that they're these other, these interesting different peoples who don't even know necessarily that they're different peoples, right?
That comes a little bit later.
Once the concept is invented, then people start to say, hey, we're nations too.
And the Germans decide they're a nation and they unify.
And the Italians discover they're a nation and they unify instead of being Florentines and Romans and Sicilians.
But then beyond nations, there's political affiliations, all those kinds of things.
It's fascinating that you start, look at the early Homo sapiens, and then there's obviously tribes, right?
And then that's very concrete, that is geographic location, and it's a small group of people.
And you have warring tribes probably connected to just limited resources.
But it's fascinating to think that that is then taken to the space of ideas to where you can create a group at first to appreciate its beauty.
You create a group based on language, based on maybe even political, philosophical ideas, religious ideas, all those kinds of things.
And then that naturally then leads to Getting angry at groups and making them the other and then hatred.
Right. That comes more towards the end of the 19th century, you know, with the influence of Darwin.
I mean, you can't blame Darwin for it, but neo-Darwin, Darwinians, you know, who start to talk about, you know, the competition between nations, the natural competition.
The weak ones fall away, the strong ones get ahead.
You know, you get this sort of combination also with, you know, modern anti-Semitism and with racial thinking.
You know, the racial thinking at the end of the 19th century is very powerful.
So now, you know, at the end of the 19th century versus the beginning, you know, the middle of the 19th century, you know, you can be a German and be a Jew and there's no contradiction.
As long as you speak the language and you dress and think and act and share the culture.
By the end of the 19th century, people are saying, no, no.
They're not Germans. They're Jews.
They're different. They have different blood.
They don't say genes yet.
But that's sort of a sense of people.
And that's when there's this sense of superiority, too, and inferiority.
That they're inferior to us.
And that we're the strong ones.
And Hitler, by the way, just adopts this hook, line, and sinker.
I mean, there are a whole series of thinkers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century who he cites in Mein Kampf, which is written in the early 1920s, that basically Purveys this racial thinking.
So nationalism changes.
So nationalism in and of itself is not bad.
I mean, it's not bad, you know, to share culture and language and, you know, folkways and...
And a sense of common belonging.
There's nothing bad about it, inherently.
But then what happens is it becomes, you know, frequently is used and becomes, especially on fascism, becomes dangerous.
And it's especially dangerous when the two conflicting groups share geographic location.
That's right. So like with Jews, you know, I come, you know, I'm a Russian Jew.
And it's always interesting.
I take pride in, you know, I love the tradition of the Soviet Union, of Russia.
I love America. So I love these countries.
They have a beautiful tradition in literature and science and art and all those kinds of things.
But it's funny that people, not often, but sometimes, correct me that I'm not Russian.
I'm a Jew. It's a nice reminder that that is always there, that desire to create these groups.
And then when they're living in the same place, for that division between groups, that hate between groups can explode.
And I wonder why is that there?
Why does the human heart tend so easily towards this kind of hate?
You know, that's a big question in and of itself.
You know, the human heart is full of everything, right?
It's full of hate, it's full of love, it's full of indifference, it's full of apathy, it's full of energy.
So, I mean, hate is something that...
I mean, I think, and, you know, along with hate, you know, the ability to really hurt and injure people is something that's within all of us.
You know, it's within all of us.
And it's just something that's part of who we are and part of our society.
So, you know, we're shaped by our society, and our society can do with us often what it wishes.
Right. I mean, because you have more or less the freedom to do things.
To do what you wish and not to be forced into situations in which you would have to then do nasty to other people.
Some societies, as we talked about, are more have proclivities towards asking of its people.
To do things they don't want to do and forcing them to do so.
So, you know, freedom is a wonderful thing.
To be able to choose not to do evil is a great thing.
Whereas in some societies, you know, you feel in some ways that Not so much for the NKVD bosses, but for the guys on the ground in the 1930s.
Or not so much for the Nazi bosses, but for the guys in the police battalion that were told, go shoot those Jews.
And you do it, not necessarily because they force you to do it, but because your social...
Your social situation encourages you to, and you don't have the courage not to.
Yeah, I was just, as I often do, rereading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and he said something, I often pull out sort of lines.
The mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole, it would be easy to condemn.
So that's speaking to, you feel for those people at the lowest level implementing the orders of those above.
Right. And also you worry yourself what will happen if you were given those same orders.
I mean, what would you do?
What kind of reaction would you have in this similar situation?
And, you know, you don't know.
I could see myself in World War II fighting for almost any country that I was born in.
There's a love of community.
There's a love of country that's just, at least to me, comes naturally.
Just love of community.
And country is one such community.
And I could see fighting for that country, especially when you're sold a story that you're fighting evil.
And I'm sure every single country was sold that story, effectively.
And then when you're in the military and you have a gun in your hand or you're in the police force and you're ordered, Go to this place and commit violence.
It's hard to know what you would do.
It's a mix of fear.
It's a mix of maybe you convince yourself, you know, what can one person really do?
And over time, it's again that slippery slope.
Because you could see all the people who protest, who revolt, they're ineffective.
So if you actually want to practically help somehow, you're going to convince yourself that one person can't possibly help.
And then you have a family, so you want to protect your family.
You tell all these stories, and over time, you naturally convince yourself to dehumanize the other.
Yeah, I think about this a lot.
Mostly because I worry that I would be a good German.
Yeah. No, no, that's right.
That's right. And one of my tasks as a teacher, right, are students.
And I have classes on genocide.
I have one now.
And another one, by the way, on Stalin.
But the one on genocide, one of my tasks is to try to...
Try to get the students to understand this is not about weird people who live far away in time and in place.
But it's about them.
And that's a hard lesson.
But it's an important one.
That this is in all of us.
It's in all of us.
And there's nothing...
And you just try to gird yourself up, you know, to try to figure out ways that maybe you won't be complicit.
And that you learn how to stand by your principles.
But it's very hard. It's extremely difficult.
And you can't... They've done a lot of studies of Poles, for example, who during the war saved Jews.
Well, who are the Poles who saved Jews versus those who turned them in?
It's completely unpredictable.
Sometimes it's the worst anti-Semites who protect them because they don't believe they should be killed.
It's not predictable.
It's not as if the humanists among us are the ones who consistently show up and experience danger, in other words, and are ready to take on danger.
To defend your fellow human beings.
Not necessarily. I mean, sometimes simple people do it, and sometimes they do it for really simple reasons.
And sometimes people you would expect to do it don't.
And you've got that mix, and it's just not predictable.
One thing I've learned in this age of social media is it feels like the people with integrity and the ones who would do the right thing are the quiet ones.
In terms of humanists, in terms of activists, there's so many points to be gained.
Of declaring that you would do the right thing.
It's the simple, quiet folks.
Because I've seen quite, on a small, obviously much smaller scale, just shows of integrity and character.
When there was sacrifice to be made and it was done quietly.
Sort of the small heroes.
You're right, it's surprising.
But they're often quiet.
That's why I'm distrustful of people who kind of proclaim that they would do the right thing.
And there are different kinds of integrity, too.
I mean, I edited a memoir of a Polish...
You know, an underground fighter, a member of the underground who was in Majdanek, in the concentration camp in Majdanek.
You know, and it was just an interesting mix of different kinds of integrity.
You know, on the one hand, you know, it really bothered him deeply when Jews were killed or sent to camp or that sort of thing.
On the other hand, he was something of an anti-Semite.
You know, he would, you know, sometimes if Jews were his friends, he would help them.
And if they weren't, sometimes he was really mean to them.
You know, and you could, in their various levels, you know, a concentration camp is, you know, a terrible thing.
Social experiment in some ways, right?
But you learn a lot from how people behave.
And what you see is that people behave sometimes extraordinarily well in some situations and extraordinarily poorly in others.
And it's mixed and you can't predict it.
And it's hard to find consistency.
I mean, that's the other thing.
I think we claim too much consistency for the people we study and the people we think about in the past.
They're not consistent anymore than we are consistent, right?
Well, let me ask you about human nature here on both sides.
So first, what have you learned about human nature from studying genocide?
Why do humans commit genocide?
What lessons? First of all, why is a difficult question, but what insights do you have into humans that genocide is something that happens in the world?
That's a really big and difficult question, right?
And it has to be parsed, I think, into different kinds of questions.
Why does genocide happen?
The answer there is frequently political, meaning why Hitler ended up killing the Jews.
Well, it had a lot to do with the political history of Of Germany and wartime history of Germany, right?
In the 30s.
And, you know, it's traceable to then.
Like you mentioned it yourself.
You can't imagine Hitler in the mid-20s turning into anything of the kind of dictator he ended up being and the kind of mass murderer he ended up being.
So, and the same thing goes, by the way, for Stalin and Soviet Union and Pol Pot.
I mean, these are all essentially political movements where the polity, state, is seized, you know, by an ideological or...
Party, single party movement, and then is moved in directions where mass killing takes place.
The other question, separate that question out.
The other question is why do ordinary people participate?
Because the fact of the matter is...
Just ordering genocide is not enough.
Just saying, you know, go get them is not enough.
There have to be people who will cooperate and who will do their jobs, you know, both at the kind of meso level, the middle level of a bureaucracy, but also at the everyday level.
You know, people who have to pull the triggers and that kind of thing and, you know, force people into the gas chamber and...
Grab people, you know, in Kiev in September 1941 at Babin Yar and push them, you know, towards the ravine where the machine gunners are going to shoot them down.
You know, and those are all sorts of different questions.
The question of, you know, especially the lower level people who actually do the killing is a question which I think we've been talking about, which is that within all of us, You know, it's the capability of being murderers and mass murderers.
I mean, to participate in mass murderers.
I won't call them laws of social psychology, but the character of social psychology.
You know, we will do it in most cases.
I mean, one of the shocking things that I learned just a few years ago studying the Holocaust is that you could pull out.
In other words, if they order a police battalion to go shoot Jews, you didn't have to do it.
You could pull out. They never killed anybody.
They never executed anybody.
They never even punished people for saying, no, I'm not going to do that.
So people are doing it voluntarily.
They may not want to do it.
You know, they give them booze to try to, you know, numb the pain of murder because they know there is pain.
I mean, people experience pain when they murder people.
But they don't pull out.
And so it's the character of who we are in society, in groups, and And we're very, very influenced.
I mean, we're highly influenced by the groups in which we operate and, you know, who we talk to and who our friends are within that group and who is the head of the group.
I mean, you see it in any group, you know, whether it's in the academy, right, at Stanford or whether it's, you know, in a labor union or whether it's in a church group in Tennessee or wherever.
You know, people... Pay attention to each other, and they are unwilling frequently to say, no, this is wrong.
Even though all of you think it's right, it's wrong.
I mean, they just don't do that usually, especially in societies.
That are authoritarian or totalitarian, right?
Because it's harder, because there's a backup to it, right?
There's the NKVD there, or there's the Gestapo there, and there are other people there.
So you just, you know, they may not be forcing you to do it, but your social being, plus this danger in the distance,
you know, you do it.
But then if you go up the hierarchy, at the very top there's a dictator,
presumably, you know, you go to like middle management to the bureaucracy.
The higher you get up there, the more power you have to change the direction of the Titanic.
Right, right, right.
But nobody seems to do it.
Right. Or what happens, and it does happen, it happens in the German army.
I mean, it happens in the case of the Armenian genocide, where we know there are governors who said, no, I'm not going to kill Armenians.
What kind of business is this? They were just removed.
Right. They're removed.
And you find a replacement very easily.
So, you know, you do see people who stand up.
And again, it's not really predictable who it will be.
I would maintain. I mean, I haven't done the study of the Armenian governors who said no.
I mean, the Turkish governors who said no to the Armenian genocide.
But, you know, there are people who do step aside every once in a while in the middle level.
And again, there are German generals who say, wait a minute, what is this business in Poland when they start to kill Jews or in Belarus?
And, you know, they're just pushed aside.
You know, if they don't do their job, they're pushed aside.
Or they end up doing it, and they usually do end up doing it.
What about on the victim side?
So I mentioned man's search for meaning.
What can we learn about human nature, the human mind, from the victims of genocide?
So Viktor Frankl talked about the ability to discover meaning and beauty, even in suffering.
Is there something to be said about, you know, in your studying of genocide that you've learned about human nature?
Well, again, I have to say I come out of the study of genocide with a very pessimistic view of human nature.
A very pessimistic view.
Even on the victim's side?
Even on the victim's side.
I mean, the victims will eat their children.
Right? Ukrainian case.
They have no choice. You know, the victims will rob each other.
The victims will form hierarchies within victimhood.
So you see...
Let me give you an example.
Again, I told you I was working on Majdanek.
And there's...
In Majdanek, at a certain point in 1942, a group of Slovak Jews were arrested...
And sent to Majdanek.
Those Slovak Jews were a group.
Somehow, they stuck together.
They were very competent. Many of them were businessmen.
They knew each other. And for a variety of different reasons within the camp, and again, this shows you the diversity of the camps, and also these images of black and white in the camps are not very useful.
They ruled the camp.
I mean, they basically had all the important jobs in the camp.
Including jobs like beating other Jews and persecuting other Jews and persecuting other peoples, which they did.
And this Polish guy who I mentioned to you, who wrote this memoir, hated them because of what they were doing to the Poles, right?
And he's incensed because aren't these supposed to be the intermention?
He says. And look what they're doing.
They're treating us, you know, like dirt.
And they do. They treat them like dirt.
So, you know, in this kind of work on Maidonic, there's certainly parts of it that, you know, were inspiring.
You know, people helping each other, people trying to feed each other, people giving warmth to each other.
You know there's some very heroic Polish women who end up having a radio show
called Radio Majdanek which they put on every night in the women's camp which is
you know to raise people's spirits and they you know sing songs and do all this
kind of stuff you know to to try to keep themselves from you know the horrors that
they're experiencing around them.
And so you do see that, and you do see, you know, human beings acting in support of each other.
But, you know, I mean, Primo Levi is one of my favorite writers about the Holocaust and about the camps.
And, you know, I don't think Primo Levi saw anything else.
I mean, he had pals who he helped and who helped him.
But he describes this kind of terrible, inhuman environment which no one can escape, really.
No one can escape. He ends up committing suicide, too, I think, because of his sense of—we don't know exactly why, but probably because of his sense of what happened in the camp.
I mean, later he goes back to Italy, becomes a writer, and that sort of thing.
So, I don't, especially in the concentration camps, it's really hard to find places like Vicko Frankl where you can say, you know, I am...
Moved in a positive way by what happened.
There were cases, there's no question.
People hung together, they tried to help each other, but they were totally caught in this web of genocide.
See, so there are stories, but the thing is, I have this sense, maybe it's a hope, that within most, if not every human heart, there's a kind of flame of compassion and kindness and love that waits, that longs to connect with others, that ultimately en masse overpowers everything else.
If you just look at the story of human history, The resistance to violence and mass murder and genocide feels like a force that's there.
And it feels like a force that's more powerful than whatever the dark Momentum that leads to genocide is.
It feels like that's more powerful.
It's just quiet. It's hard to tell the story of that little flame that burns within all of our hearts.
That longing to connect to other human beings.
And there's something also about human nature and us as storytellers that we're not very good at telling the stories of that little flame.
We're much better at telling the stories of atrocities.
No, you know, I think maybe I fundamentally disagree with you.
I think maybe I fundamentally...
I don't disagree that there is that flame.
I just think it's just too easily doused.
And I think it too easily goes out in a lot of people.
And I mean, like I say, I come away from this work, a pessimist.
You know, there is this work by a Harvard psychologist, now I'm forgetting it.
Steven Pinker. Yes, yes.
Steven Pinker. That shows over time, you know, and, you know, initially I was quite skeptical of the work, but in the end I thought he was quite convincing.
That over time, the incidence of homicide goes down.
The incidence of rape goes down.
The incidence of genocide, except for the big blip in the middle of the 20th century, goes down.
Not markedly, but it goes down generally.
That norms, international norms are changing how we think about this and stuff like that.
I thought he was pretty convincing about that.
But think about, you know, we're modern people.
I mean, we've advanced so fast in so many different areas.
I mean, we should have eliminated this a long time ago.
A long time ago.
You know, how is it?
That, you know, we're still facing this business of genocide in Myanmar, in Xinjiang, in, you know, Tigray, in Ethiopia, you know, the potentials of genocide there.
And all over the world, you know, we still have this thing that we cannot handle, that we can't deal with.
And, you know, again, you know, electric cars and planes that fly from here to, you Think about the differences between 250 years ago or 300 years ago and today, but the differences in genocide are not all that great.
I mean, the incidence has gone down.
I think Pinker has demonstrated.
I mean, there are problems with his methodology, but on the whole, I'm with him on that book.
I thought in the end it was quite well done.
So... You know, I have to say I'm not an optimist about what this human flame can do.
And, you know, someone once said to me, when I posed a similar kind of question to a seminar, a friend of mine at Berkeley once said, remember original sin, Norman?
Well, I don't, you know, that's very Catholic and I don't really think in terms of original sin.
But in some ways, you know, her point is we carry this with us.
You know, we carry with us a really potentially nasty mean streak that can do harm to other people.
But we carry the capacity to love, too.
Yes, we do. Yes, we do.
That's part of the deal.
You have a bias in that you have studied some of the darker aspects of human nature and human history.
So it is difficult from the trenches.
From the muck to see a possible sort of way out through love.
But it's not obvious that that's not the case.
You mentioned electric cars and rockets and airplanes.
To me, the more powerful thing It's Wikipedia, the internet.
Only 50% of the world currently has access to the internet, but that's growing in information and knowledge and wisdom, especially among women in the world.
As that grows, I think it becomes a lot more difficult if love wins.
It becomes a lot more difficult for somebody like Hitler to take power, for genocide to occur, because people think.
And the masses, I think, the people have power when they're able to think.
When they can see the full kind of...
First of all, when they can study your work.
They can know about the fact that genocide happens, how it occurs, how the promises of great charismatic leaders lead to great destructive mass genocide.
And just even studying the fact that the Holocaust happened for a large number of people is a powerful preventer of future genocide.
One of the lessons of history is just knowing that this can happen, learning how it happens, that normal human beings, Leaders that give big promises can also become evil and destructive.
Knowing that that can happen is a powerful preventer of that.
And then you kind of wake up from this haze of believing everything you hear and you learn to just, in your small local way, To put more love out there in the world.
To push back, it's not so obvious to me that in the end, I think in the end, love wins.
That's my intuition. I had to put money on it.
I have a sense that this genocide thing is more and more going to be an artifact of the past.
Well, I certainly hope you're right.
I mean, I certainly hope you're right.
And you know, it could be you are.
We don't know. But the evidence is different.
The evidence is different.
And, you know, the capacity of human beings to do evil to other human beings is repeatedly demonstrated.
You know, whether it's in massacres in Mexico or, you know, ISIS and the Yazidi Kurds or...
You know, you can just go on and on.
Syria, I mean, look what...
I mean, Syria used to be a country, you know, and now it's been a mass grave and people then have left in the millions, you know, for other places.
And, you know, I'm not saying, you know, I'm not saying, I mean, the Turks have done nice things for the Syrians and the Germans welcomed in a million or so and actually reasonably absorbed them.
I mean, I'm not saying bad things only happen in the world.
They're good and bad things that happen.
You're absolutely right. But I don't think we're on the path to eliminating these bad things, really bad things from happening.
I just don't think we are.
And I don't think there's any...
I don't think the facts demonstrate it.
I mean, I hope. I hope you're right.
But I think otherwise it's just an article of faith.
Well... You know, which is perfectly fine.
It's better to have that article of faith than to have an article of faith which says, you know, things should get bad or things like that.
Well, it's not just fine.
It's the only way if you want to build a better future.
So, optimism is a prerequisite for engineering a better future.
So, like, okay, so a historian has to see clearly into the past.
An engineer...
Has to imagine a future that's different from the past, that's better than the past.
Because without that, they're not going to be able to build a better future.
So there's a kind of saying, like, you have to consider the facts.
Well, at every single moment in history, if you allow yourself to be...
Too grounded by the facts of the past, you're not going to create the future.
So that's kind of the tension that we're living with.
To have a chance, we have to imagine that a better future is possible.
But one of the ways to do that is to study history.
Which engineers don't do enough of.
They do not. Which is a real problem.
It's a real problem.
Well, basically, a lot of disciplines in science and so on don't do enough of.
Right. Can you tell the story of China from 1958 to 1962, what was called the Great Leap Forward, orchestrated by Chairman Mao Zedong that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, making it arguably the largest famine in human history?
Yes. I mean, it was a terrible set of events that led to the death.
People will dispute the numbers.
15 million, 17 million, 14 million, 20 million people died.
Many people say 30, 40, 50 million.
Some people will go that high too.
That's right. That's right.
Essentially, Mao and the Communist Party leadership, but it was mostly Mao's doing, decided he wanted to move the country into communism.
And part of the idea of that is It was rivalry with the Soviet Union.
Mao was a good Stalinist, or at least felt like Stalin was the right kind of communist leader to have, and he didn't like Khrushchev at all, and he didn't like what he thought were Khrushchev's reforms, and also Khrushchev's pretensions to moving the Soviet Union into communism.
Khrushchev started talking about giving more power to the party, less power to the state.
If you have more power to the party versus the state, then you're moving into communism quicker.
What Mao decided to do was to engage in this vast program of building what were called people's communes.
And these communes, you know, were enormous conglomerations of essentially collective farms, you know, and what would happen on those communes is there would be, you know, there would be places for people to eat and there would be places for the kids to be raised in, you know, essentially kind of separate homes and they would be schooled.
Everybody would turn over their metal, which actually turned out to be a terribly negative phenomenon, their metal pots and pans to be melted to then make steel.
These big communes would all have little steel plants, and they would build steel, and the whole countryside would be transformed.
Well, like many of these sort of true megalomaniac projects, Like some of Stalin's projects, too.
And this particular project, then, the people had no choice.
They were forced to do this.
It was incredibly dysfunctional for Chinese agriculture.
And ended up, you know, creating, as you mentioned, a terrible famine that everybody understood was a famine as a result of this.
I mean, there were also some problems of nature at the same time and some flooding and bad weather and that sort of thing.
But it was really a man-made famine.
And Mao said at one point, you know, who cares if millions die?
It just doesn't matter.
We've got millions more left.
I mean, he would periodically say things like this that showed that like Stalin, he had a total indifference to the fact that people were dying in large numbers.
It led again to cannibalism.
And to terrible wastage all over the country and millions of people died and there was just no stopping it.
You know, there were people in the party who began to kind of edge towards telling Mao this wasn't a great idea, you know, and that he should back off, but he wouldn't back off.
And the result was, you know, catastrophe in the countryside and all these people dying.
And then they, you know, compounding the problem was the political elite, which then, you know, if peasants would object or if certain people would say no, they'd beat the hell out of them.
You know, they would beat people, you know, who didn't do what they wanted them to do.
So it was really, really a horrific set of events on the Chinese countryside.
I mean, you know, and people wrote about it.
I mean, we learned about it.
There were people who were keeping track of what was going on and eventually wrote books about it.
So, you know, so we have, I mean, we have pretty good documentation,
not so much on the numbers.
Numbers are always a difficult problem.
I'm facing this problem, by the way, this is a little bit separate, with the Holodomor, where Ukrainians are now claiming 11.5 million people died in Holodomor.
And most people assume it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million, 4.5 million maybe.
So you have wildly different numbers.
And we have different kinds of numbers, as you mentioned, too, with the Great Leap Forward.
So it was a huge catastrophe for China, and now only backed off when he had to, and then revived a little bit with the Red Guards movement later on, when he was upset that the bureaucracy was resisting him a little bit when it came to the Great Leap.
But he had to back off.
It was such a terrible catastrophe.
So one of the things about numbers is that you usually talk about deaths, but with the famine, with starvation, the thing I often think about that's impossible to put into numbers is the number of people and the degree to which they were suffering.
You know, the number of days spent in suffering.
Oh yeah. And so, I mean, death is Death is just one of the consequences of suffering.
To me, it feels like one, two, three months and then years of not having anything to eat is worse.
Those aren't put into numbers often.
That's right. And the effect on people long term, you know, in terms of their mental health, in terms of their physical health, their ability to work, all those kinds of things, you know.
I mean, Ukrainians are working on, there are people working on this subject now, you know, the long term effect of...
Of the hunger famine on them.
And I'm sure there's a similar kind of long-term effect on Chinese peasantry of what happened.
You know, I mean, you're destroying...
Multi-generational. Yes, multi-generational.
That's right. That's right.
And, you know, it's a really...
You're absolutely right. This is a terrible, terrible way to die.
And it lasts a long time.
And sometimes you don't die.
You survive. But, you know, in the kind of shape where you can't do anything.
I mean, you can't function.
Your brain's been injured, you know.
No, it's a really...
These famines are really horrible.
You're right. So when you talk about genocide, it's often talking about murder.
Where do you place North Korea in this discussion?
We kind of mentioned it.
So in the, what is it, the arduous march of the 1990s, where it was mass starvation.
Many people describe mass starvation going on now in North Korea.
When you think about genocide, when you think about Atrocities going on in the world today, where do you place North Korea?
So, take a step back.
There were all these courts that were set up for Bosnia and for Wanda and for other genocides in the 1990s.
And then the decision was made by the international community, UN basically, to set up the International Criminal Court, which would then try genocide in the more modern period, the more contemporary period.
And the ICC lists three crimes, basically.
You know, the genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
And subsumed to crimes against humanity are a lot of the kinds of things you're talking about with North Korea.
I mean, it's torture, it's artificial, sometimes artificial famine or famine that is not Not necessary, right?
Not necessary to have it.
And there are other kinds of, you know, mass rape and stuff like that.
There are other kinds of things that fit into the crimes against humanity.
And that's sort of where I think about North Korea.
I mean, some people, there's a disagreement among scholars and jurists about this.
Some people think of genocide as the crime of crimes, the worst of the three that I just mentioned.
But some think of them as co-equal.
And the ICC is The International Criminal Court is dealing with them more or less as co-equal, even though we tend to think of genocide as the worst.
So, I mean, what I'm trying to say is that, you know, I don't want to split hairs.
I think it's sort of morally and ethically unseemly, you know, the split hairs about what is genocide and what is a crime against humanity.
You know, this is for lawyers, not for historians.
Terminology-wise. Yeah, yeah.
You know, you don't want to get into that.
Because it, I mean, it happened with Darfur a little bit, where the Bush administration had declared that Darfur was a genocide.
And the UN said, no, no, it's, you know, it wasn't genocide.
It was a crime against humanity.
And that, you know, that confused things versus clarified them.
I mean, we damn well knew what was happening.
People were being killed and being attacked.
And, you And so, you know, on the one hand, I think the whole concept and the way of thinking about history using genocide as an important part of human history is crucial.
On the other hand, I don't like to, you know, get involved in the hair splitting, what's genocide and what's not.
So that, you know, North Korea, I tend to think of, like I said, as committing crimes against humanity
and, you know, forcibly incarcerating people, torturing them, that kind of thing.
You know, routinely incarcerating, depriving them of certain kinds of human rights can be considered
a crime against humanity, but I don't think of it in the same way I think about genocide,
which is an attack on a group of people. Let me just leave it at that.
What in this, if we think about, if it's okay, can we loosely use the term genocide here?
Just let's not play games with terminology.
Just bad crimes against humanity.
Of particular interest are the ones that are going on today still.
Because it raises the question to us, what do people outside of this, what role do they have to play?
So what role does the United States Or what role do I, as a human being who has food today, who has shelter, who has a comfortable life, what role do I have when I think about North Korea, when I think about Syria, when I think about maybe the Uyghur population in China?
Well, I mean, the role is the same role I have.
Which is to teach and to learn and to get the message out that this is happening because the more people who understand it, the more likely it is that the United States government will try to do something about it.
You know, within the context of who we are and where we live, right?
And so, you know, I write books, you do shows, you know?
Or maybe you write books too, I don't know.
No, I do not write books, but I tweet.
You tweet. Okay, that's good too.
Ineloquently. But that's not the, I guess that's not the, yes, so certainly this is true.
And in terms of a voice, in terms of words, in terms of books, you are, I would say, a rare example of somebody that has powerful reach with words.
But I was also referring to actions.
The United States government, What are the options here?
So war has costs.
And war seems to be, as you have described, sort of potentially increase the atrocity, not decrease it.
If there's anything that challenges my hope for the future is the fact that sometimes we're not powerless to help, but very close to powerless to help.
Because trying to help can often lead to, in the near term, more negative effects than positive effects.
That's exactly right. I mean, the unintended consequences of what we do can frequently be as bad, if not worse, than trying to relieve the difficulties that people are having.
So I think you're caught a little bit.
But it's also true, I think, that we can be more forceful.
I think we can be more forceful without necessarily war.
You know, there is this idea of the so-called responsibility to protect.
And this was an idea that came up after Kosovo, which was, what, 1999, when the Serbs looked like they were going to engage in a genocidal program in Kosovo.
And it was basically a program of ethnic cleansing, but it could have gone bad and gotten worse, not just driving people out, but beginning to kill them.
And the United States and Britain and others intervened.
And Russians were there too, as you probably recall.
And I think correctly, people have analyzed this as a case in which genocide was prevented or stopped.
In other words, the Serbs were stopped in their tracks.
I mean, some bad things did happen.
We bombed Belgrade and the Chinese embassy and things like that.
But, you know, it was stopped.
And following upon that, then there was a kind of international consensus that we needed to do something.
I mean, because of Rwanda, Bosnia, and the positive example of Kosovo, right?
That genocide did not happen in Kosovo.
I think that argument...
You know, has been substantiated.
Anyway, and this notion of the, or this, you know, doctrine or whatever of the responsibility to protect them was adopted by the UN in 2005, unanimously.
And what it says is, there's a hierarchy of measures that should be, well, let me take a step back.
It starts with the principle of That sovereignty of a country is not, you don't earn it just by being there and being your own country.
You have to earn it by protecting your people.
So this was all agreed with all the nations of the UN agreed, Chinese and then Russians too, that sovereignty is there because you protect your people against various depredations, right?
Including genocide, crimes against humanity, forced imprisonment, torture, and that sort of thing.
If you violate...
That justification for your sovereignty, that you're protecting your people, that you're not protecting them, the international community has the obligation to do something about it.
All right? Now, then they have a kind of hierarchy of things you can do, you know, starting with...
I mean, I'm not quoting exactly, but, you know, starting with kind of push and pull, you know, trying to convince people, don't do that, you know, to Myanmar.
Don't do that to the Rohingya people, right?
Then it goes down the list, you know, and you get to sanctions or threatening sanctions and then sanctions, you know, like we have against Russia.
But you go down the list, right?
you go down the list and eventually you get to military intervention at the
bottom which they say is the last thing you know and you you really don't want
to do that and not only do you not want to do it but it just as you said just as you pointed out it can have
unintended consequences right and we'll do everything we can
short uh you know of military intervention but You know, if necessary, that can be undertaken as well.
And so the responsibility to protect, I think, is, you know, it was not implementable.
One of the things it says in this last category, right, the military intervention, is that the intervention cannot create more damage than it relieves, right?
And so for Syria, we came to the conclusion that I mean, the international community, in some ways, said this in so many words.
Even though the Russians were there, obviously, we ended up being there and that sort of thing.
But the international community basically said, you know, there's no way you can intervene in Syria.
You know, there's just no way without causing more damage, you know, than you would relieve.
So, you know, in some senses, that's what the international community is saying about Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, too.
You know, I mean, you can't even imagine what hell would break loose if there were some kind of military.
You know, to threaten the Chinese with.
But you can go down that list with, you know, the military leadership of Myanmar, and you can go down that list with the Chinese Communist Party, and you can go down the list, you know, with others who are threatening, you know, with Ethiopia and what it's doing in Tigray.
And, you know, you can go down that list and start pushing.
I think what happened, There was more of a willingness in the 90s and right at the turn of the century to do these kinds of things.
And then when Trump got elected, he basically said, America first and out of the world, we're not going to do any of this kind of stuff.
And now Biden has the problem of trying to rebuild consensus on how you deal with these kinds of things.
I think it's not impossible.
I mean, here I tend to be maybe more of an optimist than you.
I think it's not impossible that the international community can muster some internal fortitude and push...
Harder, short of war, you know, to get the Chinese and to get the, again, Myanmar and to get others to kind of back off of violations of people's rights the way they are routinely doing it.
So that's in the space of geopolitics, that's the space of politicians and UN and so on.
The interesting thing about China, and this is a difficult topic, but...
There's so many financial interests that not many voices with power and with money speak up, speak out against China.
Because it's a very interesting effect because It costs a lot for an individual to speak up because you're going to suffer.
I mean, China just cuts off the market.
Like if you have a product, if you have a company and you say something negative, China just says, okay, well then they knock you out of the market.
And so any person that speaks up They get shut down immediately, financially.
It's a huge cost, sometimes millions or billions of dollars.
And so what happens is everybody of consequences, sort of financially, everybody with a giant platform is extremely hesitant to speak out.
It's a very, it's a different kind of hesitation that's financial in nature.
I don't know if that was always the case.
It seems like in history, people were quiet because of fear, because of threat of violence.
Here, there's almost like a self-interested preservation of financial wealth.
And I don't know what to do with that.
I mean, I don't know if you can say something there, like genocide going on because people are financially self-interested.
No, I think the analysis is correct.
But it's not only corporations, but it's the American government that represents the American people that also feels compelled not to challenge the Chinese on human rights issues.
But the interesting thing is, it's not just...
I know a lot of people from China, and first of all, amazing human beings and a lot of brilliant people in China, they also don't want to speak out.
And not because they're sort of, quote unquote, silenced, but more because they're going to also lose financially.
They have a lot of businesses in China.
They're running...
In fact, the Chinese government and the country has a very interesting structure because it has a lot of elements that enable capitalism within a certain framework.
So you have a lot of very successful companies and they operate successfully.
And then the leaders of those companies, many of whom have...
Either be on this podcast, or want to be on this podcast, they really don't want to say anything negative about the government.
And the nature of the fear, I sense, is not the kind of fear you would have in Nazi Germany.
It's a very kind of, it's a mellow, like, why would I speak out when it has a negative effect on my company, on my family, in terms of finance, strictly financially?
And that's difficult.
That's a different problem to solve.
That feels solvable.
It feels like it's a money problem.
If you can control the flow of money, Where the government has less power to control the flow of money.
It feels like that's solvable.
And that's where capitalism is good.
That's where a free market is good.
That's where a lot of people in the cryptocurrency space, I don't know if you follow them, they kind of say, okay, take the monetary system, the power to control money away from governments.
Allow technology to help you with that.
That's a hopeful message there.
In fact, a lot of people argue that Bitcoin and these cryptocurrencies can help deal with some of these authoritarian regimes that lead to violations of basic human rights.
If you can give the power to control the money to the people, you can take that away from governments.
That's another source of hope.
Where technology might be able to do something good.
That's something different about the 21st century than the 20th, is there's technology in the hands of billions of people.
I mean, I have to say, I think you're naive when it comes to technology.
I mean, I'm not someone who understands technology, so it's wrong of me to argue with you, because I don't really spend much time with it.
I don't really... I don't like it very much, and I'm neither a fan nor a connoisseur, so I just don't really know.
But what human history has shown, basically, and that's a big statement.
I don't want to pretend I can tell you what human history has shown, but technology Adam Baum.
I mean, that's the perfect example of technology.
You know, what happens when you discover new things?
It's a perfect example.
What's going on with Facebook now?
It's an absolutely perfect example.
You know, I once went to a lecture by Eric Schmidt about the future, you know, and about all the things that were going to happen and all these wonderful things.
Like, you know, you wouldn't have to translate yourself anything.
You wouldn't have to... You wouldn't have to read a book.
You wouldn't have to drive a car.
You don't have to do this. You don't have to do that.
What kind of life is that?
So my view of technology is it's subsumed.
You know, to the political, social, and moral needs of our day and should be subsumed to that day.
It's not going to solve anything by itself.
It's going to be you and me that solve things, if they're solved.
There are political systems that solve things.
Technology is neutral on one level.
It is simply a human...
I mean, they're talking now about how artificial intelligence, you know, is going to do this and is going to do that.
I'm not so sure there's anything necessarily positive or negative about it, except it does obviously make work easier and things like that.
I mean, you know, I like email and I like, you know, word processing and that sort of stuff.
All that stuff is great. But actually, solving human problems Relations in and of itself, or international relations, or conflict among human beings.
I mean, I see technology as, you know, causing as many problems as it solves, and maybe even more.
Maybe. Maybe.
The question is, like you said, technology is neutral.
I agree with this.
Technology is a toolkit, is a tool set that enables humans to have wider reach and more power.
The printing press.
The rare reason I can read your books is, I would argue, so first of all, the printing press and then the internet.
Wikipedia, I think, has immeasurable effect on humanity.
Technology is a double-edged sword.
It allows bad people to do bad things and good people to do good things.
It ultimately boils down to the people and whether you believe The capacity for good outweighs the capacity of bad.
And so you said that I'm naive.
It is true. I'm naively optimistic.
I would say you're naively cynical about technology.
But here we have one overdressed naive optimist and one brilliant but nevertheless technologically naive cynic.
And we don't know. We don't know whether the capacity for good or the capacity...
For evil wins out in the end.
And like we've been talking about, the trajectory of human history seems to pivot on a lot of random seeming moments.
So we don't know.
But as a builder of technology, I remain optimistic.
And I should say kind of, when you are optimistic, it is often easy to sound naive.
And I'm not sure what to make of that small effect.
Not to linger on specific words, but I've noticed that people who kind of are cynical about the world somehow sound more intelligent.
No, no. The issue is how can you be realistic about the world?
It's not optimistic or pessimistic.
It's not cynical. The question is, how can you be a realist?
Yes, that's a good question.
Realism depends on...
A combination of knowledge and wisdom and good instincts and that sort of thing.
And that's what we strive for, you know, is a kind of realism.
We both strive for that kind of realism.
But, I mean, here's an example I would give you.
Again, we've got this environmental issue, right?
And technology has created it.
It's created it.
I mean, the growth of technology.
I mean, we all like to be heated well in our homes and we want to have cars that run quickly and fast on gas.
I mean, we're all consumers and we all profit from this.
Not everybody profits from it, but we want to be comfortable.
And technology has provided us with a comfortable life.
And it's also provided us You know, with this incredible danger, which it's not solving, at least not now.
Okay. And it may solve, but it may—it's only—my view is, you know what's going to happen?
A horrible catastrophe.
It's the only way—it's the only way we will direct ourselves to actually trying to do something about it.
We don't have the wisdom— And the realism and the sense of purpose.
You know, what's her name?
Greta goes blah, blah, blah, something like that in her last talk about the environmental summit in Glasgow or whatever it was.
And, you know, we just don't have it.
Unless we're hit upside the head really, really hard.
And then maybe, you know, the business with nuclear weapons.
You know, I think somehow we got hit upside the head and we realized, oh man, you know, this could really do it to the whole world.
And so we started, you know, serious arms control stuff.
Mm-hmm. And, you know, but up to that point, you know, I mean, there was just something about, you know, Khrushchev's big bomb, his big hydrogen bomb, which he exploded in the times, I think it was the anniversary or something like that, you know, I mean, just think what we could have done to each other.
Well, that's the double-edged sword of technology.
I agree it's a double-edged sword.
There's a lot of people that argue that nuclear weapons is the reason we haven't had a World War III. So nuclear weapons, the mutually assured destruction, leads to a kind of like we've reached a certain level of destructiveness with our weapons where we were able to catch ourselves, not to create Like you said, hit really hard.
This is the interesting question about kind of hard, hard and really hard upside the head.
With the environment, I would argue, see we can't know the future, but I would argue as the pressure builds, there's already Because of this created urgency, the amount of innovation that I've seen that sometimes is unrelated to the environment, but kind of sparked by this urgency, has been humongous, including the work of Elon Musk, including the work of just, you could argue that the SpaceX and the new exploration of space is kind of sparked by this environmental,
like, urgency. I mean, connected to Tesla and everything they're doing with electric vehicles and so on.
There's a huge amount of innovation in the space that's happening.
I could see the effect of climate change resulting in more positive innovation that improves the quality of life across the world.
Than the actual catastrophic events that we're describing, which we cannot even currently predict.
It's not like there's going to be more extreme weather events.
What does that even mean?
There's going to be a gradual increase of the level of water.
What does that even mean in terms of catastrophic events?
It's going to be pretty gradual.
There's going to be migration of people.
We can't predict what that means.
And in response to that, there's going to be a huge amount of...
Innovators born today that have dreams and they will build devices and inventions from space to vehicles to in the software world that enable education across the world.
All those kinds of things that will on mass, on average, increase the quality of life on average across the world.
It's not at all obvious that the technologies that are creating climate change, global warming, are going to have a negative, net negative effect.
We don't know this. And I'm kind of inspired by the dreamers, the engineers, the innovators, and the entrepreneurs that build That they wake up in the morning, see problems in the world, and dream that they're going to be the ones who solve those problems.
That's the human spirit.
It is true that we need those deadlines.
We need to be freaking out about stuff.
And the reason we need to study history and the worst of human history is then we can say, oh shit, this too can happen.
It's a slap in the face.
It's a wake up call that if you get complacent, if you get lazy, this is going to happen.
And that, listen, there's a lot of really intelligent people, ambitious people, dreamers, skilled dreamers that build solutions that make sure this stuff doesn't happen anymore.
So I think there's reason to be optimistic about technology, not in a naive way.
There's an argument to be made in a realistic way.
That like with technology, we can build a better future.
And then Facebook is a lesson in the way Facebook has been done, is a lesson how not to do it.
And that lesson serves as a guide of how to do it better, how to do it right, how to do it in a positive way.
And the same every single sort of failed technology contains within it the lessons of how to do it better.
And I mean, without that, What's the source of hope for human civilization?
I mean, by way of question, you have truly studied some of the darkest moments in human history.
Put on your optimist hat.
That one. Yes.
The glimmers of it.
Yes. What is your source of hope for the future of human civilization?
Well, I think it resides in some of what you've been saying, which is in the persistence of this civilization over time, despite the incredible setbacks.
Two enormous world wars, the nuclear standoff, the horrible things we're experiencing now with climate change and migration and stuff like that.
That despite these things, you know, we are persisting and we are continuing.
And like you say, we're continuing to invent and we're continuing to try to solve these problems.
And, you know, we're continuing to love as well as hate.
And, you know, that, you know, I'm basically, I mean, I have children and grandchildren and I think they're going to be just fine.
I'm not a doom and gloomer.
I'm not a Cassandra saying the world is coming to an end.
I'm not like that at all.
I think that things will persist.
Another, by the way, source of tremendous optimism on my part are the kids I teach.
You know, I teach some unbelievably fantastic young people, you know, who are sort of like you say, they're dreamers, and they're problem solvers, and they're, I mean, they have enormously humane values and ways of thinking about the world, and they want to do good.
You know, if you take the kind of, I mean, this has probably been true all the way along, but I mean, the percentage of do-gooders You know, it's really enormously large.
Now, whether they end up working for some kind of shark law firm or something, you know, or, you know, that kind of thing, or whether they end up human rights lawyers, as they all want to be, right?
You know, is a different kind of question.
But certainly...
You know, these young people are talented, they're smart, they have wonderful values, they're energetic, they work hard, you know, they're focused.
And of course, it's not just Stanford.
I mean, it's all over the country.
You know, you have young people who really want to contribute.
And they want to contribute.
I mean, it's true some of them end up, you know, Yeah.
Yeah.
and family and that sort of thing you know the financial well-being will be more important to
them but right now you know you catch this young generation and they're fantastic.
They're fantastic. And they're not what they're often portrayed as being, kind of silly and naive and knee-jerk leftists.
They're not at all like that.
They're really fine young people.
So that's a source of optimism to me, too.
What advice would you give to those young people today, maybe in high school, in college, at Stanford, maybe to your grandchildren about how to have a career they can be proud of, have a life they can be proud of?
Pursue careers that are in the public interest, you know, in one fashion or another, and not just in their interests.
And that would be, I mean, it's not bad to pursue a career in your own interests.
I mean, as long as you're, it's something that's useful and positive for the, you know, for their families or whatever.
But yeah, so I mean, I try to advise kids to find themselves somehow.
You know, find it... Who they want to be and what they want to be and try to pursue it.
And the NGO world is growing, as you know, and a lot of young people are kind of throwing themselves into it and, you know, Human Rights Watch and that kind of stuff.
And, you know, they want to do that kind of work.
And it's very admirable.
I tend to think that even if you're not working in human rights, there's a certain way in which if you live with integrity, the I believe that all of us, or many of us, have a bunch of moments in our lives when we're posed with a decision.
It's a quiet one.
Maybe it'll never be written about or talked about.
Well, you get to choose.
There's a choice that is difficult to make.
It might require sacrifice, but it's the choice that the best version of that person would make.
That's the best way I can sort of say how to act with integrity.
It's the very thing that would resist the early days in Nazi Germany.
It sounds dramatic to say, but those little actions.
And I feel like the best you can do to avoid genocide on scale is for all of us to live in that way.
Within those moments, unrelated potentially to human rights, to anything else, is to take those actions.
I believe that all of us know the right thing to do.
I know, that's right. I think that's right.
You put it very well.
I couldn't have done it better myself.
No, no, I agree.
I agree completely that there are, you know, to live with truth, which is what Václav Havel used to say, this famous Czech dissident, you know, talked about living in truth, but also to live with integrity.
Yeah. And that's really super important.
Well, let me ask you about love.
What role does love play in this whole thing, in the human condition?
In all the study of genocide, it does seem that hardship in moments brings out the best in human nature, and the best in human nature is expressed through love.
Well, as I already mentioned to you, I think hardship is not a good thing.
You know, it's not the best thing for love.
I mean, it's better to not have to suffer and not have to...
Yes, I think it is.
I think it's, you know...
As I mentioned to you, studying concentration camps, this is not a place for love.
It happens. It happens.
But it's not really a place for love.
It's a place for rape. It's a place for torture.
It's a place for killing.
And it's a place for... Inhuman action, one to another.
And also, as I said, among those who are suffering.
Not just between those who are...
And then there are whole gradations.
The same thing in the gulag.
There are gradations all the way from the criminal prisoners who beat the hell out of the political prisoners who then have others below them who they beat the hell out of.
So everybody's beating the hell out of everybody else.
So I would not idealize in any way Suffering as a, you know, a source of beauty and love.
I wouldn't do that at all. I think it's a whole lot better for people to be relatively prosperous.
I'm not saying super prosperous, but to be able to feed themselves and to be able to feed their families and house their families and take care of themselves, you know, to foster themselves.
Loving relations between people.
I think it's no accident that poor families have much You know, worse records when it comes to crime and things like that, you know, and also to wife beating and to child abuse and stuff like that.
I mean, you don't want to be poor and indigent and not have a roof over your head, be homeless.
I mean, it doesn't mean, again, you know, homeless people are mean people.
That's not what I'm trying to say.
What I'm trying to say is that, you know, What we want to try to foster in this country and around the world.
And one of the reasons, you know, I mean, I'm very critical of the Chinese in a lot of ways, but I mean, we have to remember they pulled that country out of horrible poverty, right?
And, I mean, there's still poor people in the countryside.
side there's still problems, you know, with want and need among the Chinese people.
But you know, there were millions and millions of Chinese who were living at the bare minimum
of life, which is no way to live, you know, and no way again to foster love and compassion
and getting along.
So I want to be clear, I don't speak for history, right?
I'm giving you, I mean, there used to be historians, you know, in the 19th century who really thought
they were speaking for history, you know.
I don't think that way at all.
I mean, I understand I'm a subjective human being with my own points of view and my own opinions.
I'm trying to remember in this conversation that despite the fact that you're brilliant and you've written brilliant books, that you're just human.
Well, I am. With an opinion. That's it.
Yeah. No, no, that's absolutely true.
And I tell my students that, too.
I mean, I make sure they understand this is not history speaking.
You know, this is me, Norman, and this is what it's about.
I mean, I've spent a long time studying history and have enjoyed it.
But, you know, I'm an individual with my points of view.
And one of them is, that I've developed over time, is that, you know, human want is a real tragedy for people.
And it hurts people.
And it also causes upheavals and difficulties and stuff like that.
So I feel for people, you know, I feel for people in Syria, I feel for people in Ethiopia, in Tigray, you know, when they don't have enough to eat.
And, you know, what that does, I mean, it doesn't mean they don't love each other, right?
It doesn't mean they don't love their kids.
But it does mean that it's harder to do that.
I'm not so sure.
It's obvious to me that it's harder.
There is suffering. There is suffering.
But the numbers, we've been talking about deaths, been talking about suffering, but the numbers we're not quantifying.
The history that you haven't perhaps been looking at is all the times that people have fallen in love deeply with friends.
With romantic love, the positive emotion that people have felt.
And I'm not so sure that amidst the suffering, those moments of beauty and love can be discovered.
And if we look at the numbers, I'm not so sure the story is obvious.
Again, I suppose you may disagree with Viktor Frankl.
I may too, maybe depending on the day.
I mean, he says that if there's meaning to this life at all, there's meaning to the suffering too, because suffering is part of life.
There's something about accepting The ups and downs, even when the downs go very low.
And within all of it, finding a source of meaning.
I mean, he's arguing from the perspective of psychology, but just this life is an incredible gift almost no matter what.
And I'm not...
It's easy to look at suffering and think if we just escape the suffering, it will all be better.
But we all die.
There's beauty in the whole thing.
And it is true that it's just, from all the stories I've read, especially in famine and starvation, it's just horrible.
It is horrible suffering.
But I also just want to say that There's love amidst it, and we can't forget that.
No, no, I don't forget it.
I don't forget it. And I think it's from the stories.
Now, I don't want to make that compromise or that trade, but the intensity of friendship in war, the intensity of love in war is very high.
So I'm not sure what to make of these calculations, but if you look at the stories, some of the people I'm closest with, and I've never experienced anything even close to any of this, but some of the people I'm closest with is people I've gone through difficult times with.
There's something about that.
There's society or a group where things are easy.
The intensity of the connection between human beings is not as strong.
I don't know what to do with that calculus because I too agree with you.
I want to have as little suffering in the world as possible, but we have to remember about the love and the depth of human connection and find the right balance there.
No, there's something to what you're saying.
There's clearly something to what you're saying.
I was just thinking about the Soviet Union, you know, when I lived there, and people on the streets were so mean to one another, and they never smiled.
You grew up there? Yes.
No, but you were too young to me.
No, no, I remember.
Well, I came here when I was 13, yeah.
Okay, so anyway, I remember living there and just how hard people were on each other on the streets.
And when you got inside people's apartments, when they started to trust you, you know, the friendships were so intense and so wonderful.
Yes. So, in that sense, I mean, they did live a hard life, but there wasn't a food on the table, and there was a roof over their heads.
There's a certain line. There are lines.
You know, I don't think there's one line, but, you know, it's kind of a shading.
And the other story I was thinking of as you were talking was, it's not a story, it's a history book by a friend of mine who wrote about love in the camps We're good to go.
Which were not joyful places.
I mean, they were guarded sometimes by Germans even, but they're basically under the British control, and they were trying to get to Israel, trying to get to Palestine right after the war.
And how many pairs there were, how many people coupled up.
But remember, this is after being in the concentration camp.
It's not being in the concentration camp.
And it's also being free, you know, to more or less free, you know, to express their emotions and to be human beings after this horrible...
So I wonder whether there's, you know, as you say, some kind of calculus there where, you know, the level of suffering is such that it's just too much for humans to bear.
And, you know, which I would suggest.
I mean, I haven't studied this myself.
I'm just giving you my point of view, you know, my...
Off-the-cuff remarks here, but it was very inspiring to read about these couples who had met right in these camps and started to couple up, you know, and get married and try to find their way to Palestine, which was a difficult thing to do then.
When did you live in Russia and the Soviet Union?
What's your memory of that time?
Well, so a number of different times.
So I went there. I first went there in 69, 70.
Wow. A long time ago.
And then I lived in Leningrad mostly, but also in Moscow in 1975.
So it was detente time.
But it was also a time of political uncertainty and also...
Hardship, you know, for Russians themselves, standing in long lines.
I mean, you must remember this, for food and for getting anything was almost impossible.
It was a time when Jews were trying to get out.
In fact, I just talked to a friend of mine from those days who I helped get out and get to Boston,
and lovely people who managed to have a good life in the United States after they left.
But it wasn't an easy time.
It wasn't an easy time at all.
I remember people set fire to their doors and their daughter was persecuted in school
once they declared that they wanted to immigrate and that sort of thing.
So it was a very, it was a lot of antisemitism.
It's always a tough time.
Dissidents, you know, hung out with some dissidents and one guy was actually killed.
We think by the, nobody knows exactly by the KGB, but his art studio was, he had a separate studio in Leningrad, St.
Petersburg today. You know, just a small studio where he did his art and somebody set it on fire.
And we think it was KGB, but, you know, you never really know.
And he died in that fire.
So, you know, it was a tough time.
And, you know, you knew you were followed, you knew you were being reported on as a foreign scholar, as I was.
There was a formal exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, and, you know, they let me work in the archives, but then, you know, Ivanov got to work in the Right.
In the physics lab at Rochester or something like that.
So it was an exchange which sent historians and literary people and some social scientists to Russia, and they sent all scientists here to grab what they could from MIT and nice places.
Yeah. How is your Russian?
Do you have any knowledge of Russian language that has helped you to understand?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can read it fine.
And the speaking, you know, comes and goes, depending on whether I'm there or whether I've been there recently or if I spend some time there.
Because I really need, you know, I have Russian friends who speak just Russian.
So, you know, when I'm there, I then, you know, I can communicate pretty well.
I can't really write it, unfortunately.
I mean, I can, but it's not very good.
But I get along fine.
What's your fondest memory of the Soviet Union of Russia?
It's friends. Friends?
It's friends. Was it vodka involved or is it just vodka involved?
A little bit. You know, I'm not much of a drinker.
Yeah. So they'd just make fun of me and I'd make fun of myself.
That was easy enough. I don't really like heavy drinking.
I've done a lot of that.
Not a lot. I've done some of that, but I never really enjoyed it and would get sick and stuff.
But no, it's friends.
One friend I made...
In the dormitory.
It was a dormitory for foreigners, but also Siberians who had come to Leningrad to study.
And so I met a couple of guys, and one in particular from Omsk became a wonderful friend.
And we talked and talked and talked outside.
We would go walk outside because we both knew they were...
You know, people were listening and stuff, and he would say, well, this is, he was a historian, you know, and so we would talk history.
And he'd say, well, this was the case, wasn't it?
I said, no, I'm sorry, Sasha, it wasn't the case.
It was, you know, we think Stalin actually had a role in killing Kirov.
I mean, we're not sure, but, you know, he said, no.
I said, yeah. So we had these conversations and he was, I don't know if he would agree with me or not.
I mean, we're still friends. He's going to check in with you after this.
Maybe he'll listen to the blog or I'll send it to him or something.
He was a kind of naive Marxist-Leninist.
And he thought I was, you know, I was, you know, I had this capitalist ideology.
He'd say, what ideology do you have?
And I said, I don't have an ideology.
You know, I try to just put together kind of reason and facts and accurate stories and try to tell them in that way.
No, no, no, no, you must, you know, you're a bourgeois, you know, this or that.
I said, no, I'm really not.
And so we would have these talks and these kind of arguments and then, I mean, sure enough, you know, We corresponded for a while, and then he had to stop corresponding because he became a kind of local official in Omsk.
And he sort of migrated more and more to being a Democrat.
And he was then in the Democratic movement under Gorbachev and the Council of People's Deputies, which they set up, which was...
Elected as a Democrat from Omsk and had a political career through the Yeltsin period.
And once Putin came along, you know, it was over.
He didn't like Putin and, you know, and Putin didn't like the Yeltsin people, right, who tried to be, some of them tried to be Democrats.
And Sasha was one who really did.
He just published his memoirs in Russian, by the way, which are very good, I think.
I know the name of it. Commander Ofkiv Avlast.
That's what it's called.
It's hard to translate in English.
Commander Ofkiv Avlast.
I mean, I translate it in four points.
This is so beautiful.
Do you find that the translation is a problem, or no?
It's such a different language.
Yes, translation is very difficult. With the Russian language, I mean, it's the only language I know deeply, except English.
And it seems like so much is lost.
The pain, the poetry, the beauty of the people is...
And translators are to be treasured, and good ones to be treasured.
I mean, those who do the translations, you know, when you read, you know, things in translation, sometimes they're quite beautiful, you know, whether it's Russian or Polish or German or anything French.
Yeah, I'm actually traveling to Paris.
Talk to the famous translators, the Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and I'm just going to do several conversations with them about like, you could just sometimes just grab a single sentence and just talk about the translation of that sentence.
And also, as you said, I would love to be a fly on the wall with some of those friends that you had because the perspective on history Non-academic, sort of without, just as human beings, it's so different from the United States versus Russia.
When you talk about the way the World War II was perceived and all those kinds of things, it's...
It's fascinating. History also has in it opinion and perspective.
And so sometimes stripping that away is really difficult and then I guess that is your job and at its highest form that is what you do as a historian.
Well, Norman, I really appreciate your valuable time.
It's truly an honor to talk to you and thank you for Taking us through a trip through some of the worst parts of human history and talking about hope and love at the end.
So I really appreciate your time today.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Norman Neymark.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Stalin.
A single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
▲
Export Selection