And it’s inevitable that a larger force, namely capitalism, is going to bring about the thing that we desire, namely, democracy and freedom. To quote Margaret Thatcher or to quote Frances Fukuyama, history is over. And if that seems abstract, then what I mean in particular with reference to the United States after the end of communism in 1989 is the notion that there are no alternatives left in the world. I mean the idea that some kind of outside force is going to guarantee that the things that we desire and wish for are actually going to come about. So by the politics of inevitability, I mean the notion that sometimes goes under the heading of progress. But actually the way we think about time is an idea. The way we think about time just becomes as natural as breathing. So time is a kind of parameter for everything else. ![]() But it has the feature, like many important ideas, that it seems self-evident or natural to the point of invisibility. I think time is a really essential component of politics. And I want to begin by focusing on the kind of politics that you see as defining and maybe blinding the United States and Europe in recent decades, which is the politics of inevitability. tim snyderĪ core argument of your book, “The Road to Unfreedom,” is that different understandings of the past - myths, histories, memories - they create different politics. As always, my email, Snyder, welcome to the show. And so a topic for him that emerges out of that is how the stories, particularly when they’re dressed up is histories, the stories we tell ourselves, how they create all kinds of different politics, how they can lead us to peace or to war, to a sense of inevitability or a sense of desperate persecution, to a sense of integration or imperialism, to a wariness about the world or complacency about it.Īnd that is what this conversation is about, the stories being told in America, in Europe, in Russia, and, of course, in Ukraine, and how those stories both created and could, in the end, decide the crisis we’re in. And these are very much books about the way Ukraine has been repeatedly invaded and turned into a subject by surrounding powers.Īnd in these books, something Snyder is very alert to is the way that imagined histories of Ukraine, what he would call stories or myth, feed the justifications used for these bloody invasions of Ukraine. He’s written six books entirely or partially about Ukraine. Snyder’s core academic subject is Ukraine. They come from his immersion in Ukrainian politics and history. These are books about what it feels like and what you do when your society is beginning to creep down or trip down the road to authoritarianism.īut that perspective for Snyder, those learnings, they don’t come from his immersion in American politics. In recent years, he became something of a hero to liberals for a series of books particularly “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” which became something like a Bible for worried liberals early in the Trump era. And in that book, Snyder writes, “There is a difference between memory, the impressions we are given, and history, the connections that we work to make - if we wish.” If we wish. But if you read it, it is very much about Ukraine. There is this line I’ve been thinking about from Timothy Snyder’s book, “The Road to Unfreedom,” which is a book that, when it came out, people understood it’s about totalitarianism or authoritarianism coming to America. Transcript Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s Plans The renowned historian on Putin’s myths, Ukrainian identity and the West’s “politics of inevitability.” Tuesday, March 15th, 2022
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