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

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“When he reaches Maoism, Koakovsky essentially throws up his hands and says it's hard to know what to do with this because putting the peasantry in the vanguard role is something that is already at variance with the original design. But Marx says this is an improved version. This is an adapted and truer version of Marxism for the Chinese context. In case after case in Mao's rise to power, we see a really complicated relationship with Stalin. He works hard to gain Stalin's support because the common turn, the international organization headquartered in Moscow working to encourage and help revolutionaries worldwide is skeptical about the Chinese communists to begin with and believes that China still has a”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adjustment that you've made or adaptation, and when is it already so different that it's something entirely distinct? Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question for the Chinese context and by implication other non-Western parts of the world. This was in part Mao's way, whose ambition was great to put himself at the head of a successful international movement and to be the successor to Stalin, whose role he both admired and resented from having to be the junior partner. To take an example of a masterwork in a major milestone in the history of communism, the Polish philosopher Leshe Koakovsky, who Was at first a committed communist and then later became disillusioned and wrote a three-volume study of Marxist thought called currents of Marxism. In that book”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Mao Takes a page from the book of Lenin Adapting or seeking to adapt Marx's ideology to a context that would have surprised Marx significantly. And that is not only to set the revolution in an as yet not industrialized country, but moreover to make the peasants rather than being conservative sacks of potatoes, to make them into the prime movers of the success of this political venture. Case of the phenomenon that we talked about earlier. When is an adaptation of an ideology or a change to an ideology a valid”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we don't know what Marx would say if he opposed that question deliberately, but we do know in the case of a Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbaum, who was a prolific and celebrated British historian of the 19th and 20th centuries. And he was put this question in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he stated forthrightly that Because the Soviet Union failed, such sacrifices were inordinate. But if the experiment had succeeded and a glorious future had been open for mankind as a result of the Soviet Union's success, That would lead to a different reply. And that is one person's perspective.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they didn't have a lot of industry There's a footnote to add there, and it proves his flexibility. A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking, Might it not be possible for Russia to escape some stages of capitalist development? I mean, do you have to rigidly follow that scheme? Marx's answer was convoluted, but it wasn't a no. That suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of possible scenarios. I think he would certainly have been very surprised at the course of events as it unfolded because it didn't match his expectations at the outset.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. I think that Marx. Flexible in his expectations about tactics and strategies. Even as he was sure that he had actually cracked a big intellectual problem of what the future is going to look like. So how it would play out, he was a man who had to deal with a lot of disappointments because in revolutionary uprising after revolutionary uprising, whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, whether it was in Poland, whether it was in the Paris Commune. This is it. This is the outbreak of the real thing. And then it doesn't end up happening. So I think that he'd probably have tried to be patient about the turn of events. We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely that a workers' revolution would break out in the Russian Empire because for that you needed lots of industrial workers.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic that's so negative that it's nearly impossible to settle on cooperation, added to the fact that the communists see the Social Democrats as rivals for the loyalty of the working class. In terms of just statistical likelihood, a lot of experts at the time felt surely the German army is going to step in. And the Most likely outcome would have been a German general shutting down the democracy and producing a military dictatorship. It says a lot about how... Dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was that some people in retrospect would have felt that that military dictatorship would have been preferable if it had. Obviated the need for the ordeal under the Nazis.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would think that the reality was probably very remote, but that was certainly their ambition. German communists get quoted as saying, after Hitler, it's our turn. Their sentiment was that the arrival of Nazism on the scene Was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism was. In hindsight, that's almost impossible to believe. Because what happens is the Nazis with their characteristic brutal ruthlessness simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists who were supposed to be waiting to take over. So that's forestalled. A further hypothetical that gets raised a lot is couldn't the Social Democrats and the communists have worked together to keep Hitler out of power? That's where the prior history comes into play. The very fact that the German Revolution in 1919 sees”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're certainly striking and unique historical characters in the record. One of the things that's so disturbing about Hannah Rent's model of totalitarianism is the leader can be changed. The system itself demands that there be a leader who allegedly is all powerful and all-knowing and prophetic and the like. Whether particular figures are interchangeable in that role is a key question.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. I would think that the Nazis with atomic weapons, with no compunctions about deploying them, would rank up there as even worse than the horrors that we saw.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even in the case of the Germans themselves, the hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda about unity and about German national identity was the Nazis envisioned relentless purges of the German genetic stock as well. So among their victims are people with disabilities, people who are defined as not racially pure enough for the future, even though they are clearly Germans by identity. This full scale and the comprehensive ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking as they are horrifying.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a peace treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border every generation hundreds of miles east in order to keep winning more and more living space, and with analogy to other frontiers to always give more fighting experience and more training and aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers. In terms of nightmarish visions, this one's right up there.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or deported or annihilated, but instead they will remain as slaves for our culture. And in that one phrase, Himmler managed to defile and deface everything that the word culture had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and artists in the centuries before the Nazis. The notion of slaves for our culture was part of his longer term expectation. And then there's finally a fact that speaks volumes about what the Nazis planned for the East. Hitler and Hemmler envisioned permanent war on the Eastern Front.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In their worldview, the Jews were Especially demonized. And so the project of the domination of Eastern Europe involves this horrific program of mechanized, systematized, bureaucratically organized and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish populations. What the Nazis expected for the Slavs had a longer timeline. Himmler expected the head of the SS has given a special mission to be part of the transformation of these regions ethnically. And Himmler, in his role of envisioning this German future in Eastern Europe, gives such a chilling phrase. He says that while certain Slavs will fall victim immediately, some proportion of Slavs will not be shipped out.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hitler has Ukraine in his horizon as one of the chief prizes. And the Nazis then craft extensive plans, a master plan that they work on in draft after draft after draft, even as the balance of the war is turning against them on the Eastern Front. This master plan is called the General Plan Ost, meaning the general plan for the East. And it foresees things like mega highways on which the Germanic master race will travel to vacation in Crimea, or how their settlements will be scientifically distributed in the wide open spaces of Ukraine for agriculture that will feed an expanded and purified Germanic master race. So this was not peripheral to the Nazi ambitions but central.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one thing that emerges from this investigation is that even before the Nazis come to power in Germany, there are certainly negative and dehumanizing stereotypes about Eastern Europeans. Some of them activated by the experiences of German occupation in some of these regions during the First World War. But the Nazis take the very most destructive and most negative of all those stereotypes and make them the dominant ones, making no secret of their expected future of domination and annihilation in the East.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as you can read in Mein Komf, this is what's necessary in order to bring that racial utopia to pass. And so while the timetable might be flexible, while obviously geopolitical constellations would play a role in determining when such a thing might be possible, it was most definitely on his list. And I would want to add that in my own scholarship, I've worked to explore some of these themes a little bit further. My second book, which is entitled The German Myth of the East, which appeared with Oxford University Press, examines centuries in the German encounter with Eastern Europe and how Germans have thought about Eastern Europe, whether in positive ways or in negative ways.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simply happened as a result of unforeseen events and that it was understood as somehow being humane is also runs contrary to the historical fact. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis unleashed a killing wave in their so-called Operation Tannenberg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers who were given the name of the units of the Einsatzgruppen in order to wipe out the Polish leadership and also to kill Jews. This predates any of the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis, moreover, in many different expressions of their ideology had made clear that their plan You can read this in Mein Kampf for Eastern Europe. Were subjugation and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale? So I consider both of these claims absolutely untenable given the facts and documents.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contingent event that had been brought about by accidents or miscalculations. And such explanations argued that if you put Hitler's ideology aside, you actually could interpret him as a pretty traditional German politician in the stripe of Bismarck. Now, when I say it like that, I think you can spot the problem immediately. When you put the ideology aside to try to analyze Hitler's acts or alleged motives in the absence of the ideology that he himself subscribed to and described in hateful detail in Mein Kampf and other manifestos and speeches is an enterprise that's doomed to failure justifiably. The notion that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies An event that, um,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the years since the Nazis had come to power, they sponsored programs of education called geopolitics, which urged Germans to think incontinence, think incontinence, to see themselves as one of the superpowers that would battle for the future of the world. And now in retrospect, of course, can see that Germany was not in a position to legitimate a claim like that, but the Nazis aims were anything but limited. In particular, this sort of argument has been tried out in different ways before. In previous decades, there had been attempts by historians who were actually well read and well published. To argue that World War II Had been in part a”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that this is a bunch of absurdity, and it would be laughable if it wasn't so serious in its implications. To address the points in turn, Churchill was not the chief villain of the Second World War. The notion that Churchill allegedly forced Hitler to escalate and expand a conflict that could have been limited to Poland is that assertion is based on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was. The Nazi worldview and racism was not an ideology that was limited in its application. It looked toward world domination.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought that Arent kept before her was what if this is not a model that comes to us from benighted uncivilized ages? What if this is what the future is going to look like? That's a horrifying intuition.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a system, or at the very least, atomize the masses to the point where they would go along with the plans of the regime. This model has often met with very strong criticism on the grounds that no regime in human history has yet achieved total control of the population under its grip. That's true, but that's not what Hannah Rent was saying. Hannah Rent was saying there will always be inefficiencies, there will be resistance, there will be divergences, what was new was not the alleged achievement of total control. It was the ambition. The articulation of the ambition that it might be possible to exercise such fundamental and thoroughgoing control of entire populations. And the final frightening.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morphological resemblances. They operated in ways that, in spite of ideological differences, bore similarities. And such political scientist Hannah Rent, chief among them, crafted a model called totalitarianism, borrowing a term that the fascists had liked about themselves, to define regimes like the Nazis, like Stalin's Soviet Union for a new kind of dictatorship. that was not a backwards caste revival of ancient barbarism, but with something new, a new form of dictatorship that laid total claims on hearts and minds that didn't want just passive obedience, but wanted fanatical loyalty, that combined fear with compulsion in order to generate belief.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World War II and non-aggression pact in official terms, it contains secret clauses whereby the Nazis and the Soviets meeting in Moscow under Stalin's wary eye had agreed on territorial division of Eastern Europe and making common cause as each claiming to be the winner of the future. In spite of their oppositions, these were regimes that were able very cynically to work together to dire effect. In the course of the 1950s in particular, there arose political scientists who also crafted an explanation for ways in which these regimes, although they were opposed to one another, actually bore”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That German democracy had ceased to function even before Hitler comes to power. But in the process of making democracy unworkable in Germany, the extremes, the Nazi stormtrooper army with their brown shirts and the communist street fighters had cooperated in heightening an atmosphere of civil war that left people searching for desperate expedients in the last days of the Weimar Republic. The most compelling case of their cooperation was the signing of the Nazi Soviet Pact on August 23rd, 1939, which enables Hitler to start”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reality is that. There were aspects that were shared on either side, and that included the conviction that. Could agree that the age of democracy was done, and that the 19th century had had its day with experiments with representative democracy, the claims of human rights, classical liberal ideas, and all of this had been revealed as bankrupt. It had gotten you what? It got you first the First World War as a total conflict tens of millions dead, and then economically the Great Depression showing that the end was not far away. This produced at one and the same time, both ideological opposition and instances of vastly cynical cooperation in terms of the Weimar Republic, it's obvious with the benefit of hindsight,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The communists and from the perspective of the Soviet Union, the Nazis were in essence a super capitalist conspiracy. If the cosmological enemy are the capitalists and the owners, the exploiters, then all of the rigamarole about race and nationalism are distractions. They're meant to fool the poor saps who enlist in that movement. It's essentially steered by capitalist owners who is claimed are reduced to this desperate expedient of coming up with this thuggish party that represents the last gasp of capitalism. So bizarrely enough, from the communist perspective, the rise of the Nazis can be interpreted as a good sign. Because it means that capitalism is almost done, because this is the last undisguised naked face of capitalism nearing its end. So the other beyond this ideological total opposition in terms of their hoped for futures,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In both worldviews, the opposite side represented the ultimate expression of the evil that needed to be exercised from history in order for their desired utopia to be brought about. And this leads to strange and perverted beliefs about reality. From the perspective of the Nazis, the Nazis claimed that because they saw the Jews as a demonic element in human history, the Bolsheviks weren't even really didn't really believe all of this economic dialectical materialism. They were in fact a racial conspiracy. It was alleged. And so the Nazis use the term of Judeo-Bolshevism to argue that communism is essentially a conspiracy steered by the Jews, which was complete nonsense.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That leads them to give themselves this odd name of national socialist. Some leaders like Goebbels among the Nazis accent the socialist part to begin with. Others put the accent firmly on the nationalist part. In part, the term they chose for their movement was meant to be confusing. It was meant to take Slogans or words from different parts of the political spectrum diffuse them into something unfamiliar and new and claim that they'd overcome all earlier political divisions, that the Nazis claimed that they were a movement, not a party, even though their party was called a party. So what did Nazism and Bolshevism and communism share, or how were they opposed to one another?”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired and borrow heavily from fascist ideology, there also are different emphases that they include. And that includes their virulent racism from the outset, which in addition to a glorification of the state, glorification of the leader, and preparation for national greatness, race is absolutely core. And it's that racial radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea along with antisemitism, the demonizing in particular, of the Jews and this insane racialist cosmology that the Nazis avow, it is the assertion that the Nazis will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people, unity in the society.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's a whole bunch of terms that are in play here, right? And when we speak of fascism, fascism in its original sense is a radical movement founded in Italy, which though it had been allegedly on the winning side of World War I is disappointed with the lack of rise in national prestige and territory that commences after the end of the war. So bizarrely enough, it's a socialist by the name of Benito Mussolini who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the state. The people at large united in a militaristic way on the march, ready to attack, ready to expand, a complete overthrow of liberal ideas of the rights of the individual. or of Representative Democracy, and instead vesting power in one leader, in his case the Duce, Mussolini, in order to replicate in peacetime the ideal of total military mobilization in wartime.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were if you are sufficiently hard and determined and have the confidence to follow through. And then that obviously raises the ultimate question, what happens when that confidence ebbs or erodes or when it's lost?”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantify or to study in a methodical way, but it's the insistence that you hear with Lenin and then especially with Stalin that to be a Bolshevik means to be hard, to be realistic, to be consequential, meaning you don't shy away from doing what needs to be done, even if your primordial ethical remainders from whatever earlier experience you have rebel against it. Under Stalin, there's a constant slogan of the Bolshevik tempo. The Bolsheviks, there's no fortresses that they can't storm. They can do everything. And in a way, this is the assertion that it's will over everything. History can be moved forward and accelerated and probably your own actions justified as a result, no matter what.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's likely that this already is a key element in setting things up for further crisis because upon seizure of power, if your expectation is, well, it ought to be relatively easy to get this system rolling and put it on a basis that after all, we have the roadmap to the future, there will follow frustrations and impediments and resistance. And there's a ratchet effect then there because it'll produce more repression producing even more problems that follow. What drives the whole thing forward though, especially in its Leninist version, but already visible with Marx and Engels, is the insistence on confidence. If you have the key to the future, all of these things are possible and necessary. This leads to an ethos, I think, that That's very hard for historians to”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One should add to those factors that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own, the sheer fact that communism comes to power in most of these instances as a result of war, as a result of the destruction of what came before and a power vacuum. So think of the Russian revolutions in the wake of the fall of Tsarism. Think of the expansion of Stalin's puppet regimes into Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II and the Red Army moving into occupy areas in Eastern Europe, although they announced that they're coming as liberators. Consider the foundation of communist China on the heels of World War II and yet more Chinese civil war. Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about ambition to create essentially the next stage in human evolution, a new species growing out of humanity. Those don't sound like very modest or limited approaches. And I guess we just really won't know.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, counterfactuals are hard, like you said, and one very quickly gets off into really deep waters in speculation. There were contemporaries and there have been scholars since who suggest that Trotsky, by all indications, might have been even more radical than Stalin in the tempo that he wanted to achieve. Think of the slogan of permanent revolution. Trotsky also, who dabbled in so many things in his intellectual life, also spoke in almost utopian terms that are just astonishing to read. Utopian terms about the construction of the new man and the new woman. And that out of the raw material of humanity, once you really get going and once you establish a system that matches your hopes for the future,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The expectations of Marx that the revolution would take hold and be successful in a developed country played a role here as well. Russia, which compared to the rest of Europe, was less developed even before the First World War, is in a dire state after all of the ravage and the millions of deaths that continue even after the war has ended in the West, that leaves precious little in the way of structural restraints or a functioning society that would say, let's not do things this way. I think that in retrospect, that special role carved out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical development. Allowed for people to step into those roles and appoint themselves executors of this ideological vision. So I think those things play a role as well.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of it comes back to the ethical grounding that we mentioned earlier, the notion that ethics are entirely situational and that any ethical system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality, a particular material reality. And that leaves the door wide open. So I think that that aspect was present from the very beginning. I think that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And either executed or sent to the gulags, the uncertainty that this produced was enormous. Even loyalty was not enough to save people. The stories Sojanitson's Gulag Archipelago is full of stories of dedicated communists who find themselves in the gulag and are sure that some mistake has been made. And if only Comrade Stalin would hear about this terrible thing that has happened to them, surely it would be corrected and nothing like this would everyone else by contrast accused of terrible crimes must there must be some truth behind that. So, you know, talk about ways of disaggregating a society, ways of breaking down bonds of trust. Lasting traces on an entire society that endure to this very day.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that would put you next on the list suspected of having less than total devotion to the state. I think one of the things that also is so terrifying about the entire process is even total devotion wasn't enough. The process took on a life of its own. And I think that it might even have surprised Stalin in some ways, not enough to short-circus the process, but the notion where people were invited to denounce neighbors, co-workers, maybe even family members, meant that ever larger groups of people would be brought into the orbit of the secret police, tortured in order to produce confessions. Those confessions then would lead to more lists of suspects of people who had to be investigated.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This process and how neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night and people would be wary of talking about it. Resistance At least in these urban centers, was entirely paralyzed by fear when, if one had somehow found a way to mobilize, somehow a way to resist the process, the results might have been different. There's an astonishing book. I mean, there are so many great books that have come out quite recently even on these topics. Orlando Figus has a amazing book called The Whisperers that traces several families, history in the Stalin period. And it's a testimony to how a whole society and some of its most intelligent people got winnowed again and again and again in that process of negative selection that we talked about. The lasting dislocation and scars that this left and the way in which how people were not able to talk about these things in public.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The terror had a variety of victims. There were people who were true believers and who were Bolsheviks, who were especially targeted by Stalin because he aimed to revenge himself for all the sort of condescension that he'd experienced in that movement before, and also to eliminate rivals or potential rival power centers and members of their families. And then there were people who simply got caught up in a process whereby the repressive organs in the provinces were sent quotas. You have to achieve your quota and maybe even better yet overachieve your quota, overperform. That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies in the age of the terror. What's so horrifying is the way in which a whole society stood paralyzed in this”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have testimony to this in the case of people who later became dissidents, like Lev Kopolev, who wrote in his memoirs about how he was among those who were sent to enact these policies, and he saw families with the last food being taken away even as signs of starvation were visible already in the present. And yet he did not go mad. He didn't kill himself. He didn't fall into despair because he believed, because he had been taught. and believed at least then that this was justified. This was a larger historical process and a greater good would result even from these enormities. So I think that this was quite deliberate.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it was both things, right? I mean, there were not only sins of omission, but also sins of commission. Incidentally, one should add, I don't think for Stalin it was personal. These are people who are very remote from him. Never coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way, attributed to him is the quote that one death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic. I think he in action certainly acted in a way that would vindicate that. But the process of collectivization was not just a bureaucratic snafu following unbureaucratic snafu. There was the mobilization of communist youth, of military, of party activists to go into the regions and to search for hidden food, to extract the The food where it could be found”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside does damage and not least of that is this phenomenon of a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized will be winnowed again and again and again sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. And this pattern, incidentally, gets transposed and in tremendously harrowing ways also to the entire group of Russian intelligensia and intellectuals of other peoples who are in the Soviet Union. They discover similarly that to Be independent, to have a voice which is not compliant carries with it tremendous penalties, especially in Stalin's reigns of terror.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, right, there's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole and which is supposed to have accurate statistics. All of this is founded upon a foundation of sand. That's inadvertent. That's not an intended side effect. But what you described in terms of the internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural society was absolutely not inadvertent. That was deliberate. The doctrine was you bring civil war. Now, had there been social tensions before, of course there had. Had there been envies, had there been differentiations in wealth or status? Of course there had been. But a deliberate plan to bring”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And the outcome here is a horrific, man-made famine, not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well some of the implications of this case study in how things look in the abstract versus in practice. And those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or pretifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to have vengeance visited upon them.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By contrast, if you are an employee of a factory-style agricultural enterprise, the incentives run in very different directions. And the joke that was common for decades in the Soviet Union and other communist countries with similar systems was we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. So even labor, which is rhetorically respected and valorized in practice is rewarded with very slim rewards. And the last point, immobility. The collectivization reduces the mobility of the peasants who are not allowed because of internal passports to move to the cities unless they have permission. They're locked in place. And got to say, at the time and afterwards, that looked a lot like feudalism or a neo-feudalism in terms of the restriction. On workers in the countryside.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source