Posts Tagged ‘Timothy Snyder’

We’ve written about historian Timothy Snyder ever since his book Bloodlands, here and here and here. He’s a compelling and insightful thinker, and always worth a look, but particularly about Ukraine. In a vital column from his Substack, he argues: “To be sure, there is a certain temptation to concede mentally to nuclear blackmail.  Once the subject of nuclear war is raised, it seems overwhelmingly important, and we become depressed and obsessed.  That is just where Putin is trying to lead us with his vague allusions to nuclear weapons.  Once we take his cue, we imagine threats that Russia is not actually making.  We start talking about a Ukrainian surrender, just to relieve the psychological pressure we feel.  

“This, though, is doing Putin’s work for him, bailing him out of a disaster of his own creation.  He is losing the conventional war that he started.“

More: 

War is ultimately about politics.  That Ukraine is winning on the battlefield matters because Ukraine is exerting pressure on Russian politics.  Tyrants such as Putin exert a certain fascination, because they give the impression that they can do what they like.  This is not true, of course; and their regimes are deceptively brittle.  The war ends when Ukrainian military victories alter Russian political realities, a process which I believe has begun.

The Ukrainians, let’s face it, have turned out to be stunningly good warriors.  They have carried out a series of defensive and now offensive operations that one would like to call “textbook,” but the truth is that those textbooks have not yet been written; and when they are written, the Ukrainian campaign will provide the examples.  The have done so with admirable calm and sangfroid, even as their enemy perpetrates horrible crimes and openly campaigns for their destruction as a nation.

Right now, though, we have a certain difficulty seeing how Ukraine gets to victory, even as the Ukrainians advance.  This is because many of our imaginations are trapped by a single and rather unlikely variant of how the war ends: with a nuclear detonation.  I think we are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending.  

Using the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking.  Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures.  Indeed, we should never lose sight of how much a Ukrainian victory will improve the world we live in.

But how do we get there?  

Read the rest here. Please.

In all the panic, raving, and invective of the recent election season (not to mention the time since), historian Timothy Snyder remains a cool-headed voice of sanity. Thank goodness. His slim, 128-page On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is now the #1 bestselling book on Amazon, and also on the lists of The New York Times and The Washington Post, whose reviewer noted that “fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital.”)

Tim’s previous works include, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. We’ve written about the former here and here and here, and the latter here. Given his focus on the 20th century history of Eastern Europe, he calls this book “the most American thing I’ve ever done.”

A new kind of book needs a new kind of advertising campaign, and Tim got one. The book is being released in London this week. If you don’t have time to read, try showing up on an East London street, where the entire text of a book billed as “a practical guide to resisting the rise of totalitarianism” is to be fly-posted. From The Guardian (with thanks to Emily for the heads-up):

US historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny … is to be reproduced chapter by chapter in a series of 20 eye-catching posters pasted along Leonard Street, near Silicon Roundabout. The posters, designed by Vintage creative director Suzanne Dean and her team with students at Kingston University, will appear in sequence on Monday along the road, which is at the heart of the capital’s creative community.

Describing the book as “an attempt to distill what I have learned about the 20th century into a guide for action today”, the Yale professor said: “I can’t think of anything like this that has been done with anyone’s work before.”

He added that it was doubtful such a distillation would have been possible with his previous works, which include Bloodlands and Black Earth, both of which come in at over 400 pages, compared with On Tyranny’s 130.

In the book, the professor, who specialises in European history and the Holocaust, mixes modern history with practical lessons on how to resist tyranny. It was prompted, he said, by the shock and sense of helplessness felt by many over recent political developments in the US and UK. Utilising examples of resistance against Hitler and Stalin, each chapter includes acts of defiance readers can integrate into their daily life.

Snyder intended the book be used as “a manifesto and manual” in the fight against rising populism on both sides of the Atlantic, a situation he described as “urgent”.

For a quick taste of his message, try the 11-minute news interview below, from the Woodrow Wilson Center. It’s one of the most intelligent interviews I’ve heard about the state of our nation in awhile. Tim describes his book as “a guide to facing unfamiliar situations for Americans, a guide to what you can do – not just politically, but psychologically.”

“Erudite, ambitious, and prolific as an ethicist.”

Leonidas Donskis died yesterday from an apparent heart attack. He was 54. The Lithuanian Jewish philosopher and public intellectual – he was a political theorist, historian of ideas, social analyst, political commentator, and professor –was little known in the West, but is a major figure in Eastern European thought. He was also a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014.

One of Europe’s leading poets, Tomas Venclova (his correspondence with Donskis was published last year), wrote to the Book Haven: “Leonidas Donskis was the only one Lithuanian philosopher (mainly historian of ideas) who merited the title. I would say he was on a par with, say, Konrad, Krastev, or even Havel. His sudden and untimely death is a terrible loss.” Tomas Venclova and Donskis were both born in Klaipėda, and both attended the University of Vilnius.

Donskis recently coauthored a book with a man he considered of the greatest thinkers of our times, Zygmunt Bauman. The book Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, 2013) was “a high point of my life,” Donskis had said. “Such an opportunity can occur only once in a lifetime.”

Correspondent Venclova

At a discussion at the Central European Form in Bratislava last November, he spoke on the role of the intellectual in today’s world: “The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said that if you want to be a star in your society you need to invent yourself either as celebrity or as victim. But I think there is also a third way out for the intellectuals, who way too often become fear-mongers. This is in my opinion their sin against societies. At the same time, we still have many sober voices resisting this temptation. The principle of intellectual or journalistic work is not to scare or paralyze people. The best thing to do now is to encourage audiences to live their lives without fear, in dignity.”

“The great paradox of modernity is that everything is very close to its polarity, to its own antidote. For instance, in terms of political existence, I am afraid Europe will become even more securitized and surveilled. But the crucial thing is to defend the humanistic legacy of Europe. First and foremost, our task is not to become paranoid or fear-ridden. The challenge for the 21st century is to protect democratic Europe with respect to our humanistic sensibilities, and respect to human rights and civic liberties. This will be quite difficult, but we must stand together for it, especially given the rise of violent political extremism.”

A few words on Donskis from some important voices on my Facebook feed:

Marci Shore, author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968: I’m writing from Belgrade, in shock at the news of the death of our friend Leonidas Donskis. I had just seen Leonidas in Krasnogruda, at Fundacja Pogranicze on the Polish-Lithuanian border, at our seminar “Second reading: Tony Judt on Arendt, Camus, Miłosz, Kołakowski.” In Krasnogruda, he spoke about Bulgakov‘s Master and Margarita as a novel about the devil as superfluous in modern politics: we are in the age of do-it-yourself. He spoke about the death of the Left in Lithuania and about “ontological junk food” – quick, ready-made theories for easy consumption here and now. “I’m afraid there is just a void,” Leonidas said. But he never stopped trying to fill the void with a passionate insistence on truth and ethics. We were meant to meet in Vienna two weeks from now at this year’s Leszek Kołakowski symposium devoted to the topic “Paradises Lost: Entzauberung, Utopia, and their Afterlives.” I never imagined “afterlives” taking on this additional meaning. Now of all times our world could not afford to lose Leonidas.

Timothy Snyder, author of Black Earth:The Holocaust as History and Warning and Bloodlands: Between Hitler and Stalin: Erudite, ambitious, and prolific as an ethicist; liberal in his politics, generosity and individuality; trilingual in Lithuanian, Russian, and English. A rapid wanderer in our best traditions, a loyal companion with expansive ideas of friendship; a European link to much of what was admirable his Soviet generation and the ones that came before; an eager interlocutor who wanted to bring out the best in those he admired (such as Zygmunt Bauman and Tomas Venclova with whom he wrote books); a patient teacher whom I last saw among grateful students, filling my notebook with the connections I never would have seen without him.

Mikhail Iossel, author of Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life and contributor to The New Yorker: I am absolutely devastated. I loved him dearly. He was one of the most brilliant, altogether remarkable people I have ever met, one of Europe’s leading public intellectuals, one of world’s most interesting philosophers and social thinkers, an enormously erudite and prolific scholar and a passionate patriot of his country, son of Holocaust survivors and member of the European Parliament – and also one of the kindest, gentlest, and most decent and honest people I’ve ever known. In point of fact, I have never known anyone quite like him, in all of my long life: he was absolutely unique, unrepeatable and, to my mind, a perfect human being. I cherished each and every one of our conversations: in Lithuania, in New York, and, most frequently, online – about politics, Europe, Lithuania, Jewish history, Russia, art… It is impossible to believe he is gone. The world was so much better with him in it. There are no words….

Postscript on 9/23: We received this message from Beatriz Miranda in Mexico City, and thought we’d share it (it’s also in the combox below): “With great sadness we have received the news about the death of our beloved friend, Leonidas. I met him in Amsterdam. The University of Amsterdam asked me to invite Prof. Bauman to present their book Moral Blindness in Amsterdam. The invitation was accepted by Prof. Bauman with a condition: to bring Leonidas too. It was the beginning of real friendship. Later on, he came to Mexico invited by the 17, Institute of Critical Studies and helped us to think critically about the role of universities and academics. I will never forget the way he conducted himself, with humility and sweetness. He even travelled with me around Mexico City by metro. He ate at the Coyoacan Market and enjoyed visiting the pyramids of Teotihuacan. During that visit and taken by his passion for jazz he proposed to the Institute to give the doctorate Honoris Causa to the great jazz musician Vyacheslav Ganelin. We did it last January but unfortunately, Leonidas could not come. We will keep his words alive in our Institute. This is important especially in this violent time. Leonida’s call for peace and understanding will be missed but kept immortal through his work and publications. 17, Institute will keep the promise to translate some of his work into Spanish. Gracias querido, Amigo Leonidas! You will be missed.”

Postscript on 9/26: Read a few of his reflections and aphorisms here.

Tim Snyder in 2016 (Photo: Creative Commons)

From Timothy Snyder‘s The Black Earth:

“Irena Lypszyc was a Warsaw Jew who fled to the eastern regions of Poland to escape the German invasion of September 1939, only to find herself unexpectedly under Soviet power. Such refugees were initially helped by local Jewish communities, insofar as that was possible, but were helpless when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Almost all of the local Jews were then killed, and the proportion of already displaced Jews who died must have been close to a hundred percent. After all, they had no prewar connections with the place where they found themselves, and no knowledge of the terrain.

“Like most such people, Irena Lypszyc did not know much about her new surroundings. She was in Wysock, in Polesia, when the German invasion came. When the Jews of the town were rounded up for execution in September 1942, she ran into the swamps with her husband. It does not seem that she had ever previously spent much time out of doors. The two of them lived on berries and mushrooms for a few days before decided that she would stand on the first road she found, hail the first person she saw, and ask for help.

“The man approaching her had a double-barreled shotgun on his shoulder …”

To find out what happened to Irena Lypszyc, her husband, and the man with the shotgun, listen to the video below, from Tim’s absorbing, cogent, and insightful lecture (in my opinion, his best ever) last month at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco:

Intellectual and cultural historian Marci Shore remembers Tony Judt in the current issue of the New Yorker, which quickly segues into the current plight of Ukraine:

“We are unwise to laugh too quickly at those who describe the world as a conflict between good and evil,” Tony said, in a lecture in 2003. “If you can’t use the word ‘evil,’ you have a real problem thinking about what happened in the world.” In February, 2014, the Polish philosopher Marcin Król told an interviewer that Europeans were facing a serious political crisis and a potentially fatal spiritual crisis: they had ceased asking themselves metaphysical questions, questions like “Where does evil come from?” As Król’s friend Adam Michnik, the Polish writer and dissident, once said to Václav Havel, “This is a civilization that needs metaphysics.”

Marci reminds us of Judt’s “insistence on the historian’s moral responsibility not only to understand, but also to engage.” Her own form of engagement, or one of them, took the form of skyping in for graduate seminar on Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century, Israel: An Alternative, and Past Imperfect. (The first is an excellent series of conversations between Judt and Timothy Snyder, who happens to be Marci’s husband.) “And so this spring, from my office at Yale, I saw Mykola [a graduate student and now soldier] in uniform on my computer screen, the unmarked walls of a Soviet-built bunker in the background. He had Skyped in as well, from the undisclosed location, and he appeared on one half of my screen; Yaroslav [Hrytsak], together with Mykolas’s classmates, appeared on the other half.”

In response to Michnik’s call, she said:

The Maidan was the return of metaphysics. It was a precarious moment of moral clarity, an impassioned protest against rule by gangsters, against what in Russian is called proizvol: arbitrariness and tyranny. It united Russian-speakers and Ukrainian-speakers, workers and intellectuals, Ukrainians and Jews, parents and children, left and right. The Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak … described the Maidan as akin to Noah’s Ark: it took “two of every kind.” For Yaroslav, the wonder of the Maidan was the creation of a truly civic nation, the overcoming of preoccupations with identity in favor of thinking about values. People came to the Maidan to feel like human beings, Yaroslav explained. The feeling of solidarity, he said—it cannot be described.

You can read more about Marci’s unusual graduate seminar here.