Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org.
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Well, um, I should say something about my last podcast with Meg's Maker. As you might recall, Meg is a documentarian who had her first feature-length documentary accepted more or less everywhere, including Sundance and South to Southwest. And then she got attacked by identitarian grievance entrepreneurs and promptly defenestrated by Sundance and the other festivals. And this really was a case of picking absolutely the wrong target.
You just have to listen to Meg for about 10 minutes, and you realize she's pretty much the last person who should have been canceled for making the film she made. Anyway, she has a GoFundMe page to support her ongoing efforts to get the film Jihad Rehab, now known as The Unredacted, distributed. And when we recorded that episode, her GoFundMe had raised $3,000. But at the end of that episode, I asked you all to contribute.
If you could, and now Meg has raised over $600,000 in one week. So needless to say, her situation has completely changed, and it will be fascinating to see what happens next. So thank you all for supporting her. Beyond changing the material prospects for the film, your notes of encouragement, I know, have made a tremendous difference over there.
I mean, the outpouring of love and support was tremendous. And it was really, really gratifying to see. I love seeing a podcast guest supported in that way. So thanks again for showing up.
And on the topic of love and support, I can't say I received much for tweeting into the Kanye West, I guess now known as the artist, known as Ye, formerly known as Kanye, controversy with respect to his recent eruptions of anti-Semitism. I haven't focused much on anti-Semitism in the past. I think I've devoted exactly one podcast to it out of 300. I've noticed it on the extreme right and the extreme left, obviously.
Briefly, the way this breaks down is that on the extreme right, Jews are not considered white, and therefore, they fall within the scope of white nationalist racism, with the added spin of various conspiracy theories. But on the extreme left, Jews are considered extra white. They get something like double the white privilege points. So they fall within the scope of anti-white bigotry and activism.
So you move far enough left or right as a Jew, and you meet fairly stark expressions of hatred. So I've been aware of that, but it's not something that has been a big deal in my life, certainly, and has not been my focus. Kanye's statement on this one podcast, I believe it was the Drink Champs podcast, I believe they pulled down their version of the interview, but I think it's up on other channels. His remarks went on at such length, and they so assiduously connected all the traditional dots for the anti-Semitic worldview that it was fairly breathtaking.
It was really a Protocols of the Elders of Zion level confabulation about the Jewish control of everything. Unfortunately, there's enough truth in what he said, which is to say there are prominent Jews who have made a lot of money in recording business, and in Hollywood and the other sectors of the economy that he was winking about. It will seem all too plausible in many quarters to say that he's just calling balls and strikes as he sees them, right? This wasn't hatred, this is just the facts.
You have an extremely famous, popular, and influential artist truly exploding with anti-Semitism. Many people thought I was reacting to something he had tweeted that got him kicked off Twitter. No, that's not what I was reacting to. I was reacting to the interview, which was truly awful.
Awful as much for the fact that he received basically no pushback from the hosts. And, uh, at least in the original comment thread on YouTube, he received nothing but adulation from his fans. And when I tweeted about this, pointing out how despicable it was, what I got back was pretty amazing. You know, I have a fairly thick skin at this point.
I don't expect a lot from Twitter comments, but the torrents of hatred and cynicism I received out of Trumpistan were fairly amazing. Some of it was overtly anti-Semitic. Some of it was just expressions of hatred for what I'd said about Hunter Biden's laptop. I got some pain from the left as well.
People claiming that after all that I've said about Islam, I'm in no position to criticize someone for their bigotry. Obviously, this just voices frank confusion about the meaning of what I've said about Islam. Perhaps I should spell this out once again so it's fresh in everybody's mind because the degree of dangerous idiocy that swings on this fulcrum is hard to exaggerate. I've said some extremely critical things about Islam as a system of ideas.
I've said extremely critical things about Judaism as a system of ideas. In fact, I even made Judaism to some degree culpable for the Holocaust. That sounds like a neo-Nazi position if you don't understand what I'm saying. So I've said a lot about ideas that I think are terrible and divisive and producing unnecessary harm.
This is quite different from talking about people as people, especially for characteristics they can't change. If you listen to Kanye's statements about Jews, it's absolutely clear he is not talking about the religious ideas of Jews. He's not talking about Judaism. He's not talking about ideas at all.
He's talking about Jews much more as a race. And it's Jews as a race that are the targets of virtually all anti-Semitism. When I talk about Islam, I'm talking about the beliefs of people to the degree to which they believe them. Yes, occasionally I will talk about Muslims because I can't keep saying people who believe in Islam to whatever degree, but it's always clear in context what I'm actually talking about.
There's zero xenophobia implied by my criticism of Islam. And what's more, I've said that with respect to immigration, there are no people I would rather have given green cards than moderate Muslims. I said that in response to Trump's idiotic Muslim ban. So, you just have to follow me long enough to know what my attitude actually is toward Muslims as people.
And I've regularly pointed out there's nobody who suffers the consequences of the idiotic ideas contained within traditional Islam more than Muslims, more than Muslim women, and apostates, and aspiring intellectuals. Once again, if this is at all confusing, please recognize that criticizing Islam is like criticizing Marxism or Scientology. When I'm talking about skin color or country of origin or anything else, then the consequences of a specific set of ideas. And what I've criticized in Islam again and again and again really I will admit ad nauseum are the consequences of specific beliefs about jihadism and martyrdom and apostasy and blasphemy and none of that entails bigotry against people.
And yet I was inundated with moronic allegations of bigotry even by some well-known people in response to my criticism of Kanye's absolutely crystal clear anti-Semitism. Yes, Kanye's bipolar. I'm sure he suffers from that. Being bipolar doesn't make you anti-Semitic.
That particular problem doesn't come with ideological content. So this struck me as genuinely new. Having a star of Kanye's size express that degree of anti-Semitism and to have it be celebrated at the level that it was seems genuinely new to me. This is not Mel Gibson on the side of the highway raving at the cops while getting arrested for drunk driving.
So it seemed like a cultural moment worth addressing and clearly condemning. And I'm pretty surprised at the people who couldn't quite manage that. Anyway, from my troubles there I've got an extraordinary amount of hatred directed at me mostly from Trumpistan which provides further indication as if one were needed that there's a fair amount of anti-Semitism to be found there. I suspect this problem isn't going away anytime soon.
We'll see what happens if the orange menace runs for president again. And perhaps I'll say something more on this topic at some point. One thing to notice over at Waking Up we built a live audio feature which allowed me to do a Q&A live earlier this week. I think something like 14,000-15,000 of you showed up for that.
That was great. And I think we'll be building out that feature and using it more going forward. So if you follow me on Twitter you might occasionally see me say I'm on the app for the next hour. Ask me anything and hopefully we'll all find that useful.
Okay. Today I'm speaking with Timothy Snyder. Tim is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of many books among them On Tyranny, Black Earth, Bloodlands, and The Road to Unfreedom. His work has received many prizes and Tim has distinguished himself as a remarkably clear and urgent voice on the topic of fascist and quasi-fascist propaganda the way in which it seeks to erode democratic freedom globally and he's especially an expert on Ukraine and so I wanted to get his point of view on what's happening there in its ongoing war with Russia and its implications for nuclear risk and in particular I wanted him to address much of the commentary I've been seeing online from non-subject matter experts people like Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sachs the physicist Max Tegmark the economist Jeffrey Sachs and many people who've been calling with increasing urgency for a reset of our approach to supporting Ukraine.
They've been calling for de-escalation they have been to the eyes of many dignifying Putin's claims about the provocations of NATO and NATO expansion so I want to get a clear statement from Timothy about all this I have no illusions that this is the final word on the matter but it is as you'll hear a deeply informed word and it's one that echoes many of my far less informed misgivings about what I've been hearing largely on social media from again very prominent people who are speaking very much in the vein of what I call the new contrarianism you know everybody within that platform is now doing their own research and promulgating their resulting opinions however they can and the results on many topics is a cacophony of unqualified voices whether we're talking about COVID or climate change or the war in Ukraine this is just now the new norm to have anti-establishment voices create more and more noise and sometimes this is to the good I'm not saying it never makes sense to do your own research but there is something to be said for expertise now and again so I want to get an expert on Ukraine to come on the show to give us the lay of the land as he sees it and that's what I've done so now I bring you Timothy Snyder I am here with Timothy Snyder Tim thanks for joining me again really glad to be with you again so I've really been eager to talk to you first I should say that you've been on the podcast at least once before I know we spoke about your book on tyranny which you've recently updated in audio format to cover the war in Ukraine and I've listened to that audio and it's really fantastic so I recommend that people download that now you are a genuine subject matter expert on Ukraine and Russia unlike many people who are spending a lot of time online at the moment telling the world what we should all think about the war in Ukraine before we jump in can you summarize your engagement with this topic how have you come to know about Ukraine and Russia well first of all I want to thank you for remembering that I mean the things that I maybe understand about America I probably got my intuitions from other places I've been working on East European history my entire adult life my beginning more than 30 years ago I went to Kiev for the first time almost 30 years ago I've been speaking Ukrainian in Kiev in Ukraine for more than half my life working in Russian Ukrainian sources for more than half my life and I've been to the country regularly for the past quarter century I've written six books that are Ukrainian history or that bear on Ukrainian history the most well known of which is probably Bloodlands Europe and Hitler yeah and would I be right to assume that you currently know people who are fighting in this war or certainly experiencing its results firsthand in Ukraine yeah I mean I know I know hundreds of people in Ukraine and I mean just to give one little tiny example on the Monday before the war started I was doing a doctoral exam and the student passed he has a wonderful wonderful dissertation and the next day he signed up for the territorial defense everybody I know in Ukraine is involved in a war somehow a large number of men and women who I know are in the army or in the territorial defense and those who aren't are generally all doing something which is of course part of the reason part of the result part of the mystery as to why Ukrainians are winning this war is that people are so active in civil society looking to fill the gaps that the state can't fill that's a story which is kind of hard to write but it's a fundamental feature of Ukrainian society I really want to target a specific audience in our conversation I think we'll take a few passes over the terrain to actually get down to bedrock but here's what I most want to address and I think we I know you're going to have to cover a fair amount of history before we get there but what I most want to cover are the doubts and fears of very bright rational people who at this point think that US and EU support of Ukraine has gone too far and that we're running the risk of plunging into something like World War 3 quite unnecessarily and that we in some sense provoked Putin or at least we're culpable for our own failures of diplomacy and that NATO essentially and the United States has backed him into a corner and put him in a position where his behavior is now pretty rational and even defensible from some non-sinister angle and again you'll be familiar with much of this but if I look at my Twitter experience I'm seeing many smart well-connected people some of whom have very large platforms as I said none of whom are subject matter experts but they're not dummies and yet they're speaking as though Putin has some kind of reasonable as I said non-sinister claim upon the patience of the world at this point and that we should step back and get Ukrainians to step back and there has to be some kind of path to de-escalation here that isn't an abject capitulation to the threats of a tyrant and just to kind of round this out the cynical take here is that most Americans can't find Ukraine on a map and still can't and yet many are speaking about the Donbass as though the blood of Ukrainian mothers runs in their veins and that we've been propagandized to by a weird union of a neoliberal neoconservative order and all doubts about the wisdom of this project and the wisdom of going all in on Ukraine is that they're being silenced and this is all kind of an escalatory ratchet towards something awful the true awfulness being a proper exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and Russia so that's why I want us to defuse all of that and I know you have to get into some relevant history before we get there but that's why I want to put that flag on the rise and I want us to aim at it. Yeah, I mean, that's fine with me. I think you'll probably have to break it up into little pieces. What you're talking about is kind of, you know, you're giving a take on a bunch of takes which are pretty far away from any recognizable empirical reality having to do with Russia or Ukraine.
Or for that, for the U.S. I'll just say a little bit of the U.S. I mean, before we get into the other parts, the idea that the U.S. was expecting this scenario and is somehow behind it is not only wrong, but deeply colonial.
The U.S. expected that this war was going to be over in three days. That was the official American position and that was the basis for our actions at the beginning of the war. Very important to understand that the Ukrainians are people who have agency and who have taken risks and decisions.
And the risks and decisions that they have taken have in turn affected Russia and America. I think a lot of the thinking or some of the problems in the thinking that you're describing starts from the unspoken assumption that places like America and Russia are a real country and Ukraine is not. And once you start from there, you then have to twist yourself around an awful lot to try to understand what's happening. So I think that's a base I would start out with.
I think the idea that somehow America is behind all of this is, you know, it might be left-wing imperialism, but it's imperialism because it's overlooking the agency that small and medium-sized countries can have and it's overlooking the decision, you know, the ethically-based decision that Ukrainians took when they decided they would defend their country from this atrocious war. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back in time, however far back you think we need to go to get to the present.
I think the question I would give you to frame this part of the conversation is to describe the reality of Ukraine and Crimea and their relationship to Russia. Because, you know, obviously what is being said by Russia and being taken at face value by many critics of our support of Ukraine is that Ukraine was always part of Russia or has been part of Russia for so long that it is some kind of ahistorical obscenity to consider it its own real country as you just described it to be. So what is, how should we think about Ukraine and Crimea? I guess it should be separated there and Russia.
Well, I guess the first point which is really important is that, I mean, I might know more history than other people and I might have interesting things to say in response to your question and I'll try to say them but it is actually irrelevant. The border between the Russian Federation and Ukraine was agreed upon by both parties in December of 1991. Both parties are are signatories of the basic conventions about involving borders and it may seem like a really banal point but history doesn't actually give you a reason for invading someone else's territory. If it did, there essentially is no border in the world including the American-Canadian border or the American-Mexican border which you could say is somehow perfectly legitimated or justified by history.
That's just not the way that history works. History and law are two different things and so the unspoken assumption here is that if Russia had some kind of historical claim then it would be okay to invade but I just, I would start by that that assumption is 100% wrong and if you want to make that assumption about Russia you should be saying in general well we would like for there to be warfare on every continent except Antarctica because everywhere in the world there are disagreements about history which would then justify war so the history is interesting it's a lot more interesting than listening to Mr. Putin would get you to think I mean you use an interesting word which is always and always is when everyone says always in these things what is happening is an imperial claim that's being made it's imperial powers who say things like always and never and what they're doing is they're asserting their right to control the forms of knowledge which get the rest of us to thinking that wow there isn't really something there so in the case of Crimea there was a state in Crimea which lasted for six centuries which is much longer than the United States or Russia in any recognizable form and that state I guess for two years as part of the golden horse sorry two centuries as part of the golden horse four centuries as part of the Crimean Hanuk which was defeated and eliminated as a political unit by the Russian Empire in the late 18th century so that's not always first of all that's an awful lot of century but more anything Russian power gets there it's defeated by a bunch of Ukrainian Cossacks in the Russian service by an empress Kathleen the Great who's German and by a state of the Russian Empire which is nationally speaking or linguistically speaking majority not Russian that state ceases to exist in 1918 or 1917 sorry and is not the same state as today's Russian Federation the native people of Crimea who were almost 100% of the population not so very long ago were dispersed by first the Russian Empire and then Stalin in 1944 in 1944 the end of the day of the Stalinist secret police forcibly deported every single man woman and child who was a Crimean Tatar thereby leaving open an awful lot of space for Russians and other people from the Soviet Union to move in that's 1944 that's not always in 1956 the Crimean Peninsula still inside the Soviet Union was given from the Russian part of the Soviet Union to the Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union because there were no longer any Crimean Tatars there there was no longer a special status for the place it was no longer an autonomous region as it had been it was given to Ukraine for the very banal reason that from the point of view of Ukraine Crimea is a peninsula there's a land connection so you can supply it with water and can use electricity grid from the point of view of Russia Crimea is an island there's no land connection that Khrushchev in 1954 when he made this change dressed it up because of course there's always difficulty with Ukraine and the Soviet Union so he dressed it up as some kind of great gift from the Soviet Union to Ukraine and they had lots of celebrations and they printed cigarette packs and they printed nightgowns celebrating all this stuff and so then some people now in the Soviet Union remember this as a great gift especially Russian nationalists by the time it was a purely pragmatic decision so that's Crimea the idea that Crimea is always Russian is A. imperial B.
wrong and C. silences the history of the genocide of its native population history is very interesting and again you go into it at considerable length in both your reissue of the audio of On Tyranny and also in a 10 part lecture series on YouTube on Ukraine that people can watch from your Yale class but I really love the point you made about the disjunction between the stories we tell about history and the legal and political reality that enforces any national border at this moment in time and it's always hard to know where to start the clock except when you have a treaty or when you have a border that has been ratified by both sides of that border that is a very reasonable place to stop your wayback machine so perhaps let's start with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 what's the significance of that for the present moment if you want to bring the character of Putin into the conversation at this point that might be appropriate because Putin is very much driving the show here and it's his decisions that we're living with the consequences of and trying to figure out how to respond to and he has evolved as a person and as a leader over these last decades tell us about the fall of the Soviet Union and how that is setting the stage for where we are now I appreciate Sam you're reinforcing the point about law because it really is a very important point I mean we can choose to sympathize with anyone we want who is violating law but as a result of the second world war as a result in part of Hitler making exactly the kinds of arguments that Putin is making now the principle was accepted that we're going to have sovereign borders and sovereign borders are not going to change and that's a principle which has generally been a great benefit especially inside Europe I'm going to start this answer by making a similar distinction between Putin and the end of the Soviet Union Putin says a lot of things about the end of the Soviet Union now which he wouldn't have said then and he says a lot of things now which people find plausible because he says them over and over again but which are simply not true one of them is that the end of the Soviet Union was somehow an American plot I was there at the time I mean I wasn't of any significance but I was in Washington DC working on foreign policy stuff at the time I was helping to run conferences at the time I was in US-Soviet relations was what I did at the time I was going to Moscow at the time it was American policy to preserve the Soviet Union and that's clear from the American archival material it's clear from the open source material about Bush's visit to Kiev in September of 1991 which is remembered as the chicken-kio visit we were actually trying to hold the thing together it was the Russian Federation the country that Putin now rules which brought the Soviet Union to an end and that's a kind of fundamental fact which tends to get overlooked in all of this because Putin starts his story from such completely outrageous places knowing that there will be people out there who will somehow meet him halfway but that's not really how one should treat the historical record so the end of the Soviet Union I mean one thing which is interesting about the Soviet Union is that its very existence is a recognition of the existence of the Ukrainian nation the reason why the Soviet Union was founded at the Soviet Union in December 1922 was that the people who founded the Soviet Union Bolsheviks and cosmopolitans though they were were familiar from several years of civil war inside Ukraine that the Ukrainian nation was a real thing as a result of that when they won and they established their larger unit they made a unit of nominal federal republics so Ukraine actually decides the form of the Soviet Union because of the obvious even to people like Solomon and Lenin existence of the Ukrainian nation and even though Ukraine inside the Soviet Union suffers more than any other republic from Soviet policies in particular the famine of 1932 and 1933 there's never actually a moment in the Soviet Union where the existence of the Ukrainian nation is denied and I stress this because the phenomenon that we see now with Russian nationalism and Mr. Putin at this point is actually quite radical and fairly new and insofar as it has a precedent its precedent is with right-wing it's not really the Soviet Union it's rather with right-wing and fascist Russian intellectuals of an earlier period but the thing which is worth stressing kind of bringing two points together now is that when the Soviet Union falls apart it's also taken for granted that the borders of the republics will be the borders of independent states in December of 1991 the leaders of the Russian the other Russian and Ukrainian republics meet and agree to dissolve the Soviet Union the reason why it's those three is that those are the three republics which existed in 1922 when the Soviet Union was founded and which still existed in 1991 and so they agreed that the borders as they were would be their borders at which point these states become sovereign states governed by the same conventions that govern everyone else's borders and those things aren't contested and Ukraine actually has a referendum on its territory before all of this and it's also in December in which not only do 90% of Ukrainians and this is 31 years ago not only do 90% of Ukrainians vote for independence a majority in every single region of Ukraine also votes for independence and in those intervening 30 years the drift has been and I say this is a great understatement the drift has only been in one direction and that direction has been in favor of the notion that there is a separate Ukraine that deserves to have a Ukrainian state okay so let's bring Putin into this how has his thinking evolved here because he came back in 2012 correct me if I'm wrong and there's a kind of crazy making degree of unreality to his politics this is a quasi-fascist regime maybe it's just appropriate to just call it a fascist regime it's definitely a single party state that on your account which I agree with is engaged in an imperialistic war against a democracy and yet is framed rather often from Putin's side as a war of denazification of Ukraine so he's the good guy going against the Nazis it's probably inconvenient for that thesis that the president of Ukraine is Jewish but that's really not an obstacle to the claim and while I haven't noticed many high profile people on our side dignify the Nazi part of it actually there's at least one exception to that there's something happening in America in fairly high profile right of center or even centrist circles where the perversity of Putin's framing is not only not noticed it is denied at least implicitly I mean it's just I'll bring in one specific claim here just so you have something to react to but in person I noticed the economist at Columbia Jeffrey Sachs on some podcast talking about this and it's hard to imagine the Kremlin not liking anything he said he essentially said that the US and NATO have been provocative all along and that the offer for Russia was always obvious we just have to declare the neutrality of Ukraine and give an assurance that they'll never join NATO because that obviously impinges on Russia's core security concerns how would we feel if we had a Russian client state in Mexico or Canada there are many people saying things like this and one thing that's perverse about that which I'll just point out before you give me the rest but immediately what strikes me as perverse is that it conceives that we are the moral equivalent of Russian despotism and that the spread of democracy is no better than the spread of fascism if you try to flip things around in that way it's just who's to say anything's better than anything else in terms of spreading a political orientation over the surface of the earth and that's just so dishonest and ethically upside down that it's just amazing to see academics in America talking that way this is something you speak about the condition in which fascists themselves are claiming to be at war with fascists and Nazis and it's pretty much pure fiction thanks for mentioning that the book in question is now Road to Untreedom where I do a very careful and slow dissection of all of this on the basis of the Russian primary sources on the basis of everything that Putin said that I could track down over the period of his two presidencies and in starting thinking of your question it's clear that there was a kind of evolution with Putin Putin number one his first couple terms in office was perhaps sincerely trying to carry out what he called a dictatorship of the law and centralized power but it turned out that in centralizing power in doing away with the other oligarchs he and the people around him just became the chief oligarchs so what Putin ends up with is a dysfunctional state the most interesting feature of which is the extreme economic inequality and that is a point which is really worth dwelling on for a minute because if only when you have the kind of power that he has and the kind of money that he has that you're allowed to get away with the sort of lunatic ideas that he expresses it may seem like a simple thing but the fact that he's been in power for 20 years and controls the five television networks and had lots of money to spread around among influential people around the world without those things I mean he's just a guy on a street corner you know probably with a pretty tattered looking soapbox because his ideas in themselves are neither original nor completely convincing but anyway my point was that in Putin stage 2 when he comes back he's recognized that he can't make the Russian state function or at least making it function is inconsistent with him being the chief oligarch and being able to give his friends billions of dollars if he wants to and so he moves to a politics of spectacle where of course Russia's always right whether it's intervening in Ukraine in 2014 or intervening in Syria in 2015 where everything becomes a kind of show where Russia is always innocent and the other side is always to blame and he develops from about 2011 forward ideas about how Russia doesn't have to follow the rules because Russia has a special destiny and Russia has a special mission and Russia has a special civilization and no one else can force to understand this but Russia has the right to do whatever it likes and you know this is this fundamental challenge to international order you know western non-western any kind of order he's been espousing for about a decade he made it very clear on September 30th talking about the annexations when he said what are the rules who made up the rules Russia has a millennial mission right and these ideas are already more than tangential with fascism a person he cites regularly and who probably by no coincidence he also cited on September 30th this year Ivan Ilyin is the chief Russian fascist thinker and he became essentially the house philosopher who Tim was fighting him all the time but not only him contemporary Russian fascists began to get airtime on television and became part of the mainstream Russian discussion which leads me to I mean the thing about the schizo-fascism actually Tim can you just define fascism yeah fascism is the idea that it's not rationality that's the basis on which we build politics it is will and imagination that rules are not the basis upon which we interact we interact on the basis of strength strength is always proven as a matter of practice therefore endless conflict is entirely normal and given all that politics begins not with any kind of mutual recognition but with the choice of an enemy when i choose my enemy then i know who i am and the moment i've chosen an enemy that's when politics can actually begin and that takes you pretty far actually towards understanding the russian attitude towards ukraine because what problems with with putin's rule is that he has no definition of russia at all he has no notion what the future of russia will be nor can he from the state of oligarchy therefore russia is defined as the anti-ukraine and it takes it takes this arbitrary choice of an enemy in order to give meaning which is also related to nato now i mean i'm just gonna be very straightforward about this they're not russia is not afraid of nato at all had they been afraid of nato they certainly wouldn't have undertaken an invasion like this right and had they been afraid of nato they wouldn't be moving the bulk of their troops from the actual nato borders in order to fight in ukraine which is what they have done they're not afraid of a nato invasion they've never been afraid of a nato invasion this is a giant guilt-making factory they're not afraid that nato is going to invade them he pooched himself until very late in the day did not say anything to the effect that he was afraid of nato this is something he came up rather late so that we could have a guilt trap for ourselves i mean your point your point about it not there being a difference between spreading democracy not spreading democracy is well taken but i think perhaps an even more fundamental point is that nato is not that nato or the european union in large nato and the european union take on new members when sovereign states backed by their populations request themselves in democratic elections choose to join those institutions the reasons why poland is in the european union or or nato do not have to do with russell's or washington they fundamentally have to do with the polls and the reasons why ukraine would like to join institutions doesn't have to do with russell's or washington has to do with the lived experience of the ukrainians themselves and it seems to me that if anything that's an even more fundamental difference that what russia is trying to do is expand an order illegally by force whereas the european union and nato take on new members when independent states choose to join them yeah well let's cycle on that point one more time because i think it's crucial so you're saying that putin and russia have no fear of invasion from the west right it seems completely crazy to me that that any western power would want to invade russia but a person would be forgiven for believing that putin might believe such a thing would be possible and that he therefore would want ukraine as a buffer between him and an antagonistic europe but you're saying that's just not the case well that option was available to putin and he chose not to take it the um ukraine had agreed to russian base russian bases on the black sea for decades when russia invaded in 2014 when russia invaded ukraine in 2014 it was he was giving up as a result of its own decision the possibility of a friendly ukrainian buffer to the west when you invade a country you're no longer have the option of treating as a friendly buffer when you invade a country you're making an enemy of it that was a choice that moscow made on its own um one can decide it was a mistake or not a mistake but that option was available they have pushed ukraine to the west again and again with their own decisions before 2014 a majority of ukrainians were against joining nato after russia invaded in 2014 a majority of ukrainians unsurprisingly decided they were in favor of joining nato that's the result of russia's choices so that option was there but that's not what they want what they want to be able to i mean this is what they say openly day in day out on television from the foreign ministry from the president's office from the security council day in and day out what they say the commander-in-chief of the operation just said it yesterday what they say is they want to ukraine where they are in control and that's something completely different that means invading the country occupying it replacing its leadership with someone else um that's not a friendly buffer that's you know that's a genocidal aspiration and that's what they care about again to repeat the point if they cared about security from nato um which they don't but they cared about security from nato they would be dispersing their armed forces around the finnish border around the polish border they'd be concerned about places like that that's not what they're doing what they're doing is they're throwing an absurd obscene amount of their available firepower into the project of destroying ukraine as a country which i'm just going to pick step back here makes zero geopolitical sense it is weakening russia extraordinarily and the reason i'm taking a big step back is that one of the assumptions that we're making in this conversation or at least one of the assumptions that's made in the view that you're presenting is that putin actually cares about the interests of russia i think that's an assumption should be made explicit in question because i see very little reason to think that putin is a geopolitician who cares at all about the interests of russia if he were he would be much more concerned about the fact that there is a great power on russia's border which in fact does have designs unlike the united states on russian resources which unlike the united states invests more in the asian part of russia than russia does itself and that is china but rather than being concerned about china what putin has done with his entire anti-western turn is to create a situation in which future rulers of russia will have little choice but to be vassals of china and the invasion of ukraine has only accelerated this process troops that might have been defending the border with russia have been brought west to fight a losing and pointless war in ukraine while beijing just watches as the power relationship with russia which was already very much in its favor accelerates to the point where it's just hard to imagine that russia is going to be able to get out from under it a russian leader who cared about geopolitics and cared about russian interests would be balancing between the west and russia it is geopolitically absolutely idiotic to go so far in one direction that you can't come back but that's what putin has done i don't think he's an idiot i think he simply doesn't care about russian interests so what does he care about he cares about dying in bed he cares about you know legacy i mean when we i appreciate other questions about putin which you know lead in profound directions which i haven't always been able to follow my answers we have to think of this person as someone who's been in power for the lifetimes of many people who live in russia many people can't remember anyone else this is someone who's been in power for you know the entire for you know the entirety of this of this century this is someone who is on a classical you know as described by plato as described by shakespeare tyrannical trajectory where at a certain point he's no longer able to hear the advice of others at a certain point his own fantasies start to become realer than the reality around him i think there's no question that his obsession with ukraine is real i think he really thinks something along the lines of historically weird fantasies that he projects i think he really thinks that somehow somewhere there really are ukrainians down there who who believe that they want to be invaded by him but i think that that is a classical tyrannical mistake and he is doing that thing that tyrants do when they're in power for too long which is they commit state resources to their own fantasies that's the tragedy of tyranny and that's where putin is right now so right now he's in the grip he's in the fantasy which doesn't have anything to do with interests or with geopolitics i think we take a deep breath and look coldly at russia's geopolitical position we can generally agree that this has been an asinine move he's in the grip of something which can't be reduced to interests or it doesn't have much to do with the state what he thought he was doing in ukraine was leaving a legacy what he thought he was doing in ukraine was leaving leaving an indelible mark his own mark on history where he would be remembered as the person who united what he thinks of as the russian lands as peter the great did as katherine the great did i think that's what he thinks he was doing he's not going to be able to do that because the world is just not the way that he thinks the world is but i think that's what that's what has him in its grip well he's also been doing a bit more than that in that he's been launching a a larger war mostly a cyber war against western freedom really i mean it's just there's been this i believe you call it a hybrid warfare uh at various points where the goal seems to be to destabilize democracies generally perhaps now is a good moment to say something about that and how that what we've seen of that since i guess you know 2014 in the first war in ukraine i appreciate that question and i appreciate your earlier remark about there being a difference between democracy and other systems and i guess i rather wish that in these conversations which are which seem to be about i don't mean your mind i mean the kind of discussion that you are refereeing here people would admit like which of three positions they take because i think there are a lot of people out there who just like fascism and i think they often own it that they like fascism and that's why they like and i think that would clarify matters i think the second position is i really don't believe in anything i'm a complete nihilist i have no preference between democracy and everything in that position you can also say well putin is fine because there is no truth there are no values yada right and then there's a third position i'm sure there are others there's a third position which says actually people seem to like to vote whether they're in iran or whether they're in russia or whether they're in portland oregon they seem to like to vote and uh and countries where people are able to vote and represented seem to be peaceful and prosperous and freer and people seem to live lives and more satisfied and so on right i mean i think it would be kind of like in some way this discussion about putin is a proxy for all of that where the people who are slightly afraid to say yeah i'm a fascist or yeah i'm a nihilist um are willing to say well i think maybe putin's okay or i think maybe what's happening here is fine and now i've forgotten well yeah well actually let me add one more cohort there because i guess it's nihilist adjacent but it would uh they certainly wouldn't think of themselves as nihilist and these are all the people you know most of whom are in trumpistan and so i think i'm talking about you know maybe 40 percent of american society i think that more or less everything said about russia attempting to destabilize democracy in particular our own and especially their attempt to hack the 2016 presidential election amounted to a a lie you know it's just a pure confection of the democratic party wherever it is true and even if some are going to see that some aspects of those allegations are true it's unimportant because we do the same thing to other countries right this came out explicitly when trump himself said well you think our hands are so clean you know we've been pretty bad too right so we have the spectacle of a sitting u.s president who said he trusted putin and his intelligence services over his own intelligence services and something like half the country was happy to go with that and and i think that basically this all gets summarized under the rubric of the the russia collusion hoax right like anywhere right of center now the all you need to say is the russia collusion hoax to discredit any concern about russia's misinformation campaign that's happened on dozens of fronts for years which has created a politics of unreality within our own society in large part so anyway i get you know that we might call it nihilistic but i think most of these people think that they're not nihilists they they want to put american interests first they want us to be essentially they want us to pull back from our engagement with a fairly crazy world and close our borders and they want to get back to the good things of making america great again because that's not nihilism it's it's a kind of delusion and it's a complete loss of contact with certain moral imperatives at the moment i would say but it's um i think it's a different cohort and and there's a fair amount of evidence at this point that russia has had more than a little bit to do with creating these perceptions yeah there's a philosophical consistency here because what happens in russian domestic politics is that putin finds himself in a place where he can't meanly promise russian a better future and one of the moves he makes that point very effectively um helped by a very intelligent propagandist called vladysov circle is to argue that well actually things may seem lousy in russia and maybe we close down for no reason and maybe there's very little social mobility and maybe you know wealth is horribly badly distributed and maybe your vote doesn't really count but if you look around the world the putin line it's actually all the same everywhere it's the same britain the same in the united states and so the way the move that their propaganda makes is very different the soviet union the soviet union actually still said there are good things and we're moving towards good things that might have been a lie but it was a lie in a world where there's still truth what the propaganda does is it says look nothing's really any good russia's rotten we admit it but britain is just as bad and america's just as bad and then they just hit on the things which are bad about us and they put them right in the center and they make them the absolute essence of our countries so that is a kind of programmatic nihilism it's a way to stay in power when you can no longer actually operate a state in the way that it's normally thought of as being beneficial to people and so that connects with where we are in our politics where you know we begin to doubt that the state can do things for us or that the state represents us and then we are captured i'm not saying the russians are the only ones responsible for this i'm saying what the russians are doing is they're pushing forward like they're the avant-garde in this general tendency to say well who knows whether our system is better than their system right who knows whether it was better you know where russia does this and we do all this and so when trump says you know i trust their services more than our services he has a good reason to trust their services because his services did much more for him than our services ever could do but when americans follow that and they say well it's kind of all the same then it's not just you know adjacent to nihilism that actually is nihilism because what you're doing in your reason that way is you're saying well no matter how bad something is it's probably just a bad somewhere else and you can't really build up a democracy on that basis i mean to build a democracy you have to have some notion that you have that you can improve things that some values are real you know that law that law does matter that we can organize ourselves in ways that are better than other ways and then you know at the practical level you're speaking to the right here but at the practical level this kind of posture also turns off on the left where you know the existence of russia just becomes um an occasion to point out that america did things which was bad and of course we did right but that doesn't actually answer the question i mean if you know if people if russia's committing a genocide in ukraine and we say well you have to do terrible things in iraq okay that's fine that means that you know countries shouldn't carry out illegal wars so there's a there's a principle there um and i'm happy to defend that principle but the way it goes illogically and i think politically destructively is for people to say well you know on the one hand on the other hand as though that were dispositive and that that just brings us to this nihilism and with nihilism russia wins because they're not aiming for anything else they don't really need for us to believe that the ukrainians are nazis right they obviously don't believe that themselves they don't really need for us to believe that ukraine doesn't exist they just need for us to be somewhere in no case for us to be in nowhere land and we shut our shoulders and we say well who knows you know maybe maybe we did something like that at some point that's all they're aiming for that's really all they're aiming for and unfortunately they're getting a lot of it okay well i want to i know you have a hard stop in about 40 minutes now so i don't want us to be short on time to address the nuclear elephant in the room so many people think that we are running an intolerable risk by not doing everything we could possibly do to de-escalate the situation i want to give you some examples of this from what i've seen on social media i want us to analyze them because if you're not someone who's been as you have been really in the weeds of of ukrainian and russian history and politics it's easy to think well there's got to be a reason why ukraine is not a nato state right and we're not truly bound to defend it like it is one it's not therefore a core american national interest so how is it that we are not doing everything we can do to mollify putin at this point right because this is a situation of nuclear blackmail it even gets worse somehow if we exceed to the idea that you know he doesn't even have russia's interest at heart he's just a tyrant who's psychologically unraveling and he's given some speeches of late which suggest a kind of unraveling of a quasi-religious sort he gave one speech a month ago where he sounded practically like a jihadist in terms of his you know the other worldliness that was creeping into his claims so why are we just not doing everything we can to get off this ride and so i'll give you just a few examples of this the venture capitalist david sacks has been making a lot of noise about this and he wrote an op-ed in newsweek recently and this is a quote the online mob has decided that any support for negotiated settlements even proposals that zelinski himself appeared to support at the beginning of the war is tantamount to taking russia's side denouncing voices of compromise and restraint as putin apologists this removes them from acceptable discourse and shrinks the overton window to those advocating the total defeat of russia and an end to putin's regime even if it risks world war three anyone who suggests that nato expansion could have been a contributing factor to the current ukraine crisis, or that the sanctions imposed on Russia are not working and have backfired on a soon-to-be shivering Europe, or even that the U.S. must prioritize avoiding a world war with a nuclear-armed Russia is denounced as a Putin stooge.
So let's take that. How would you respond to that? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.
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