YouSaid · the spoken record

Vejas Liulevicius

lines on the record: 198
first: 2024-09-20
most recent: 2024-09-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Appropriation is world history trade, transfer of ideas, influences, valuing that which is unlike your own culture is also a form of appropriation, quite literally. And so that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experience is so unlimited as history testifies gives me great hope for the future.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we talked indeed about a lot of latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature. But I find hope in another aspect of human nature, and that is the sheer variety of human reactions to situations. The very fact that history is full of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, the will to build up even after the horrors have passed, this to me is an inexhaustible source of optimism. And there are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned. The problem is a synonym for cultural”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Audiobooks are definitely not to be scorned because, as people pointed out, the original traditions of literature were oral, right? So that's actually the 1.0 version, right? And combining these things is probably the key. I think one of the things I find so wonderful about the best lectures that I've heard is it's a chance to hear someone thinking out loud, not laying down the law, but taking you through a series of logical moves, imaginative leaps, alternative suggestions, and that's much more than data transfer.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To human empathy, a broadening of your own sensibilities of what's possible, what's in the full range of being human, and then what's best? What are the best models for what has been thought and felt and how people have acted? Otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators and the ability of artificial intelligence to give us versions of realities that never existed and never will and the like.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those have their place and can be valuable, but the task of sitting down with a book and absorbing its message, not agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications, learning how to think within the categories and the values of the author is going to be irreplaceable. And my anxiety is that with college bookstores now moving entirely to the paperless format, it changes how people interact with texts. And if the result is not a renaissance and a resurgence of reading, but less reading, that will be dreadful because the experience of thinking your way into other people's minds that sustained reading offers is so crucial.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It comes down to one word, and that one word is read. I'm as a college teacher, I'm concerned about what I'm seeing unfolding before us, which is classes, not my classes, but classes in which students are asked to read very little. Or maybe in some cases not at all, or snippets that they are provided digitally.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm still amazed by that. And then there's also in the spirit of recommending neglected classics, my favorite author. My favorite author is now a late Canadian author by the name of Robertson Davies, who wrote novel after novel In a mode that probably would get called magical realism, but is so much more. Robertson Davies was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and Jungian philosophy. But in literary form, he managed to create stories that blend the mythical, the mystical, and the brutally real to paint a picture of Canada as he knew it, Europe as he knew it, and the world as he knew it. And he's most famous probably for the Depthford trilogy, three novels in a series that are linked. And they're just masterful if only there were more books like that.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that case, all of us reflect on our own childhoods and that magical moment of reading a book or seeing a movie that really got you launched on some particular set of things that you're going to find fascinating for the rest of your life. And there's a direct line to the topics we were talking about today from myself in the Chicagoland area as a kid, seeing the film of Dr. Jivago and then later reading the novel on which it was based by Pastanak. And even though the film had to be filmed on location in Spain, pretending to be Revolutionary Russia, it was magical for the sheer sweep and tragedy and human resilience that it showed. The very way in which a work of literature or Cinematography could capture so much.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some cases to introduce them to neglected classics or books that make you want to grab somebody by the lapels and say, you've got to read this. There's probably few things that are as exciting as a really keen and targeted reading recommendation. In addition, I've also done other courses on the history of World War I, on the diplomatic history of Europe from 1500 to the present, a course on the history of Eastern Europe, and also a course on dictatorships called Utopia and Terror, and then also a course on explorers and a course on turning points in modern history. And every single one of those is so rewarding because you learn so much in the process and it's really fantastic.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, journey is probably just the right word because it's this week that the third of that trilogy, Decline of Communism, is being released. And it felt like something that I very much wanted to do because the history that's narrated there is one that is so compelling and often so tragic that it needs to be shared. The vast amount of material that one can include is probably dwarfed by the amount that actually ends up on the cutting room floor. One could probably do an entire lecture course on every single one of those lecture topics that got broached. But one of the great satisfactions of putting together a course like this is also being able to give further suggestions for study to the listeners.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for that reason, some of them called Napoleon the master of the sightless stair. So if you're talking with a world leader and he or she has a sightless stare, that's probably a bad sign. But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints about the moral compass or the future expectations of a leader that emerge in one of your wonderful conversations.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they condescending? Are they, on the contrary, fundamentally interested in another person, even if that person can't help them or be used in some way? Speaking of prominent world leaders to interview, there's Napoleon. Napoleon psychologically must have been quite amazing person to make a bid for mastery of Europe and then already thinking about the mastery of the world. But contemporaries who met Napoleon said that it was very disturbing to talk with him because meeting with him one-on-one revealed that he could talk to you but look like he was looking right through you as if you were not fully real. You were more in the nature of a character on a chessboard.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the case of figures like Churchill or Hitler, their experience of World War I shaped their actions in World War II, their values were shaped in their childhood. There is a way of engaging with Someone you're interviewing, even obliquely, that gives a view in on their sense of what the future might hold. And I mean that, obviously such people are expert at being guarded and not being pinned down. But the categories in which they're thinking, a sense of what their own ethical grounding might be or their ethical code that gives hints to their behavior. It gets said, and again it's a clich ⁇ because it's true that one of the best measures of a person, especially a leader, is how they treat people from whom they don't expect anything.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I mean, the answer is very clear. I would never presume to advise you about interviewing world leaders and prominent people because the roster that you've accumulated is just astonishing. But I know what I might aim for. And that is, I think In historical analysis, in trying to understand the role of a particular leader, the more one understands about their prior background and formative influences, the better a fix I think one gets on the question of what are their expectations? What is the, in German, there's a beautiful word for this. Germans managed to mash together several words into one even better word. And in German, it's Ewansungshorzund. The horizon of expectation.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope not, but I think so many predictions reach their expiration dates and get invalidated. Obviously, we're confronting a dire situation in the present.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way, we may already be there because ratifying the use of force to change borders in Europe was a taboo since 1945. And now look where we are. If that is validated, then... It sets up incentives for more of the same.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike probably. I think my concern is about the part of the equation that involves people just being desperately unhappy, laying the foundations for more trouble to come. I couldn't imagine what that looks like, but once again, these are things that escape human control in the details.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arrangements that sound very good in the abstract and that will just be refused by people who have actually experienced what the war has been like in person and what it has meant to them and their families and everyone they know in terms of lives destroyed. I think that peacemaking is going to face a very daunting task here given all that's accumulated and I think in particular you know just from the last days of the launching of missile attacks against indiscriminate or civilian targets, that's not easy to turn the corner on.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very pessimistic on this score, actually, and for the reasons we just talked about how these things escape human management or even rationality. I think that war takes on a life of its own As accumulated suffering. actually eliminates possible compromises or settlements that one might talk about in the abstract. I think that One thing for people far away to propose trades of territory or Complicated guarantees”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has produced a very different dynamic and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia for the past packaged however it might be and however nostalgic it might be made to appear. And there, I think that Putin's expectations in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned. His expectation was that Ukraine would be divided on this score and that some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome the advance of Russian forces. And instead, there has been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance that continues to this day.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a commonplace that echoed by many that Russia without Ukraine is a nation state or could be a nation state. Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire. And Putin, who is not really seeking a revival of Stalin's rule, but still is nostalgic about earlier forms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood to the exclusion of other values has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite different from what he likely expected. And I think that timing is crucial here. It's fascinating to try to imagine, what if this attempt to re-digest Ukraine into An expanded Russian imperial territory had taken place earlier. I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And often mutually contradictory historical memories or packages of memories. So on the one hand in Putin's Russia, the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light because Lenin by producing federalism as a model for the Soviet Union laid a time bomb at the base of that state that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts as nations regained their independence. While Stalin, it's acknowledged, exacted a dreadful toll, but also was effective as a representative of Russian statehood. This produced where we are today.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other ex communist countries, there was also precious little in the way of legal proceedings that would have established responsibility. And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals, a very important one, as it turns out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize information, to create knowledge and transparency about what the reality had been in the past. In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today, instead of a clear-eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin, upon replacing Yeltsin, was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied eclectic”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been less than would be healthy of a taking stock, a reckoning, even in a signing of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past. no Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the short answer is without a full historic reckoning that would have been healthy about the recent past in ways that's not very surprising because given the economic misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment, it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection. But after an initial period of great interest in Understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with new sources after an initial period marked by such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now and the today. And the result is that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was a great win for peace and for human harmony and to completely change their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany. There were many American communists who couldn't stomach this and who in disillusionment simply quit their party memberships or drifted away. But it's a fascinating story of the ups and downs of a political movement with radical ambitions in American political history.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That reality had actually been closer to the reality of the 1930s and the 1940s than his own time. But the association of American communists with the foreign power of the Soviet Union and ultimately an adherence to its interests did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing for American communists. An example, of course, was the notorious Nazi Soviet Pact in 1939. The American Communist movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda before the Nazi Soviet Pact of august nineteen thirty nine, they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to world peace just after the signing of the pact they had to proclaim that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both the unique character of the author in all of his idiosyncrasies and a sense of huge issues being at stake, ones upon which the future of humanity turns. So talk about the ethical element being of importance there. apparatus of the state the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies into America's military as well as government institutions one great irony is that when Senator McCarthy in the 50s made vast claims about communist infiltration of the government apparatus claims that he was unable to substantiate with deals”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shaped American perceptions of the communist movement in the United States involved issues of espionage. During the 1930s and the 1940s, American communists, not all of them obviously, but select members of the movement were called upon by Soviet intelligence to play a historical role by gathering information, winning sympathies. One of the most amazing books of the 20th century is the book written by Whitaker Chambers, who had served as a Soviet spy, first a committed communist, then a Soviet spy, and then later a renegade from those allegiances. His book is entitled Witness in 1950, published in 1952. And it's one of the most compelling books you could ever read because it's so full. of”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The notion was that communism could find roots in American political discourse and experience where Earl Browder fell afoul of other communists was in his expectations during World War II that it might be possible for the Soviet Union and the United States to make their current cooperation permanent and to come to some sort of accommodation that would moderate their rivalry. As it turns out with the dawning already of Cold War tensions that would later flower more fully, that was unacceptable. And the movement divested itself of Earl Browder. Another point that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communities that had come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong socialist contingents, and when this break happens within the socialist movement between radical socialists and more moderate socialists, there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to help shape the American communist movement, but the result was that for many American workers, they saw It would only be with a rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder, a American-born political leader with vast ambitions for creating an American communist movement that that image would start to be modified. Earl Browder had a meteoric rise and then fall over the promise he made that went by the slogan Communism is 20th century Americanism.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fascinating to observe this story because one longstanding commonplace had been that socialism has less purchase or radical socialism in the United States than in European countries. So to the extent that that was true, it was an uphill battle for the communists to get established in the United States. It makes it all the more interesting to follow the development of the movement. Were two challenges in particular that played a role in shaping the Americanist experience. One was the fact that to begin with, the party was often identified with immigrants.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a precarious kind of twinned existence when you have countries that are across the border from one another that are derived from what used to be a single unit that now are kind of a real life social science experiment in what kind of regime do you get with one kind of system, what sort of regime you get with another kind of system. And that's a very unstable setup, as it turns out.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's Realists see states following their own interests and prioritizing their own security. And there's probably not much that could be done to change that. But conflict arising as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or misinterpretation, those are things that policymakers probably do have some control over. I think that there's internal processes that will work their way out even as opaque a place as North Korea. It's also the reality, just as we saw with a divided Germany's that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much as we can learn about a closed society that is goes about its everyday in ways that are inscrutable to us is very, very challenging, but the only answer. When an example like this escapes your analytic categories, probably there's a problem with your analytical categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the answer that a historian can give is a historical answer, right? That we have to inquire into what has to happen in order to arrive at the path we are today, where you have a regime that's claiming to be communist or has an even better version of Marx's original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called Yuche. Um, How does that mesh with the reality that we're talking about a dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy if that's what it is? I think that Examining”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned in the context of the claims of science, humility as a crucial attribute. I think that humility, sobriety, realism are tremendously valuable in trying to understand another society, another form of government. And so Think one needs to be very self aware that projection onto others of what we think they're about is no substitute for actual study of the sources that a society like that produces. It's declarations of what matters most to them. The leadership's own pronouncements about what the future holds. I think that matters a lot more than pious hopes or versions of being convinced that inevitably everyone will come to resemble us in a better future.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Country anymore. And that's probably a question that haunts China's current leadership as well. With Chairman Xi, we've seen a return to earlier patterns. Xi insisting that Mao's achievement has to be held as equal to that of the reform period, sometimes imitations or nostalgia for the Mao period or even the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution are part of this volatile mix. But all of this is outward appearance. Statistics can also be misleading. And I think that very much in question is China's further evolution in our own times.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing like that, it's argued, is possible in the Chinese case because Mao was not the equivalent of Stalin for communist China. Mao was the equivalent of Lenin. Mao was the founder. So there's no repudiating of him. They are stuck with that formula of seventy percent. And acknowledging that there were some problems, but by and large arguing that it was the correct stance of the party and its leader that was paramount. And the results of this wager are where we are today. China has been transformed out of all recognition in terms of not all of the living standards of the country, but many places. Its economic growth has been dramatic. And the new dispensation is such that people will ask, is this a concept?”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there is without denouncing Mao, without repudiating Mao's 70% correctness, the regime actually undertook a new venture. And that venture was to open up economically to gain access to world markets. Play a global role Always with a proviso that the party retained political supremacy. It's been pointed out that while Khrushchev tries in the Soviet Union in 1956, especially with a secret speech in which he denounces Stalin's crimes, he tries to go back to the founder's intentions of Lenin”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mao himself had a view of human beings as being as he put it beautiful blank pieces of paper upon which one can write new characters. And that is... Clearly, at variance with what you and I know about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world. I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one size fits all for a country as big and as varied in its communities as China inevitably such an imposition of one model was going to lead to serious malfunctions. And so much of the what other episodes in Chinese history had showed the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity economically of the Chinese people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes. What we've seen since after Mao passes from the scene and with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, one sees just how much of those energies”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I mean, think of the impact on officials who are loyal servants of the regime and just want to get along. The message goes out loud and clear. Don't be venturesome. Do not propose reforms. Stick with the tried and true, and that'll be the safe route, even if it ends in ultimately stagnation.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After some of them had ventured that to come in and purge them, to punish them ruthlessly for having done what he had invited them to do. That is the most cynical variant. Some historians argue that Mao himself was not prepared for the ideas that he himself had invited into the public square and that he grew anxious and worried and angry at this without having thought this through in a cynical way to begin with. The end result is the same. The end result is once again negative selection, the decimation of those who are most venturesome, those who are most talented and intelligent are punished relentlessly for that.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Hundred Flowers campaign is a chance for Mao, who has felt that he has lost prestige and lost standing in the party because of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward to regain some of that momentum. And the whole Hundred Flowers campaign officially titled the Rectification Campaign to set things right is still shrouded in mystery. Historians disagree about how to interpret what Mao was actually up to. The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and intellectuals to share ideas and to engage in constructive criticism, to propose alternatives, and to let a full discussion happen. And then, after”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Promises are helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people the prospect of real successes just around the corner. But what happens when the date arrives and you haven't actually achieved that goal? That's one ticking time bomb that played a role in the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union. In the case of China must have been something similar.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's so valuable to pursue and to take seriously in the history of communism is what concrete promises were made. In the case of China, Mao made promises and projections for the future that were worrying even to some of his own assistants. He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961 Perhaps by 1973, China would be the winner in this competition. And it would have achieved full communism. So that which Marx had sketched as the end point of humanity would be achieved first by the Chinese. Later, his own comrades, when he passed from the scene, felt the need to temper that a little bit and promised that they would achieve full communism by the year 2000.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're supposed to demonstrate mastery over nature by sheer acts of will. These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural techniques that were pioneered by a crackpot biologist by the name of Trofim Lisenko that produced more agricultural disaster. That involved things like plowing to depths that were not practical for the seeds to germinate and grow, but were supposed to produce superplants that would produce bumper harvests and outpace the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. So the context for all of this is a race to get first to the achievement of full-scale communism. One of the themes that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible for the peasant masses out of their conviction in the rightness of the Chinese communist cause to industrialize China overnight. That involved things like creating small, smelting furnaces in individual farm communes. It involved folding together farming territories into vast communes of very large size that were just because of their sheer gigantism supposed to be by definition more efficient than small-scale farming. It ended up producing environmental disasters and campaigns to eliminate birds or insects.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actions like the Great Leap Forward and the agricultural disasters that follow from that are literally attempts to outdo Stalin, to outperform Stalin, to show that what Stalin was not able to do, the Chinese communist regime will be able to bring off. And the toll for that hubris is vast.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long way to go before it's reached the stage where it's ripe for communist revolution. And in a way, that's more Orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing. Mao chafes under Stalin's acknowledged leadership of international communism as a movement. And in 1950, when Mao goes to visit Stalin in Moscow in order to sign a treaty of cooperation, he's left waiting for days and days and days in a snub that is meant to show him that you're just not as important as you might think you are. And then when Stalin dies in 1953, Mao feels the moment is ready for him to step into the leadership position surpassing the Soviet Union. So many of Mao's”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source