„Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin are losing big wars,“ says historian Timothy Snyder

Покслухати ческо у телевизи. Покслухати ческо у телевизи, але це інстратно. Покслухати ческо у телевизи, бо вироціється. Вона зберяє. when he actually stood for anything at all, if you see what I mean. And I think this is why the media has trouble covering him because normally if there's a corruption scandal, so imagine there's a big corruption scandal in the Czech Republic, right? There would be press coverage of it, and then maybe people would apologize or they would deny it or something. But in Mr. Trump's case, he doesn't apologize. He doesn't deny it. And this causes a lot of trouble for the media because in the rules that the media plays by, we say this person might be corrupt, and then they say, no, no, I'm not corrupt. Whereas Mr. Trump plays by different rules. You can say you're corrupt, and he'll say, no, I'm just a smart businessman who's made billions of dollars, right? And so in a way he's beyond this notion of corruption, he's simply, I mean, he simply says, there are no rules, right? And if there are no rules in the world, you can't really say that somebody is corrupt, and that's why that's the game he's playing. What do you see the corruption? - Crypto, insider training? - Yeah. - Where do you see the corruption? - Yeah, an example. - Oh, well, taking a huge plane from a foreign government and then using it to fly around in, having your son-in-law and your friends claim to be the only important negotiators of your country while they have active economic interests and all the countries that they're going to and negotiating. Crypto is another excellent example. Having people, having mediaries take money so that you pardon people. I mean, these are all, oh, and recently Mr. Trump claims that he was treated unfairly by the tax authorities, which is ridiculous because he's never really paid taxes, and that the tax authorities owe him $10 billion. And he's going to take that $10 billion, he says, and create a slush fund and give it to his friends who have broken the law on his behalf. Okay, so despite our earlier conversation about how somebody can't, I think he can't be corrupt because he's simply evil, and if you're evil, you can't be corrupt. However, if you want an example of corruption, that's it. You take taxpayer money and you say, I'm going to give it to my friends who have broken the law because I want to protect them. And that's essentially what he's trying to do right now. - You, many times, you have said, I do not worry about the future. I just try to learn from history, point out the possibilities, and make people act according to the knowledge that we gain from the history of lessons. What's going to happen before the November elections? - Oh, well, I think two out of the three things that could happen have already happened. So there will very predictably be some kind of election stunts. There will be diversions, there will be cheating. And this is utterly predictable because this is what authoritarians in a weak position do. - Excuse me, what kind of cheating are we talking about? - Yeah, well, they will be trying to, they'll be trying to frighten people away from voting. They'll be sending people messages about the election day being a different day. They'll make it very hard for people to find their way to polling stations. And they're maybe more radical things than that. But I mean, going back to your question, I just want to, there's something I want to be clear, which is that it's normal, but it doesn't have to work. So consider Orban in Hungary. Orban did the classic election stunt, which he said, he said, oh no, there are terrorists. And because there are terrorists, therefore the opposition is with the terrorists, and therefore you have to vote for me. And it didn't work. - Speaking about the Ukrainians. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, they made up this thing about Serbs and Pipelines and the Ukrainians in the opposition, and nobody believed it, right? And not only did nobody believe it, the reason why nobody believed it was because Magyar, the opponent, said he will do this. And so I think it's just normal. And we should expect that there'll be stuff like this in the American election that Trump will say, this or that or the other thing. There was a terrorist attack and so on. But I don't think it has to affect the election. Anyway, there are three things you can do. The first thing is he can start a war. He already did that. The second thing he can do is that he can say there was some kind of terrorist attack. I think it's pretty likely he'll do that. The third thing he can do is actually try to manipulate the outcome of the elections. All three of those things, I think, will already have appeared in some form. - I'm afraid we cannot trust this president and people around him to accurately characterize what happened. You said in the interview with Katie Correct that is placed on YouTube speaking about the possibilities of a terrorist attack. So the Americans should not believe what the administration is telling them. If there is a terrorist attack. - So there was a terrorist attack in the United States, a very meaningful one in early January, 2021, when Mr. Trump himself was trying to steal the presidential election that he lost. He guided his followers to attack our parliament. That was probably the worst terrorist attack in our history in the sense, not in the sense that most people died, but in the sense of the most demoralizing and he, of course, says lied about that. And he's pardoned everyone who took pardon it. And he's tried to make them into heroes. So that tells us, I give this a sense of what Mr. Trump is willing to do when he thinks his own political survival is at stake. Now to be clear, I'm not saying don't trust everybody. You can trust the local police on the scene probably. You can trust the reporters who go there and write about it. You can trust the experts on munitions or explosives who write reports about what happened. You can trust the experts on right wing terrorist groups or midi terrorist groups or whoever it is who analyze. But one person you just really can't trust is Mr. Trump because unfortunately the President of the United States lies about pretty much everything all the time. And when it comes to his own political interests, he lies on a grander scale. Who is Victor Orbán to Donald Trump? He's a mentor, he's a teacher. That's the interesting thing. Americans think Donald Trump is this big tough guy. But on the international scene, he's kind of a mid-level apprentice of above all of Orbán. And you could see that before the Hungarian election. The Americans as such weren't paying any attention because we're very provincial and we don't pay attention to foreign countries. But Mr. Trump and the people right around him, his family, his friends, were paying a huge amount of attention. They even sent the vice president of the United States J.D. Vance to Budapest to tell Hungarians how to vote. Mr. Vance told Hungarians that he knew what God thought and God thought they should vote for Mr. Orbán, which is ridiculous and it's shameful. It also brings us back to the other conversation about Mr. Trump and God. But that didn't work, of course. But it shows you how important Orbán was to these people. He was a model for them. And what does it mean that he is out of power after 16 years in power? - Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because it's quite, again, Americans aren't paying that much attention but it's quite demoralizing for that part of the American, right? It's quite demoralizing for Maga to see that even if you control the media, even if you've been in power forever, even if the elections are not fair, you can still lose and lose by a lot. So that's been demoralizing for them. But putting it in a more positive way, there's a broader lesson which is that if you have a determined candidate who's willing to go on the road and talk to people and if you can unite protest politics with democratic politics and finally and most importantly, if you can explain to people that corruption what we talked about, abuse of power, is what is making them poor, right? Because people understand that their lives could be better and they could be. People know that there's corruption. But if you can have a candidate who explains how those two things go together and that we need to have human rights rule of law, democracy in order to have social mobility, good lives for our children, a better everyday life. If you can get those things together, then you can win an election. Do you trust? Do you need a leader of a hungry? That's for the Hungarians to decide. I mean, I'm impressed by him as a political organizer and I think no one runs that kind of campaign with that kind of energy, without having real intention to change things. That doesn't mean that his politics are exactly the same as my politics. But I do believe that on basic issues, like being a normal member of the EU, like allowing the EU to fund Ukraine, like not using EU money to fund his best friends. I think on those basic issues of normality, I think yes, I think Mr. Mager will be predictable. - I think the war in Iran is inevitable because you can only win a war when you are fighting a war for something and there isn't anything here. So why is there a war in Iran? - I think that Mr. Trump really enjoyed Venezuela. So we took part in what was essentially a coup inside Venezuela where one part of Venezuela's right-wing government displaced another part of Venezuela's right-wing government and the American armed forces took part in essentially that internal bit of Venezuelan politics. But Mr. Trump really enjoyed that. He really enjoyed the extraction of the Venezuelan president. And we know, I'm not just making this up, we know it because the next morning, he called into a show called Fox and Friends and he shared his emotions about it. It was clear the man was on some kind of real dopamine high that he really, and he said during this phone call, we can just do this again, nobody can stop us. So honestly, I think the main reason is that Mr. Trump gives way to impulse and emotion. And then you can start out from another side, which is that Mr. Trump has no idea what an actual war is. He doesn't really know what it involves. And so it wasn't clear to him also because he doesn't listen to people, how wars get out of control, how they're unpredictable, how the other side also gets a vote as they say, none of these things were clear to him. So I don't think we had any purpose in going into Iran except to make the president feel good And that objective has failed, obviously. I don't think there really were any other ones. When you mentioned that's really sure, taking off, just taking off Venezuela, Mr. Maduro, was that the terrorist act on our part? It was certainly a violation of international law. I'm not going to say I'm not expert enough on what terrorism is, but it was certainly a violation of international law. While we're on the subject, the attack on Iran was also a war of aggression on our part. There are many things we're wrong with it just from the point of view of our own interests. But one of the things which is wrong with it is that it's a violation of basic international law. What would be the consequences of the war in Iran for the U.S. and for the world? It goes back to your question about super-terror suicide. I mean, if you want to make yourself be weaker and look weaker, fight a war for no purpose, lose that war in humiliating fashion, use munitions in that war that could have been better used for other purposes, reveal yourself to be weak in ways that people didn't understand that you were weak. So that's a consequence for in foreign affairs. In domestic affairs, it means that Mr. Trump is much weaker politically because this is very unpopular and he doesn't have an obvious way of getting out of it because they've lost, but they can't admit that they've lost and so in order not to admit that they've lost, they kind of keep us going in this state of no war, no peace indefinitely. But I mean, in the long run, it drastically weakens our position both among our friends and among our enemies and it's one more big step to the situation you talked about at the very beginning where the pieces are lined on the ground and it's a matter of picking them up and putting them back together something different. One thing is clear as well, Russia is happy. Oh, yeah, that's a great point. So we, the United States, we are keeping Russia in the war and that is shameful. We're keeping them in the war by repeating the propaganda, which unfortunately the White House and people around the White House do every day, Russia is losing this war, Russia's losing more soldiers than it can replace, Russia's making zero progress on the battlefield, Russia's taking real pain from deep strikes by Ukrainian drones. That much is clear, but meanwhile the American propagandists, the Americans who are, for whatever reason, repeating Russian propaganda, say things that are simply not true, that basically are meant to improve the Russian bargaining position. That's one thing and then the other thing, which I'm sure you mean, is that by fighting this war, we are artificially raising the prices of oil around the world and that is giving Russia the income that it needs to keep the work going. So it's sad to say an Americans have a hard time facing things like this, but if it weren't for us, Russia probably already would be out of this. Donald Trump is also mentioning listing dissonction, concerning the direction oil. Who is Donald Trump? Tu Vladimir Putin? He's a, I mean, so if you just follow Russian television, right, I'll start with that. Trump is essentially a servant of the Russian regime and they get, he doesn't always do what they want and so sometimes they get annoyed with him, right? But they treat him as somebody who is essentially their guy. As for Mr. Putin, I think Donald Trump is his great hope. He was, he was Mr. Putin's great hope in 2016 and it went, when 2024 came around, it was very clear that the Russians were just hoping that Mr. Trump would win the election because that was the way they were going to stay in the war. And that's how it's turned out. Once Biden gives way to Trump, military aid to Ukraine goes away completely. And the entire rhetoric of official American changes, now our rhetoric is basically to repeat Russian propaganda. That doesn't, that doesn't mean by the way that Russia is going to win the war. I think the whole thing is in a way a trap for Russia, extending the war, actually, I think weakened Putin's position. But that's what Trump is to, to Putin. He's somebody who is very easy to move around and very easy to move around in a way which allows Putin to do the one thing that he wants to do, which is fight this war in Ukraine. In your book on freedom, you wrote, "Dunal Trump, Putin's submissive client. Do you have a historic power that could be used to describe this relationship?" That's a really good question. It's strange to be a representative of a much more powerful country, right? This is the thing which is difficult and shameful, I think, for a patriotic American, that we are so much more powerful than Russia. Across any dimension you care to name and yet our leader insists that Russia is powerful, Putin is powerful. And there's a reason why he does this, which is that Mr. Trump, as I said before, he doesn't think in terms of the US, the American government, the American society, the American nation, the American economy, he thinks in terms of what he can do personally. And it's true, Vladimir Putin can do more personally on the scale of Russia than Trump can do personally on the scale of America. And so he looks up to Putin as a dictator, even though Putin is running a country whose economy is about the size of a couple counties in California, but he looks up to Putin and he submissive to Putin because he admires the way Putin runs Russia. I can't think of an easy historical parallel for that, obviously. I do want to say it has something to do with having billionaires in politics, though, because one thing that Mr. Trump admires about Mr. Putin is that Mr. Putin is much richer than he is. So Mr. Trump is a kind of baby billionaire, you know, a few billion, never really made money on his own. Whereas Putin has hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's another thing that Trump admires about Putin. What would happen if Russia was not led by Vladimir Putin next month? Not our problem. So I don't know is the answer, but the fundamental answer is that this is not our problem. I think this line of questioning always leads people in the West down to a certain place, which is that since we don't know what's going to happen in Russia, we should just try to keep the existing guy in power. And we do this over and over again. It doesn't matter who it is, is it Yeltsin, is it Gorbachev, is it Putin. But the truth is when it comes to succession in Russia, the Russians will do something. They will do it their way. It will seem strange to us, but they will be satisfied with the result. And it's just not our business. So I'm trying very hard to to remind people that we shouldn't feel guilty about whatever messy and quite possibly bloody things happen in Russia when Putin loses power because it's not our business, it's not our fault, and it's not our responsibility. So I don't know, but there will be some kind of transition. The transition from Yeltsin to Putin was very weird. It involved fake terrorist attacks, it involved a war, it involved a lot of propaganda. They chose Putin because they thought he was like a film star. It was very strange. And the next one will be strange too, but it will happen. It's really hard to understand what's happening really in Kremlin because we are receiving various messages, naturally some of them are fake, obviously, used by the propaganda. But we are also hearing some messages that Putin is considering to end the war or pause the war while keeping his face to sell it, to find a way how to sell it to the Russians that we actually won despite not winning the war. Do you find this realistic? Oh, I think that's absolutely what they're going for, and that's where the Americans come in. Because the Americans are willing to negotiate essentially on Russia's side. So the Americans are willing to repeat Russian propaganda messages. So for example, Donbas, the Russians don't control all of Donbas. The Ukrainians have their most important line of fortifications in Donbas. So naturally the Russians want Ukraine to give them the rest of Donbas. The Ukrainians naturally won't do that. It's like giving Germany what the Germans called Sudetenland, like that idea because that's where you have all your fortifications. So the Ukrainians obviously aren't going to do that. But the Americans keep saying the White House, I mean Russia could take that if they wanted to or they've already taken it and both of those things aren't true. So I think what Putin is counting on is the Americans being the negotiators and the Americans doing things for Putin that the Russian armed forces can't do for Putin. I think that's the play and I think that's why we're hearing a lot of American propagandists being very loud right now. I also think that's why we're seeing a lot of provocations on the Russian side. Because since they're losing the war they need to make Europeans feel Russia is big and scary. So they're going to do things now to Ukrainians, civilians, they'll do things even outside of Ukraine not because they're winning but because they're losing and if any kind of negotiations start they want Europeans to be fearful. Whereas I would say the crucial thing is if there are negotiations, if it does come to that the Europeans have to be involved because the Europeans have some sense of what the interests of Ukraine and the continent are whereas unfortunately the people who negotiate if that's the word on the American side have no notion of that nor do they care. When we speak about values you can put something in the box of American values, maybe European values, would you put in the box like both Russian values? I'm not talking about Vladimir Putin, not talking about the war in Ukraine. I want to understand what are the Russian values that you can see through the centuries that are not changing. And we maybe do not understand them from the European or American perspective. So what you're asking me in a way is to. crack the mystery of Russia, and my basic answer is that I don't really believe in the mystery of Russia. And so the first thing I'm going to say is that Russia is not old, and the idea that Russia is old, and there are some kind of ancient secrets involved, is itself Russian propaganda, right? So Mr. Putin's notion that he has to invade Ukraine because of some things that Vikings did in the eight sixties is a very weird idea, but while we might quibble with the details, we tend to accept that Russia is very old. Russia is not very old, Russians didn't, people who were Russians didn't govern that territory until incredibly recently, like the 20th century. It was governed by a dynasty, which was largely foreign for a very long time. The person that Putin celebrates, Catherine II, was of course a German, their elite was Polish and Swedish and German for a very long time, Soviet Union was not a Russian state, the Russian Federation is kind of like a Russian state, but the Russian Federation is new, it's been around for three and a half decades, and there never was anything like a Russia before that. So there isn't any ancient Russia that I can draw conclusions from. What you can't say. I do recall it was the quote of Vatsav Hava, who said, "I think there has been a Russian problem for many centuries, that Russia doesn't know exactly where it begins and where it ends." This is what you're having in mind. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, so the thing that we think is old is actually, I agree with Hava here, it's a kind of lack of definition, right? So if it's a Russian state, then why does it go all to the Pacific? Like if Russia comes from Europe, which is Putin's argument for this war, why are all of its resources coming from Siberia, right? The way they talk about themselves officially doesn't really make a lot of sense. If Putin wants to go back to the Middle Ages, well, fine, that would mean giving up all of Russia's Asian territories, because in the Middle Ages, Rus had absolutely nothing to do with Siberia and the places where they get their natural gas. So none of the story makes any sense, so I would say that Russia, I would say that Russia as a nation is rather new and is very much in the making, and it's been made now in highly unfortunate circumstances, which involve wealth accumulation, monopoly control or state control of media, and a terrible imperialist war, that Russians are being made in those conditions, and the best that we can do, if we care about Russia, is to try to take some of those conditions away. So the war in Ukraine, it's like colonial wars, that's what you are saying. Of course, it is a colonial war, yeah, it is a colonial war. And imperialism is a way of not answering the question of who you are. Because if I'm an imperialist, then my project is not about me, it's about denying somebody else. And if you notice, that is, I mean, I hope you don't watch as much Russian television as I do, but the main way that Russia is defined is as an anti-Ukrain, right? We are against them, we are not them, but that allows you not even to ask the question of who you are really. When we met in Hypoxivization in 2015, you said, "In general, Russia is trying to spread the idea. Who really knows anyway? You can't figure it out. Don't trust the West. Don't trust us. Don't trust anybody. Just sit on your couch. How are we handling it? Well, I mean, at least we're not on couches, we're on these uncomfortable chairs, badly, right? Badly, and that we were about five years into the social media revolution, then, you know, it's not been another ten years. And I think that general idea that Russia pioneered, the Russians, people in the Kremlin, they understood what social media was for. It was to find your vulnerabilities, it was to engage your emotions in such a way that you become angry, but ineffective, right? So you spill your emotions while you're in front of the screen, but you don't actually do anything productive because to do something productive, you have to believe in the world, you have to believe in facts, you have to believe that other people worth cooperating with. So the Russians have been very good at exporting this idea, not that they've been doing it on their own. They've had plenty of help from California, social media, oligarchs, as well. So I would say we're not doing well. The only way we're doing well, I think, is that many people now recognize the problem. Many people recognize, to go back to hobble, he mentioned earlier, that you can't really do the politics of human rights without truth. You can't really do any kind of decent politics without truth. So in your book on tyranny, you wrote, "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so." What kind of media do we need? So people have the facts. People need to have media around them. People need to know reporters personally. This is the fundamental thing. It doesn't mean you have to like the reporters, but you have to see the reporter next to you at a sporting event. You have to know that the reporter went to the meeting of the local town council. People have to see reporters as human beings, like I'm seeing you right now. That's the fundamental thing. So local reporting. And if the government has to subsidize that, the government should subsidize that. The second thing which is important after the local is the investigative. That reporters are able to take days, weeks, even months trying to figure something out. Because these subjects we're talking about, corruption, war, the corruption and the war of the Trump administration are very simple, and so we can talk about them in five minutes. But usually corruption is more complicated, and you need time to figure them out. Like the Hungarian reporters took time to figure out the scandals in Hungary. So investigation, local investigative reporting, and if that requires state intervention, there should be state institutions that allow that to happen. Should the Czech Republic have free public media? Absolutely. The Czech Republic should absolutely have free public media. Yes. What would be the consequences if there are no free public media in the Czech Republic? Look, we're in the middle of central Europe. We know how this game has played. If it's public, then it has a chance of being objective, neutral of the society, everybody's paying for it. If it becomes state media in the narrow sense, we saw what happened in Hungary. And we saw what happened in Poland under the governments of peace. If it's state media in a narrow sense, then it can become a political football. So it's important to have taxpayer-supported media, which has some kind of independence, which is protected by law and institutions. Yesterday you met the president, Peter Paulo. Who is he to? I mean, who is he to me? First of all, I find him to be someone of gentle courage. So he says things that are important, but he doesn't stay them to make himself seem important, which I like quite a lot. He's somebody whose opinions seem to come from nowhere, except for his concern for his own country, which is also very unusual in today's politics. He's also somebody who knows how to get along with other Europeans, so yeah, and so he's somebody I admire. I didn't know that you had, or we'll have the chance to meet Andrei Babish, the prime minister. What he is to? So I'm concerned about a phenomenon, which we've talked about. And the phenomenon is the merger of large amounts of money, control of media, and politics. If one wants to have a decent pluralist politics, a dignified politics, a democratic politics, one needs to make sure that the shortcut to power is not having lots of money or controlling media. These are very elementary lessons, and I'm sure that if Mr. Babish, if we can imagine the thought experiment where he wasn't a very rich man and didn't have lots of influence over the media, I'm sure he would agree. In your book on freedom, you wrote, quote, "Oligars do not just have the biggest piece of the pie. They often have the pie-catra, and when they do, it does not matter much if the pie gets bigger." Is the world being sold out to oligarchs? Yeah. I mean, yes, it is, or we are allowing it to be sold out by oligarchs because the oligarchs are telling us self-serving stories, and we can choose to believe them or not to believe them. And here I really am helped by the legacy of the dissidents, because although the setup was different, there's a basic similarity, which is the presence of very big lies. It's the presence of big lies, which confirm to us how important the truth is. And whether it's aging communists or whether it's California oligarchs who say they're going to live forever, in both cases, we're confronted with really wild stories. And the only way to deal with really wild stories is to be skeptical of individuals, whether they're general secretaries or whether they're CEOs of tech companies. And it's to be aware of the basic facts around us, to be respectful of other human beings, to be respectful of human dignity and human freedom. We can do that. It's possible to do that, but it takes two things. It takes values, like I've been saying, but it also takes governments that follow the rule of law. Because if you are an oligarch, your move, your obvious move, is either to destroy the government or to take control of the government. And from your point of view, it just seems like the natural thing for you to be doing. We can't come on the oligarchs to suddenly develop a sense of mercy at a certain point. It's natural. The issue is you really have to care about individual people and you have to have a state which makes sure that wealth and equality doesn't become too great. Because if wealth inequality becomes too great, and this is not some radical point that I've been making, it's this is Aristotle in 2,500 years of political common sense. If you allow wealth inequality to get too great, it's very hard to keep up with democracy. You mention the big lie, how do you fight the big lie? There are three ways. The first is you have to say, even if it sounds naive, there's such a thing as truth. Second, we already talked about it, you have to support the reporters and the scientists and other people who generate the small truths. Because you can't bid a big lie with another big lie. You can only bid a big lie with humans and with a belief in truth. And the third thing is, as we're just talking about, you have to have a government that passes laws. You can't hold back big lies without having laws that restrain social media in some way. And without having laws which support the gathering of facts and which support reporters and scientists. But also, I mean, I guess another thing is you have to be willing to say that it's a big lie. Like somebody has to say, that's not true. The Emperor is wearing no clothes or the Emperor is wearing terrible clothes that don't match. Whatever it might be. Or the Emperor is wearing the same tie every day. Ultimately, to resist the few big lies, we will need to produce millions of little truths. The Emperor is in your book on freedom, who is responsible for producing the millions of truths? That's a great question. I think we all are, right? And part of our problem is that we've everybody's become a professional skeptic. And that is so easy. It's so easy to say, okay, scientist, I don't believe you, or okay reporter, I don't believe you. Or what you're telling me doesn't make me feel good. And if we want to live in a democratic society, then we have to be able to take a little bit of criticism, a little bit of discomfort, all of us ourselves. Because what makes you feel good is a trap, right? Like being offered dessert all three meals a day, it's a trap. Line on your bed all day is a trap, right? And so the way that social media is set up is to just give you the things that you like and then occasionally make you very angry. Whereas what we have to be able to do is say, no, no, I actually want to hear the truth. And I'm willing to pay little tax money or I'm willing to subscribe to a newspaper or pay for an internet service where there are actually reporters. So we are all responsible, but that responsibility includes making sure that we elect people who care about this sort of thing. What does it say about me? When I'm not happy with the situation in this society, it doesn't matter what matter it is. And I go to a rally to protest. Well, I mean, first of all, it says you're courageous about it. It says you're courageous. It's a little bit of courage, but it's something, right? Because going to a rally isn't what everybody does every day, right? And so it's going to a rally in the Czech Republic is not like going to a rally in Georgia or Belarus, but nevertheless, every time you go to a rally, you're showing that you're courageous. Also, you're showing that you think some things are better than others. And that is necessary, right? Going back to the point about indifference and just seeing on the couch, it's necessary to say, hey, I'm protesting because I think it could be better than it is. And then there are things you're doing for other people. If when you protest, you're telling other people, hey, maybe this isn't normal. And you're also telling other people, hey, maybe you could protest as well or maybe we could organize something together. So I think protesting is in the West right now. It's wildly underrated. Like it doesn't solve things on its own, but try to think of an example of a democratic transition that didn't involve protests somewhere along the way. In your book on tyranny in 2017, you wrote, if none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. What is freedom? I mean, first this gives me a chance to just point something out, which is that the distribution of courageous action might be uneven, but it's present. So we're sitting in a nice hotel, we're having a nice conversation. I'm not sure either of us has said, oh, yes, we have talked about Ukraine, but the fact that the Ukrainians are behaving courageously is one of the conditions for us having this nice conversation. And not only the Ukrainians, there are people taking risks all around the world because of some idea of decency. You don't take risks on your own without some kind of value. To answer your question, freedom for me is something positive. Freedom doesn't just mean I'm not being stopped from being what I'm doing, from doing what I want. It means I have an idea of what's good. Freedom means that we work together to create conditions where everybody can think about what they think is good because there's no one answer to that. One answer to what is good is totalitarianism. There's an infinitude of possible answers, and we should all be trying to work them out. Freedom means we accept that there are lots of good things. Freedom means that we accept that we're not always right. Freedom means that we have enough power individually to create conditions where all of us can try to answer those questions. When we are talking about good and evil, there is the famous quote by Gilbert who said, "I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it, a lack of empathy." Is the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapable to feel with their fellow men, evil? I think it's the absence of empathy. Would you agree? I mean, I think that's basically right. My definition of evil is that denial that anything is good. But I agree that empathy is a precondition for pretty much everything good. And I also think that empathy is at the heart of today's politics. So Mr. Musk, for example, is an enemy of empathy. He's on an active campaign against empathy. And one sees that in a lot of the American far right, that they define empathy as being something that has to be destroyed. And I think they're, I mean, from their point of view, they're correct because empathy is necessary for all kinds of good politics. Empathy is necessary for freedom because in order to be a free person, you have to know who you are, and you can't do this on your own. The only way to know who you are is to pay attention to other people. But you will never do that if you don't empathize with them, right? So, and freedom itself, as a, like as a political project, it only works generationally. So I have to think, well, what would it be like for the next generation to be free? From birth forwards. And then I think, well, they're going to need, their parents are going to need some time off, the kids are going to need daycare, the kids are going to need schools. But if I don't have empathy, I'm never going to have that first thought about what everybody needs to be free. So I think the, the, the, the fascist oligarchs know what they're doing when they're trying to kill empathy because I think empathy is a precondition for freedom and it's a precondition for decent politics. And it's something that ought to be cultivated. You're a historian. You know the pearls. You know the history. How it has been written and rewritten. How should history remember Ukrainians of year 2022, 2023, 2024, year five, twenty six? It's very likely that history will look back and, and see, Ukraine as having made things possible for other people. Ukraine has bought us, or the people who were resisting the Russian invasion, Ukrainians have bought us time. They've given us a chance. If they had lost immediately or had given away, or if their government had fled, I think everything we're talking about would be much worse and we probably wouldn't be having this conversation and the politics in Prague would be probably much worse than they are now, probably politics everywhere would be much worse. So I think this war will be remembered as an example of one, one, one nation, I'll use the word, giving a lot of other nations a chance, right? Now whether we take that chance or not is up to us. In your book on tyranny, you wrote post-truths, it's pre-fascism. In a different part of the book you wrote, listen for dangerous words. What are the dangerous words we should be listening now to make sure that we are not on the path towards tyranny? So I mean I'm going to stop on post-truths pre-fascism for a moment because there, although we've been talking about politicians who are generally on one side of the political spectrum, the notion that emotions are the same thing as truth is not necessarily right-wing politics, right-wing oligarchs have run away with it, thanks to social media and maybe natural born selfishness. But the idea that who knows what truth is and maybe it's just your opinion and today I feel this way, that's not something that came from the right, that came from everywhere and it came from the academic left in particular and so we all bear a certain amount of responsibility for that and it is interesting how like when I'm in the academic settings, I try to make a point of saying naïve things like I believe in truth and so on because it may be a little bit naïve but it's less naïve than saying, oh I don't know what truth is and it doesn't matter if I don't know because it really matters a lot. But the dangerous words are extremism, terrorism, today it's fake news, I didn't know that I want to wrote the book but when people say fake news, fake news, they're basically saying you're a good journalist and when people say terrorism, I mean there is such a thing as terrorism in the world but when Mr. Putin says terrorism or I'm afraid when Mr. Trump says terrorism, what they mean is domestic opponents are doing something that I don't like and we have to create a state of exception. The reason you have to be on the alert for dangerous words. words is that they are the preparation for a state of exception. They're a preparation for saying, well, the normal rules don't apply now because something terrible has happened. Well, it makes you happy into kind of a world. People who are at work, and I am often very happy, like I'm much happier when I'm doing stuff than when I'm talking about stuff, but what makes me happy is actually doing work, whether it's with American organizers and American cities or whether it's with Ukrainian civil society, what makes me happy is actually doing things. And that is, by the way, a good lesson for everybody that even when the big things seem very difficult, we do have a chance, but the chance depends upon doing a lot of small things. And doing the small things does make you feel better. It makes you feel less alone, and it makes you feel more productive, and that's because you are more productive. So, I mean, the two things that make me feel happy are one, like those 15 minutes a day when I get to be a historian, that makes me really happy, and then the other thing that makes me happy is being with people who are better organized and more courageous than me, who are out there every day doing the kind of work that we've been talking about. I have something for you. What did these people do for freedom? Okay. That's a great question, because it helps me answer your earlier question about what freedom is. Freedom means that you actually care about some stuff. So, I mean, these guys they cared about, they cared about their music, they cared about the velvet underground, they care about the plastic people of the universe, they cared about the velvet underground, they cared about making their own kind of music. That's the important thing. Being caring about freedom doesn't mean saying freedom, freedom, freedom. It means being yourself, and then being willing to take a certain kind of risk to be yourself. That means recognizing that other people also have things they care about, right? So, when Huffle was writing about freedom, he didn't say freedom, freedom, freedom. He said, think about a guy who takes a sign down from his store, or think about a guy who thinks that some beer is better than other beer. Those are literally Huffle's examples, right? And in his political life, although Huffle didn't actually like this kind of music at the time, in his political life, he recognized not just him, also, you know, Jan Patočka and other people. He recognized that the plastics, and also not only the plastics, there were other musicians involved as well, but he recognized that young musicians were doing something they actually cared about. And that's the first step towards freedom, right? The first step towards freedom is you care about something, you're willing to say you're care about it, you're willing to do it, even though it makes you a little bit different. Because that breaks the conformity, that breaks the spell that none of us really care about anything. It also breaks the spell that nothing is really true. Because if it's true that you care about something, that means that truth is a real thing in the world. Thank you very much for the interview. My pleasure, thank you. And thank you for watching Hydeboxyvisation tonight. You can find the interview on our website, www.hydeboxyvisation.com. Thank you very much and good evening. [BLANK_AUDIO]