Rethinking the 20th-century intellectual legacy - with David Rieff
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Which 20th century ideas should we carry with us into the 21st century? And which of them have become obsolete? We have discussed these topics during a live event with David Reif, a prominent American writer and journalist. The discussion was held on March the 1st at Pan-Ukraine Space in Kyiv and was organized by Ukraine World, Pan-Ukraine and Thinking in Dark Times podcast.

My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko, I'm a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. My co-host is Tatiana Uharkova, a Ukrainian literary scholar and author of the French language podcast L'Ukraine Face la Guerre by the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. We are both lecturers at Kyiv Mahill Academy, the oldest university in Ukraine.

So, let's begin.

I'm very happy to present here our very good friend and one of the most brilliant intellectuals today. Those intellectuals who are courageous to come very often to Ukraine and live here and travel with us to the frontline zones. David Reif, please welcome. David is an American journalist and writer.

who has spent a lot of time as a war reporter and he speaks a lot about the different experiences of the war and in particular in Bosnia and he speaks a lot about the connection between the Bosnian war and our struggle against Russian invasion.

David was recently accepted as professor honoris causa at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, which is very also important for us with Tetiana because we are teaching at this university. And Tetiana Oharkova, who is a Ukrainian literary scholar and volunteer and journalist and very, very active in the French information space and francophone information space.

Tetyana is a specialist in French literature, but not only. And we are coming to you in several months with our book, which will be called "Je t'aime, ma vie," that we wrote together with Tetyana, who doesn't know I'm her husband. So please welcome. And last but not least, let's introduce Volodymyr Yermolenko, who is the president of PEN Ukraine,

Ukrainian philosopher and writer, volunteer, and also my husband as well, and very active in commenting on what's going on here in Ukraine in many languages, and making all this intellectual debate with many countries possible. So please welcome Volodymyr as well.

So, our idea was to talk about the 20th century. And when we come up with this idea, the book that I personally had in mind is "Thinking the 20th Century" of Timothy Snyder and Tony Judd. I think it's one of the greatest books which is, you know, analyzing what happened in the 20th century.

Those of you who don't know, this book was when Tony Judd, a great American historian, was dying, was actually in the process of dying. You probably all know Timothy Snyder, and he's very often our guest here. But this book was made when it seems that major 20th century ideas, and primarily the post-war ideas, the ideas of post-Second World War are still valid, which is...

The criticism towards the power politics, the criticism of racism, the criticism of the idea of, you know, that this, the, of the idea of social Darwinism, that the strongest has the rule, and the criticisms of everything which was connected with the Second World War, meaning the conservative revolution. The idea that, you know, we should go very deep into the past, make something great again.

Now, David, it seems to me that all these ideas are under a big question mark, both in America and in Europe. What is your take on it? Well, I share your admiration for the book. I knew Judd fairly well. And Snyder did a brilliant job of finishing the book, in effect, which is what he did, taking the sort of outline of...

And the chapters that Judd had been able to... Judd was dying of ALS, ELA, I don't know what's your... And by the end couldn't speak, but I think Snyder was very faithful to his ideas. And as I say, did a very brilliant job. I do recommend the book. However, I do think also that the book is, just as Valeria says...

It's very difficult to read that book in the same way in 2025 as when it came out, what was it, 25 years ago, whatever it was. I think that the 20th century is very curious because on the one hand, it's alive in a way that is sort of strange given how long ago it was. For example...

i'm struck always when people talk about uh the russian war on ukraine and the west's responses to it in terms of munich or molotov-ribbentrop and i try to imagine munich was in 1938 that is to say 38 62 and 25 uh well there you go um almost 90 years ago and yet

That's what we reach for. But imagine if in 1900, the only political example that came to people's mind for the crisis of the moment was 1810. It's quite inconceivable. So on the one hand, the 20th century seems very far away. And on the other hand, it's much closer than normally it should be. Because why are we still talking about

I mean, if you'd said to someone in 1900, you know, well, really, you need to think about this thing that happened in 1810, they would have looked at you as if you were insane, and quite rightly so. But we find it perfectly normal to talk about these events that in the case of... I'm sorry, of Munich, was really so long ago. So there is a...

There's a strange loop about the 20th century that the 21st century can't seem to shrug off, to stop wearing, to stop being oppressed by, to stop I don't know what. And that's one element. The other element is, look, all of the whole international system that is now collapsing

was built on the ashes of the Second World War. That's just historical fact. That's not a controversial statement. So the entire financial structure, for example, the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the IMF and the regional banks, this was all set up in the end of the Second World War. The UN system...

was completely the product. It was actually formulated during the war and it was agreed to just at the end of the war. And the idea was to never again have what happened in the Second World War to happen. And so you had a whole architecture of security, of various forms of relief and development

And in the case of the UN, you also had the fundamental task, the greatest success of the UN, that the UN is a total failure as a peace and security institution. And we knew that from the late 1940s when the so-called military council stopped being effective because of the Russian-US conflict. Because the idea had been in 1945

with the founding of the UN that there would be a great wars of aggression would be punished by international coalitions organized by the UN. That was the point. And the end of the Cold War, I'm sorry, the beginning of the Cold War put paid to two crucial things. That which people tend to know about because of all the debates about interventions of the last 40 years.

And the other thing, which if anything is even more important, which was the idea immediately after the war, in the wake of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nuclear power would be controlled internationally by the UN. And there was a great debate in the end of 1945 and through 1946 and into 1947 about whether the Americans would give up their bombs

and put everything under the control of some international body. The international body was formed, but it didn't have any power. And it was a total failure. The one great success of the UN was decolonization. It was a decolonization machine.

And a great friend of mine who was one of the people who presided over decolonization, a British diplomat called Brian Urquhart, whose memoirs I highly recommend to you, was one of the people who did that. And basically, all of Africa, much of the Middle East and much of Asia,

was decolonized under UN aegis. Not everywhere. The UN is not responsible for the decolonization of India. It played no role in it. That was the Indians freed themselves. But in Africa, certainly, this was true. And so I think that the dominant ideas were not only a rejection of what you speak of, I think, entirely accurately as

as various forms of, well, absolutist ideologies of various kinds and blood and soil ideologies of one kind and another, which were, by the way, blood and soil ideologies were very present in liberation movements in the first half of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. It's not, blood and soil has never been the pure prerogative of the right, historically speaking.

But those ideas were poisoned by Nazism. Nazism for half a century, maybe even 60 years, you could even say, till 2010 maybe, were, those ideas were in, they were in eclipse. The intelligentsia for overwhelmingly move to the left,

It was to some extent left even before, but there were certainly important right-wing intellectuals all over Europe and to some extent in the US. And then succeeding on to, and this is the last point I'll make here, the decolonization machine was the human rights machine. And the idea was that we lived in a new age of human rights that the Nuremberg trials in which the

Nazi leaders who survived, who didn't, were for the most part judged and for the most part executed, were that this was the beginning of a new world of international justice. Now it was supposed to operate in tandem with the UN and it never really did exactly. But it did to some extent. And even very late in what, in the

in the time of the primacy of these ideas, that is to say in the 1990s, the time of Rwanda and Bosnia, you had debates about intervention and accountability. And people still thought there were tribunals about Bosnia. And there was the creation of this international criminal court, the Rome Statute, as it's called, which was supposed to

in a sense, revive these ideas. And unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have worked. I think 9-11 played an enormous role in absolutely reversing the course of things. And I think the other thing that may not be as vivid here in Ukraine or in Poland is migration.

Because migration calls into question fundamental issues of identity. Who's native, who's foreign, what culture is, what language is even. I mean, if you go to Brussels today, half the people don't speak either French or Flemish. They speak English because they're from Pakistan or from wherever. So if you're a native speaking Fleming or Walloon, what do you think of that?

Thank you very much. David, these are some insightful ideas. We are talking in Kyiv.

We are talking in Kiev and in Ukraine actually. In all these descriptions you provided, let's talk about ideas linked to this geography as well. Because at the same time, the 20th century we are talking about today is also a century of the Soviet Empire.

in this part of the world, in this country, in this city as well. And you were talking about this architecture of institutions, which we all know, United Nations and the century of human rights, etc., etc. But I would say that most of the century in this geography was not the century of liberty, of human rights,

of punishment for crimes or for compromising or just judging ideologies like Nazis ideologies. So we left, I mean, in this geography, we left 20th century thinking that a lot of crimes were not punished. I mean,

I mean all these Soviet totalitarian crimes, a lot of judgments were not done and a lot of fights for human rights were not accomplished, right? And this is a problem. And you also mentioned that this big part of this intelligentsia in Western societies, there were leftists for many reasons, for many inner reasons for these societies.

And we do have some problems with Volodymyr, with many other of our friends when we argue abroad about why communism was a big tragedy and why the absence of the judgment on this ideology is problematic today. So because this type of thinking was considered to be an alternative to all critics of Western society. So what are your takes on this? So we have to take into consideration this geography as well, right?

Yes, absolutely. And you probably even have to take into account the reluctance of people here to think about the communist past, not just the reluctance of outsiders to do so. I've been very interested in the Bikivny Forest. And one of the things that struck me most as I've tried to interest people here in Ukraine about the forest is how much they don't want to be interested in it.

You go to this forest and there's no marking, clear marking. There are no toilets, so there can't be bus tours. Of course, if it's two or three people, the guardian will let you in to their home and you can use the toilet. But you couldn't take a distinguished group of people there without making sort of provision that they can get to the petrol stations.

you know, a thousand meters or 800 meters down the road or something. You, I, uh, we did a reading of some of the poets who were buried the other night at the Corvus theater, the actress, Talia Stefanova and myself. I read the English house, just the sort of backup. I mean, it was her show in both senses of the word. Um, but yes, of course, all these things don't

Don't register in the rest of the world and so much so of course that there's the famous well the the famous problem which I think it's only thanks to people in this part of the world that people in the West are Western Europe and North America are aware of which is the double standard about communism and Nazism for example in New York in the 90s there was a bar called KGB and

the height of irony, it was thought very funny that you could have a bar called KGB and there were sort of old hats on the wall. And it was just, I mean, nothing else about it had anything to do. The owners weren't Russian or Eastern European. The food had nothing to do, the drink, et cetera, et cetera. It was a kind of hipster bar for a while on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. You could never have a bar called the SS. No.

You just couldn't. It's not possible. It would have been closed in a day if someone had tried that, to do that in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And no one would have gone there, by the way. It would have also been, even if they'd let it stay open, it would have been a commercial failure. Because people don't think the SS is funny, even the most oddball ironist. Whereas communism is thought to have had good intentions

originally, and therefore, because it had good intentions originally, it can't be condemned in the same way. And that's been, I think, the problem once the countries of the former Soviet empire became either literally independent like yourselves or functionally independent like Poland or other countries such as the Czech Republic, etc.

You had a big problem saying, convincing people in the West that what happened here was just as bad. And that hasn't completely worked.

And it's worked more than it did at the beginning. And by the way, I mean, I know these are not names people in Ukraine like to think about, but American intellectuals, I should only speak there, were highly influenced by the arrival of people like Baryshnikov and Brodsky and others, and Limonov for that matter, who were at the time...

Well, I think Brodsky and Baryshnikov remained anti-communist. They were Russian nationalists, but that's a separate conversation. But Limonov maybe not so much. But they were the first people who spoke of communism as evil to people on the left. That is, of course, there was this discourse on the right in the United States and other places, but the discourse didn't exist

on the left, at best people said it was a disappointment or people talked or they were Trotskyists or they talked about actually existing socialism as the word went as opposed to the thing. And when you would say to people, well, you know, actually existing socialism is socialism and they didn't want to hear it. And some of these Russian and they were Russian, not Ukrainian, not from other parts of the empire.

With the exception maybe of a couple of the Lithuanians. I don't know how you count Miłosz or Thomas Wenzel, a couple of other people like that. But they shifted the conversation, but not enough, as you can see now, frankly. I mean...

I realize we're not going to talk about, I mean, you can ask any question of me and I presume of Tatiana and of Volodya that you want, including the ghastly stuff that's just happened in Washington. But, I mean, that's not what we're talking about. But some of the ability to think, give Russia the benefit of the doubt, is the heritage of these ideas, in my view. It's also interesting how it also...

has an influence on the way how we talk about decolonization because that's a huge gap between the way how we think about the imperialization, decolonization from the Western and from let's say global Southern point of view which is which very often are opposed but they can really put in the same basket if you take the leftist Western discourse and global South leftist discourse which says okay

We started decolonization, decolonization started around the First World War, it continued with the Second World War, and it was all hypocritical, we need to continue it, but at least the impetus is there. Well, in our region, the reverse is true, because the Second World War brought more empires and not less empires here. We have the history of re-imperialization and not de-imperialization.

And therefore the whole kind of context of thinking is different because, for example, our thinking is that empires is not only the question of the past but probably the question of the future.

which suddenly we see in contemporary America. We were thinking that it's the case of contemporary Russia, maybe China, maybe something else, but it's now the question of contemporary America. So in a way we were kind of better prepared for the idea that empires strike back, empires come back, and

Well, the reading even of the end of the First World War is not the reading of decolonization because you have decolonization maybe in the Central Europe, you have the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire, but then you have re-imperialization if we're talking about Eastern Europe, and we have re-imperialization if we're talking about Middle East.

So basically the British and the French going into the former imperial territories of the Ottoman Empire and created the, probably contributed to the creation of the current wounds as well. Unquestionably contributed to that. But, you know, in this way, let me continue with this thinking. Maybe to understand what is happening better, we need to understand better the 20th century.

Sure. Well, I mean, the first quarter of the 21st century, it seems to me, has been the blowing up of everything of the second half of the 20th century. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, all of these dreams have come to dust in one form or another for all kinds of reasons. Among them, as you rightly say, in my view, the re-imperialization of the world. And a lot of...

I'm not someone who tends to think that language is dispositive, but sometimes language really is a prophylactic against thought, as a friend of mine used to say. And one of those is the multipolar world. And we were supposed to think that the multipolar world, certainly using the example of Western European well-intended bien-pensant people, I don't know how you say that in English,

But, you know, the well-meaning, politically liberal, enlightened, emancipated, blah, blah, blah. And of course, all of the Global South, all of the intelligentsia, artists of the Global South, 'cause you can count on these fingers the number of right-wing major poets, writers, artists in the Global South after 1930.

There are a couple. Borges would probably be included, some of the greatest. Nicanor Parra, the great Chilean poet, the aphorist and moralist who was the kind of Latin American equivalent of Ciro, a man called Gomez Davila. I mean, but they really are, you know, you really can count them. It's not, there aren't many. And for them, of course, the multipolar world is interpreted as being...

world in which finally the world of the American Empire, the view is the Soviet Empire, ha ha ha, collapsed while you were the living disproof of that particular hypothesis. But the idea was before, I mean before the full-scale invasion, I mean of course you experienced things from not just 2014 but before 2014, differently going back to Budapest.

But the view, the enlightened, in inverted commas, view was that we get rid of the American empire, the last surviving empire. This was the narrative. And then we'd have this multipolar world. And the implication was this multipolar world would be more just. Well, ha, ha, ha. You know, it turns out what people meant by the multipolar world was the restoration of spheres of influence.

And Trump's policy vis-a-vis Ukraine, leaving aside all the barbarous sadism of it, is if you strip that element away. I don't think you should strip that element away, but you still have to see all the elements. One of the elements is simply the old realist dream that will have spheres of influence, call them empires, call them preponderant states. I mean, you can use any international relations term

Rhetoric you want and that's what a lot of people and not just these very very radical counter-revolutionaries in the Trump administration Trump himself Vance particularly Vance because that's is some of you may know very connected to Orban into these various think tanks in Budapest and very influenced by what the work they do but

I first met Vance in that context, for example. I mean, in the context of these people who now work in these places, Americans, these are right-wing Catholics. So we've got the return. What we have is, as you say, not this emancipatory multipolarity

but rather the return of various empires. So back to, we were talking about, you posited, I think you both posited quite correctly, that in terms of what ruins we're living in, we're living in the ruins of the second half of the 20th century. But in terms of what we're going back to, well, we're going back to 1913 is where we're going back to. We're going back to a world of conflicting empires and empires

interests, which will be united, by the way, as the world of 1913 was, by international trade. The first globalization didn't take place just now. It took place in the 1880s through to the First World War. There was, you can have conflicting empires, all this nonsense that, you know, countries that have McDonald's don't fight each other and all

All this stuff that was being sold in the 1990s is sort of gibberish, op-ed gibberish. That's not true. But what you can have, of course, is a whole international trading system. And what's very interesting, and Trump may break this with all his tariffs, but what's been very interesting up to Trump has been the fact that while the United Nations system has collapsed, the international justice system has...

sort of incarnated by the new ICC, the International Criminal Court, has disappointed these ideas in the UN about humanitarian intervention, the so-called responsibility to protect doctrine that was passed in the aftermath of Bosnia and Rwanda. All of these are failures. The international trading system has largely stood up.

People obey judgments of these trade courts. They may defy judgments of the ICC, but they don't. When these international trade courts rule, more often than not, their rulings are heeded. Let's talk about...

Let's talk about Europe and the United States. It's extremely actual problematics now when we see divorce between the United States and Europe, at least in terms of security issues. It's pretty evident today.

You are from the generation, and your mother was from the generation which were extremely fond of European intelligentsia, European intellectuals. And this was a kind of very interesting dialogue between Americans on one side and Europeans on the other side, and specifically with French people.

Susan Zontag was extremely fond of French literature and we did read her articles about French authors and this dialogue was something very important during a couple of decades, right? So this is maybe not what is happening now. And maybe let's talk about what's happening now.

what's the difference between the 20th century and the 21st century in this relationship between United States, I mean, new continent and old continent, but in Europe? - In the specific case of my mother, my mother made her early reputation, her early essays, in effect interpreting European high culture to Americans. These various filmmakers, critics,

novelists. She was very Francophile and Franco-centric, so her focus was on, was more on France than anywhere else, although she read Spanish and Italian, and she did not, however, read German, which made things a little problematic in terms of what was going on there. So figures of the same period who were very important in the German-speaking world, like Uwe Janssen,

You know those people were not people she knew She would have written about she was interested in writing about Salah not Heinrich Bairn, etc but I think for her generation and maybe even people born 10 or 15 years earlier like Mary the American novelist and critic Mary McCarthy France was the sort of center of the imagination and

And that was something that had been going on really since the 1920s with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and those people in the famous, you know, Hemingway said, all good Americans go to Paris when they die. You know, and there was a certain sense of that. But in my mother's case, it was this new post-1945 culture, the nouvelle vague in both cinema and the novel culture.

the critics like above all about but not only about the filmmakers Bresson and Godard and others and so I mean she went on to do other things but I mean she she made her career her reputation in her late 20s and early 30s as a

On the one hand, as an interpreter and introducer, that's not an English word, but you know what I mean, of French culture in the U.S., and as an esthetician with articles, with these famous books, the essays about aesthetics of various kinds, which are obviously influenced by intellectual currents in Europe, but are not Europe-focused in the same way. I think that that was a...

That didn't last past about the 1980s or 90s. I don't mean for people of my mother's generation. They probably continued to think this way. But

I don't think American writers starting in the 90s, people who then would have been, who would be 50 today but would have been 20 then, and certainly not younger generations, are particularly interested in these things. There is also, remember, the political downgrading of high culture in the West through what

we call woke. I've just written a little book on this subject, but it's basically an idea that high culture is actually an artifact of various forms of oppression, of patriarchy, of white supremacy, et cetera, et cetera. And that what you need is the unrepresented to have the central say, the central voice. And that mostly they're not speaking as individuals,

so much as being as representatives of their group, which is where we come back, to come back to Valeria's point, where we come back to the similarities between, if you like, pre-1945 Europe, because this is in some way...

Blood and soil idea. There's the inherent genius of the lesbian the black the whatever you I mean now it's all fragmented That's a whole other argument to be made about that, but it's not for today Maybe some other time maybe about the relation between between consumer capitalism and these ideas but

But I think, so I don't think Europe, I think of people in the US, and maybe to some extent in Europe too, look at culture, they look at the global south more than anywhere else because that's politically laudable. And in my view, what this has given rise to is kitsch. And I've said, I've written in several places that high art can coexist with schlock art.

I don't know if these terms are familiar to you, but it cannot coexist for long with kitsch because kitsch is self-praising and moralistic. Kundra has a wonderful definition of kitsch. He had many definitions of kitsch, but the one I prefer is where he says kitsch is where you have an opinion that makes you feel better about yourself or think better of yourself.

And to my mind, that's what's going on in the culture of the West today, which is, to my mind, why if you here in Eastern Europe and people in places like South Korea and Japan can avoid being laid low by this particular virus,

it's more likely that interesting high culture is going to come from here or from South Korea. So we already see it in cinema, by the way. I mean, the most interesting films are being made in Asia. I don't think that serious films have been the kind of films that used to be made in France or in other places. I don't know enough about cinema in Eastern Europe and Ukraine here to know whether that's true here or not. But I think that right now, at least the

that people like my mother, where my mother died in 2004, I think that they would feel quite out of place in New York and quite at home in Kyiv. We welcome her very much in some alternative life. We will ask one last question, me and Tanya, and you wanted to add something? Yeah. I have one question, but you go first.

because it's a continuation of this topic. So it's interesting how we come back to the old French-German competition. And I will try to explain you how, and I will also try to introduce Eastern and Central Europe into the debate. So let's remember what happened with the French after the French lost Franco-Prussian War. It was 1870.

And it was the last of the non-Republican government in France. So finally you have the Third Republic, the collapse of the Second Empire, of the Napoleon III. But then there is a huge reflection in France of why we lost the Franco-Prussian War. And the reply was, well, we lost it because the Germans were much more systematic and much more scientific.

So the Germans did history better than we do, the Germans did the positivist science better than we do, the Germans did sociology better than we do, the Germans did industry better than we do, etc. And then there was this positivism turn in France, which is very interesting, very important.

But then coming to this French admiration, which Susan Zontag had, but also quite a few other Americans, but also the Germans. And then you have French theory in the United States, and then you have people like Derrida and others are very, very welcome in America.

And I was asking a question, why? And I think the reply is that this intellectual climate in France in 1950s, 1960s, was everything against the system.

everything against the kind of very strict science. So it's like everything against this Husserlian way of phenomenology is a strict science. No, we do completely the opposite. We do the anti-system. And even the systematic theories like structuralism was very unsystematic.

And I think that kind of gave you a sentiment of freedom. So finally we can combine whatever we want. We can combine cinema with literature. We can combine the reflections about art with the reflections about medicine, for example, as the beautiful book by Susan Zontag, Illness as Metaphor,

And then France also was a refuge for very controversial thinkers. So you suddenly have an interest to Dessart, you suddenly have people like Sioran whom you knew personally, you suddenly have Céline, anti-Semitic but still adored, you suddenly have Nietzsche.

So Nietzsche, the revival of interest to Nietzsche was thanks to Italians and the French in the 1960s. For Germany, it was completely out of the way. What is happening today? And this was our topic, by the way, with Tim Snyder all the time. There was a bunch of Eastern and Central European intellectuals, which was very important, but still...

not very present in the Western thought. I'm thinking about Kundera, I'm thinking about Czeslaw Milosz, I'm thinking about the Solidarność, Polish Solidarność thinkers, and I'm thinking about Ukrainian dissidents who are actually saying, "Okay, let's come back to the idea of values and truth," and of course of Havel, "of values and truth as realities, not something that you can relativize everything."

And it seems that now is the point, now that the postmodernism went to the extreme and became a reality, now this should be a reply. We should be saying, okay, these are Central and Eastern European thinkers who can help us with it because they were really moral and ontological realists and they can help us with this relativization of values and everything.

And suddenly you have a completely different thing. And again, coming back to the Germans, you have Carl Schmitt who appears.

and you have all this conservative revolution who appears. So Vance is really a Carl Schmittian person, and Carl Schmitt is a person who says, forget about the law, forget about rules. There is a sovereign who imposes himself and who acts as an exception to the rules. And this is what Vance, Musk, Trump, Curtis Yarvin, and all the rest are saying right now. What do you think? No, I think that's right. I think the...

I mean, the thing is that in Eastern and Central Europe, for all kinds of obvious historical, self-evident historical reasons, liberalism in the old sense, the 19th century sense, I mean, didn't get replaced, didn't die. Smart people continued to be loyal to it, to think it was...

better than other systems. I don't mean literally left-right liberalism in that sense. I mean in the broader sense that you could have what today would be considered conservative strains, but it's still liberalism. You don't have that. That's gone in the West. And I think there is a, as we used to say in first-year philosophy classes, an objective correlative.

and that is that political liberalism has no answers whatsoever to the political challenges of the 21st century. None. It doesn't know how to deal with migration. It doesn't know how to deal with globalization. It doesn't know how to deal with social services because of the demographic transformation. It has no answer at all. So if you look about people of the age of most of the young people in this room, they're attracted either to the radical right or the radical left.

We saw this just in the German elections where the two youngest cohorts, the very youngest voted for Die Linke, the heir to the old East German Communist Party, and the next cohort, 24 to 32, I think, voted for the AFD, the hard right party. And I see that in France where I spend a fair bit of time that the rallies of

the equivalents, the Assemblée Nationale on the right and the La France Insoumise on the left. It's the same. You see young people, whereas you don't see that many. You know, the crowds in the, you know, at a Macron rally are middle-aged. And I don't think that will be different if Mr., what's his name, if some center-left party is revived under the young Luxembourg

So it's very difficult to have artistic and cultural and philosophical liberalism when political liberalism seems so bankrupt. And that may be the difference, that that's not the experience here. And the last question, we were talking about culture.

And you published recently this book about the woke culture, so-called woke culture. And we had these conversations about to represent the underrepresented and we tried to talk about the Ukrainian context. I do remember the phrase you told to French writer Emmanuelle Carrère during our visit to Kherson.

you were discussing woke culture and we know that you are irritated by woke culture, by woke people, so you're... Yes, irritated, so you don't accept it. And...

But for us, this question of represent the underrepresented, this is existential question because if we talk about Ukrainian culture, so this is about underrepresented because when we talk about Ukrainian culture and somebody talks about Malevich or whatever, so he used to represent Malevich for many decades like,

Russian avant-garde artists. And there are many other cases like that. So we have this debate here in Ukraine. And I do remember that you told that day to Emmanuel Carrère that I don't like woke people, but in Ukrainian case, I think they might be right. So what makes Ukrainian case so different from

from what you and maybe in a broader way. So I also remember when I've been this summer, last summer in talk with conversations in France and I do remember one American lady talking about American education today and she was literally crying

explaining that in the United States, in many universities, they don't teach anymore, as simple as that. They just talk about ideologies, about... So the idea, the objective of a student is to survive in this cancel culture and to socially survive and not to learn whatsoever about high culture, about anything. So you don't learn anything, but you are to survive socially.

in this vocal culture. So how important the problem is and what did you discover in Ukraine and what made you think that in the Ukrainian case we are still right? Well, I mean, first of all, I'll tell you the short answer is that when people talk about Ukrainian culture emerging from under the suppression

of the Russian Empire, the various, or the Soviet Empire, whichever empire based in Moscow you wish to choose. You're talking about high culture, and you're not rejecting high culture, whereas American woke and Western European woke is a rejection of high culture. But Valeria and I are about to publish in a Spanish magazine a very brief

interchange that we had privately over WhatsApp and we'll fix up a little bit but he makes an excellent point toward the end of his reply to me which is all about what Tatiana calls Tolstoyevsky and all the rest of it he makes an excellent reply which is he says in I'm paraphrasing you you are in a

You live in a culture where all hierarchies have been abolished. And so you want, in a certain sense, in your own culture, to reestablish some hierarchies. Whereas, you know, I live in the opposite situation. And that what I want is to stop saying that this group of, small group of indeed great Russian writers

are so much greater than everybody else i didn't say great russian no you didn't say i'm sick uh because i don't that part i don't buy but anyway and we could talk about that in the in a much less controversial context which i mean controversial in the context of ukraine which is celine because that's the right comparison it seems to me uh in terms of dostoevsky uh

the dilemma of Selene is the same dilemma as the Dresden. But, of course, Valeria is absolutely right. It's two different times, historical epics. I mean, we all know

that history doesn't go in the same space at the same rate in different parts of the world. And I suspect, to answer your question, that if I were Ukrainian, I would be of your opinion about the role of these things. We might disagree about whether X writer's that good or not, but that's a very secondary question. I mean, that's not the principal issue. So that would, I think...

That's a very interesting conversation that we have with David quite regularly and I do think it's very interesting. I do think it's very interesting and very profound. So, we pass the floor to you who wants to ask questions. We have this road, but maybe, yeah.

- Sweet. First of all, David, thank you so much for being here in Ukraine. I know it's not an easy journey to come all the way from the US. I don't know if you came from the US or elsewhere around the world. So my name is Anna. I'm Ukrainian, I'm Israeli, I'm Jewish, and I spent many years in the US, including working college campuses. And I wanna touch back on the question and kind of the topic that we brought about college campuses. The students are the future and they are the leaders of the future. And right now we see this woke culture. And my question is,

To what extent do you believe that it's been influenced by a propaganda if it's Russian propaganda Iranian propaganda that really pushed out on college campuses or to what extent is it's our responsibility as Ukrainians and also as former Soviet Union countries to educate more about the atrocities that happened it happened in the past here during Soviet Union era and Also happening right now. Well, I there I

I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. If you're talking about woke, the woke takeover of the universe of universities in the English-speaking world, because it's not just the US, it's the UK, it's Canada, it's Australia, it's New Zealand, it's all those countries.

And to some extent it's penetrated into the Protestant countries in Europe. You see some of these elements in Germany and in the Netherlands, particularly a little bit in Scandinavia. And my father, who was a very conservative writer and academic, used to talk about post-Protestant culture. And I think the woke thing fits in very well with post-Protestant culture. I don't think that has anything to do with manipulation

by Iran or Russia. I think it's possible. I don't know this for a fact, so I don't want to assert it, but I'm sure that some of the pro-Gaza, pro-Palestinian stuff has been supported by outside powers of various kinds. But that wasn't dispositive about woke. And so the conversation about

I mean, the woke thing has really deep roots in the culture. I mean, for example, you can't separate what I call the triumph of the traumatic. That is, everyone's traumatized by everything. I mean, I'm going to make this art. It's my next, I'll probably write a little book about Ukraine. But when I, at some point I'll write what will probably be my last major book about

which will be a book called The Triumph of the Traumatic, which is precisely about trauma culture and how it dominated. But that has nothing to do with the event. This has to do, for example, with the American wellness movement, with the fact that health has become deified in a certain sense, and anything that's an impediment to health has been, has been diabolized. You know, you can't, you can't blame this on the latest

events of some kind, this really deep in the culture. And there are even elements, again to use my father's formulation, a post-Protestant idea. You can be anything you want to be. You interact. Protestant idea, what's the difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy? You, the individual believer, interact directly with God. And to move from that to I'm whoever I want to be,

isn't that big a leap once secularization takes place. And I think you can... So I don't think that's the issue. I think in terms of the demonstrations of late that there has certainly been outside influence. I don't know that it's been dispositive. As far as talking about the crimes of communism, I mean, this is a battle people have been fighting for a very long time, and it's not seemingly...

all that much better. You have, as I say, now these rising... Everyone talks about the rise of the far-right parties. I'm very interested in the rise of the far-left parties, which seems to me a phenomenon that will undoubtedly revive some of these ideas and try to make them respectable again. Respectable in inverted commas. So I'm not...

I don't think the issue is woke. I think the issue is that there's a fundamental misunderstanding about communism, which is, it's what you might call the fallacy of presuming that good intentions mean one should be less severe about the results. And that I don't know how you get over. We reflect a lot about this, and we try to really...

I'll try to explain this, but this is another topic. Just a small reflection, you mentioned this traumatization. There is a book, a recent book by Pascal Bruckner, I don't know if you know it. Pascal was here half a year ago. "Je souffre donc je suis." "I suffer therefore I am." And I think it's very interesting because one short thought, I think 20th century,

is caught in a trap of thinking the history either through the eyes of the victims or through the eyes of perpetrators. And like there is two categories of people, either I make you suffer or I suffer, whereas the whole category which I would call pathetically the hero, which is not at all pathetic because hero in ancient Greek mythology is someone who challenges the stronger,

it's completely disappeared from the discourse. And I think, therefore, we have this absolutization of the trauma and victimhood and the competition of victimhoods. Thank you. I would like to roll back to politics. So you said that liberal politics is bankrupt now. That's why people look at recent elections everywhere to hard right and hard left. But don't you think that actually it could be

explained rather with bankruptcy of representative democracy in the age of social networks because social network user wants to have simple answers on very complicated questions and traditional politics looks boring from that point of view and complicated and too many letters and hard right and hard left have

the simple answer: "Let's kill these people" or "Let's send out these people" or "Share everything" or whatever. And it's very easy to use as a bait. And also, as Romanian, a very dangerous precedent shows us that there are state actors that participate in local and national elections.

via social networks. So maybe something has to be done with traditional democracy. Well, I actually would put it the other way around, to be honest with you. I mean, I think that the social networks prove that Republicans, I'm not speaking of the American Republican Party, I'm speaking of Republicans in the classical sense, were right that democracy is really dangerous.

And that people, and here I go back to my, one of the people who taught me how to think, Emile Cioran, you know, I mean, I don't consider myself on either the left or the right, although I suppose as a pessimist, I have to not be on the left. But, because I don't see how you can be a pessimist in the way that I am, and I don't mean a disabused optimist.

But I think it's, I don't see how you can be a progressive and have that kind of pessimism. So even though I can't say I identify with the right, if I've got to pick one or the other, I guess I'm stuck on the right. But I don't, I think the problem of social networks is to the contrary, that everybody's getting a voice. And that before social networks, in what you call representative democracy, whatever you want to call it, it's one perfectly good way to describe it.

that the voices of all these people didn't have to be listened to. They could be suppressed or suborned or in some other way dealt with so that you would not get leaders who actually reflected the horrors of the mob, you know, as, again, I would put it. So, no, I don't think that. And I also think that if liberal democracies...

would even address these issues in a courageous way, they might find themselves better. And the good example is Denmark in this continent. The Danish left, the center left, accepted the fact that migration, unlimited migration, was a real problem and addressed it. How successfully you... I don't know. I don't know enough about Denmark, but I know enough to know that

That's not a country where these very extreme parties have been able to prosper. And I view that as the fact that here's actually liberal democracy trying... Now, it's a very small, very rich country. It doesn't have the same problems with globalization that bigger countries have. I mean, I realize all that, so it's not an entirely fair example. But I don't see how you can have... And policing the web...

You know, frankly, the technologies are always going to outrun the censors sooner rather than later. I mean, maybe there'll be some, you know, maybe there'll be times, but, you know, these efforts in Germany and in the UK to control certain kinds of racist speech, they're not going to work. I mean, they work a little bit, but they're not a solution. They're a stopgap. And the problem with a stopgap is...

it's fine to have a stopgap if you have a solution in the wings but if all you've got is this doubt gap well you're screwed um frankly hi hi my name is andre uh thank you for this um discussion thank you david for coming to kiev for being here to sharing your thoughts

I think living during the war is a tough time, but I think it is like a mental hurricane because it requires to reassess everything in your life and be ready to see the new reality, new future.

And it's pushed a lot of people of their age to be the most... like, to try their best and to try to be in their best. Because there are no other time to be like that in your life. And I think...

like President Zelenskyy coming to Washington and being able to talk honestly and it's also the person who is living during the war and it's very visible. And I think what's happening now in Ukraine pushes a lot world discussions and push other people who are not living in Ukraine, not seeing all of this, to reassess their values.

My question is, do you think people who are supporting Ukraine actually going through transformation, through revisiting their values, their vision of the world, or just more compassion and support in terms of, it's not us, like we are in the safe place and these poor people require support, but we are fine and nothing will happen in our lives.

it's an excellent question um unfortunately i think it's the latter uh my mother actually wrote a very interesting book that in this class i'm co-teaching in media studies class with uh roman veritalnik uh we've actually read it and i wrote a preface for the ukrainian edition of this book it's called um the book is called regarding the pain of others and was published by this uh ist i think it's called publishing house last year

And we're looking at this book, and the point is, the book is about the limits of empathy, basically. I mean, that's the real subject of the book. I mean, there are lots of other things in the book, but it's basically...

about how empathy is both unsustainable over the long haul for other people, it's called regarding the pain precisely of others. There's no problem of keeping your focus on your own pain or the pain of your family or your neighbor. But how long are you going to be able to sustain empathy? So I think when you ask about transformation, I think it's a terrific question. I do think that

What transformation there is stops fairly soon among most people. Look, a few people have come here to live. A certain number of people have fought and died. That American who was reburied just now, you know, they certainly were transformed, were, and those who are alive are transformed by it. And I think, you know, and I'm here partly because I think it's mainly, I mean, I'm

I'm both, you know, I didn't have to come here. I'm no longer, I used to be a working journalist, but I'm, I'm now a right. I write my essays and my books and I've been lucky enough to make enough money in my life to do as I please. I certainly am not, you know, I didn't, nobody's paying me to come here. My enormous hotel bills are my own. Um, that's, uh, but, um,

But I'm here because I think this is a just war, and I think the only other one I ever saw was Bosnia. And the only other two I know about are the ANC's very unsuccessful war military campaign against apartheid South Africa and the independence of Bangladesh. And those are the only four I can even think of in my lifetime. And maybe there are one or two I've forgotten. And I've covered a lot of wars, I assure you, and most wars, both sides should be in The Hague.

the leaders on both sides. Yeah, maybe one side's a little bit less horrible than the other, but a just war, at least in the very rigorous Catholic just war theory sense, which is the tradition that I subscribe to, belong to, if you like, has incredibly rigorous standards for what constitutes a just war. And I think Ukraine meets and exceeds all those standards.

So, you know, there are people who have these senses. But the kind of thing you're talking about, which is empathy, sympathy, isn't it terrible that this Iskander fell and killed a family, you know, et cetera, et cetera, that prisoners, these prisoners were tortured or executed in the field, that can't last. It's too, there are too many things. And look,

You see, it's hard. The key to the title of my mother's book is the plural, others. If it were another, maybe you could focus on it. But it's not another. It's Gaza. It's Sudan. It's DRC. You can't do it in numerical terms. Because listen, I don't believe in these kind of moral hierarchies.

And I don't think they're either useful or they're certainly not sufficient, and I don't even think they're useful, frankly. But, you know, if you want to do just numbers, well, sure, a lot more people have died in DRC than have died here. So what? I don't consider that dispositive of anything. But that's the problem, and the media...

can really only cover one story at any given time so when gaza happened as you all know better than i do ukraine disappeared from the front page of the when you scroll to look at your pick your international newspaper uh it wasn't there anymore the le mans people whom i know very well here said that their traffic just plummeted it's not doable that way

And also, empathy is a depoliticized and demoralized sentiment. And it always does border, come back to that Kundera definition of kitsch, on kitsch, because don't you feel good that you're sympathizing with Ukraine? And you can put a little blue and gold emoji on your Twitter feed. It makes you feel so warm and toasty about yourself. And that's neither nearly as moral as people think.

nor is it, unfortunately, sustainable. My name is Varvara, and I'd like to address the beginning of this discussion, which you've been talking about Soviet Union and communist ideology being normalized on the West. And I remember how...

I bumped into this piece of opinion that after the World War II, communism has been somehow legitimized in the world. As for Soviet Union, appeared to be a country which also fought Nazism and was a victor in this war. And after this, communism had the right to be in the world.

And it's been much lighter than it was before because in the beginning of 20th century there have been some persecutions of the communists, of its organizations. For example, in 20s or 30s in America there have been this loud case of scriptwriters in Hollywood. But after the World War II communism has some kind of a right to be even though there is a Cold War going on.

In 2015, in Ukraine, there has been a new law, bill, that is supposed to be contending and forbidding the symbolics of Nazism

also communism ideology. And back then, before the full-scale invasion, it had been raising some kind of discussion whether it's right to prohibit Soviet symbolics or not, as far as it's a part of history. And it was also a discussion in Ukrainian society too. And contemplating about that, I've been thinking about what we can do to put Nazism, fascism and communism in the same place.

and thinking about the nature of authoritarian ideology, it appears to me that there is always some kind of utopian idea that is built in every kind of authoritarian ideology. And it appears to me that we can use this approach to kind of delegitimize communism in the world nowadays.

So I'd like to ask you if you have any clues about, any thoughts about what kind of rhetoric we can use to kind of delegitimize communism, to show the true face of it to the Western audience, especially for the Western youth.

Just a historical point. Be very careful with your timelines here. It's not true that the Hollywood scriptwriters were persecuted before 1945. It all took place in the late 40s. There was a persecution of communist agitators after 1918 in the wake of the

with the Red Panic of the immediate post-World War I period. But actually, the 1930s were a period of enormous communist militancy in the United States, including the shutting down in 1935 of all the West Coast seaports by a communist union. So I don't think you can just say historically that communism got a kind of...

that this is all a sort of 45 thing. There was a tremendous anti-communist moment in the United States. It's just that it didn't last. And as I say, the... Now, it's true that people got disenchanted with the Soviet Union, but not in the way that, in my view, they should have, which is to say that this was a terrible system. Instead, they said it was, as it were, a disappointment. So you have in the Western left...

kind of migration from the Soviet Union to China, from China to Cuba, from... I'm not necessarily getting the order correctly, but anyway, from one communist state to the other, which was supposed to exemplify true communism as opposed to actually existing communism, which admittedly had been a disappointment, but... That's what happened. And unfortunately, that never stopped. And I don't think...

It's not today, unfortunately. Now you have the added, going back to something you said earlier, you have this alliance between the hard left and Islamism, which is the latest wrinkle, particularly in France. I think it's at its most advanced. But it's true in America and Canada and other places. But, I mean, the problem is that how do you...

Here's this idea that's supposed to be so noble, so as you rightly say, utopian. If you're an anti-utopian like me, as my master, Sion, taught me to be, and Samuel Beckett, the other person, although I only met him, I didn't know him.

um, you know, if you're, if, if, if, you know, your entire view of the world is basically anti-utopian, which is what my view, if you boil it down, it's just, I'm having some long, pointless argument with Kant and, uh, you know, but, uh, uh, but people can't do without utopia or most people can't. So to attack Nazism and communism on the basis that it's,

Utopian seems to me a strategy destined to fail because simply utopia, as Erasmus pointed out, as everybody has known forever, is just we're wired to be attracted to it. And you have to be a strange kind of misfit not to be, frankly. And you also probably have to be privileged in certain ways. So I don't think that's the way. And I think, I mean, everyone...

Look at, for example, you have this Russian propaganda, I mean the Russian propaganda right now. And it's everything. It's the Battle of Poltava and it's Stalin and it's Alexander Nevsky and it's, you know, folk dances in Bakudia and it's,

And everything is sort of mixed up. And it's all sort of supposed to make you whatever you feel. And the former flag of the Soviet Union is now called the victory flag. And instead, it's on the tanks when they're in parades and sometimes even when they attack. They've learned not to do that, thanks to your FPVs. But I think this is a problem that...

We've so far failed to crack. It's just as simple as that. We've failed to crack it. You in this part of the world have done more to address it than anyone else. I mean, there's no question about that. And the influence of anti-communist dissidents, including Russian nationalists, at least shifted the conversation. But not enough, I'd say. Hello, my name is Piotr.

so many questions, but let me reflect on the issues of communism and Nazism and why the communism stayed a little bit unpopular and Nazism of course not. First it was the Holocaust that was revealed after the war

and Gulag was revealed a little bit much later. So that gave the little bit difference and that gave the wrong perception that the Nazism was actually more cruel than Communism itself. And the second is actually that Second World War. When you see it as a war between the colonial powers, the old ones, France and UK, and the new ones, Japan, Italy, and Germany,

The outcome was that two anti-colonial powers, United States and Soviet Union, that being the force for good, in this sense, created the wrong perception that communism, also being kind of a universal, secular Christianity...

gave the opinion about communism as being something different than nationalistic-oriented Nazism. So that's maybe the reflection. But my questions are, actually, can I have two? First, I would love to hear some of your personal experience with Emil Czoran.

He wasn't a great internationalist analyst, only one essay on Historia and Utopia, actually on Russia, so maybe you could share some experience with that. And the second is actually the book of Susan Zontag on photography. And I would like to ask you for a kind of reflecting on that book. In a face, what we are experiencing, maybe not with the photography, but with the video feeds,

of the actual death that we see from the frontline. You know, the drones dropping grenades, people committing suicide. I mean, this war, contrary to the previous ones, even the Iraq-Afghanistan, is very well seen, in a detailed way, you can observe death.

From the Second World War, from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Vietnam, you can only have glimpses of the nature of war. Right now you can see it, you can very easily go through Twitter and see how it looks like, how the death looks like. Could you reflect on that? I mean, on photography of Susan Zontag.

Well, first of all, I think your point, what you say about universalism versus particularism is true. Of course, you can't become a Nazi unless you fit a certain number of conditions. You have to be...

You have to be German. And even the Nazi movements in, well, Charon, Romania, the Codriano movement, or de Grelle in Wallonia, or other figures of this kind, they...

They excluded, in principle, more people than they could possibly include. And I think that is the other element. And I think it's a very valuable addition and corrective to what I say. Because that's also the problem with getting rid of it. Because people are going to say, but wait a minute, wait a minute. The SS only allowed just these...

eight meter tall blonde men in whereas you know the KGB you could be from Mingrelia in fact you were from Mingrelia quite specifically if you happen to be called Lavrentiy Beria at the time but

So it is a problem, and that's, again, one of the universalist appeals, and that I don't know what you do with that. It seems to me it just makes it even harder. About Sion, I knew Sion in the last, I'd say, 20 years of his life.

and he was already quite well known. He still lived in this, he lived in a series of garret rooms at the top of a very grand building near the, for those of you who know Paris, the Place de l'Odéon, where the Odeon Theatre is. But he lived at, although of course by then he was making a little money, and he lived in these literally garrets, what they used to call

chambermaids rooms, in the day, in other words, where the servants lived above the rich people who lived in the big flats. And he had acquired, leased, somehow, and the toilet was not in the house, it was down the hall. And his companion, who had been an English teacher, a lycee teacher of English, Simone Bouet, she was called,

And she was very much, but he yet, he was somebody who was very ironic about his own pessimism. I have a theory that real pessimists are very cheerful, that it's only disappointed optimists who are gloomy.

This is my experience both of Sion and of Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett just thinks, "It's so awful, it's kind of funny," when all is said and done. So I'll tell you a story about Sion. We used to walk in the Luxembourg gardens together, and he would tell me stories, basically stories. The one thing he did not talk about, although he didn't deny it, was his two years in Berlin in the Hitler period.

He acknowledged it. He was not one of these people who was rewriting his past in any way. But I always felt about him that that experience had been so cauterizing, so deeply wounding, that he just thought, to hell with politics. I'm just not doing this anymore. And although he was quite perturbed by the Islamic immigration to France, and that was a very long time ago,

because he almost i mean this must be 40 years ago if it's a day uh and he said he said in 50 years paris uh notre dame will be a mosque he didn't anticipate it would burn down of course um but basically his irony was that very cheerful irony of oh sorry pessimist was a very cheerful pessimism of beckett who was always making a joke of his own pessimism a famous beckett story

Also in the Luxembourg, told me by the Irish poet Thomas McCarthy. They're walking. Thomas McCarthy says, it's a beautiful day. Beckett says, yeah, very beautiful day. And Thomas McCarthy says, kind of day that makes you glad to be alive. Beckett says, oh, I wouldn't go that far. And Sion had something of that. So he would tell me these stories because they persecuted him because he was a very old-fashioned guy, so you could find his telephone number if you searched.

And these Romanian students would come to Paris and they would say, I've been following you. You're my master. I'm going to kill myself because that's what you say in your book. And Sion would think, oh shit, and try to find them and talk them out of it.

And so this was the kind of, as I say, this cheerful... I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, I wouldn't go that far. And they, I mean, those are the two only real genuine pessimists I've ever known. I think the third is me, frankly. But it makes you very cheerful because you think, fuck it, you know, okay, it's terrible. So what, you know, why are you going to... You know, you're gloomy because you think it should be better.

I'm not talking about a war, I'm talking about one's view of the world. My mother's book on photography is an attempt, I think, to really talk about what's transformed by this kind of image making.

And I think she saw something even though she only lived to the, I mean, there were cell phones, she died in 2004. So there were indeed cell phones and all that. But you didn't have this thing, you didn't have what you refer to. And I think, you know, very justly, which is, we certainly can't talk anymore about sanitized images. I mean, all that stuff that these sort of idiot leftists in places like Yale, like Samuel Moyn, talk about. Sorry, he's a friend of Snyder's, but...

He'll forgive me. But they talk about how it's the surveillance state, but you don't see it. Well, here you see absolutely the cruelty as if it could be the 17th century and those images of people hanging during the 30 Years' War. I think her idea was to talk about what the image did, both in terms of what it compelled, but also what it meant

eliminate it from the way we look at things. A phrase I'm always very struck by, as she says somewhere, of course, if you had a choice between seeing

a wonderful painting of Shakespeare and a photo of Shakespeare. Of course, you put the photo, pick the photo, but why is that? And the book is in a sense a prolonged meditation. The second book, the one that was published just now, actually, on photography, it was published by that Harkiv Photography Group a couple of years ago.

But I had nothing, I didn't, they didn't contact me. But the others, The Ghost at the Banquet, which book is it? This is a publicity of our book about essays. There you go. It's just published and we arranged that it drops precisely at this point. It's a little advertisement in the middle. Every program has to be interrupted. I think the second book, which was very influenced by her time

in Sarajevo when she directed the Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, was to say that, you know, what were these images? Because we were all obsessed with sending out images of the war. And of course, this was long before everyone was a journalist and everyone was posting their journalism, particularly video.

I think that book is about precisely the thing. There was a question earlier about empathy that I think that it's about the limits of empathy and the photographs are made to elicit, war photographs are made to elicit compassion and horror, but they have a shelf life. They have a limited time where they have this effect.

Just a small advertisement from our side. So those of you who speak English, you can listen to a Volodymyr podcast with David on Ukrainian Ukraine World Network. And those of you who speak French, you can listen to my podcast with David on our podcast Ukraine Faced with War.

and everybody who speaks Ukrainian and who is interested in both Siohan and Susan Zontag, you can listen to our Ukrainian podcast with Volodymyr. We talk about Siohan and about Zontag in two different podcasts in Ukrainian. So it's advertisement time. Because I spoke French with him. Did he use Choran or Siohan? He used Choran.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. But I learned, I mean, I read him before I met him and I, he was called Sion when I started to read him and I,

didn't ever change, but you're perfectly right. Sure. There's one all the way in the back. Okay. Good evening, everyone. So I have a question about geographic allocation that we talked before. So we thought that we live in a world where we have social media and quick access to the world press, and we would understand what's going on in the world better.

But, for example, a couple of weeks ago, Judy Vance in Munich said that the biggest problem in Europe right now is immigration.

And we would receive different answers about this issue from German people and from the people from Eastern Ukraine, sorry, Europe, and from the United States. The same with, let's say, historical background, when we're talking about communist threat. For example, in Kyiv we don't have

Lenin statue anymore but we have bars with Che Guevara for example right so this the point is depends what happened with you in historical time it's gonna you know it's gonna have the how it's called

It depends what happened with you in history, that's what's going to create your political views in the future. And in most times you cannot control that. As I said, it depends what happened with you before, that's going to create your political view in the future, if you understand me correctly. Thanks. And we'll take the final question and you will answer both of them.

Thank you. My name is Lesya and I wanted to ask a question. We spoke a little bit today about the Ukrainian identity and decolonization process and us trying to separate ourselves from Russia and greater Russian culture.

But in this conversation, I would like to raise a question about American identity and what is happening to it right now. Because while watching yesterday's banter that was supposed to be a press conference, I feel like American identity is losing right now one of its pillars, and it's being a good guy.

Because to me, well, when I was 15 years old, I got to spend a year in the United States, in Kansas, my senior year in high school. And actually, this experience has taught me that democracy is valuable, that freedom is a must for a person to be happy in this world and content.

And right now, and being good guy is an important thing too. So what is the future of being American? Thank you. The first question, my answer is sort of yes and no. Yes, of course we're formed by where we live and what our experiences are. But people, you know, Galileo said, and yet it moves. You know, one is both...

Part of one's you know, it's like that what you're talking about it, you know reminds me a little bit of the scientific debate about free will You know, it's yes, there's free will up to a point and yes You're formed by these things up to a point and then there's quite a bit at the edge that you can change And that people have changed. I mean inconceivable things have happened in the world both for better and worse and

But some for better. I mean, again, one must be, I mean, from my way of thinking, I want to be a pessimist, but not a cheap pessimist. And, you know, no one could have imagined 300 years ago that slavery wouldn't be the norm in the world. And then over a course of about 150 years,

There's still slavery in a few places in Mauritania and Yemen, a few places like that. But for the most part, it's over. This was inconceivable for the whole 5,000 years of human civilization. So again, yes, you're mostly the function of your environment, your class, your birth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, your gender, et cetera, but not always. Oh, gosh, the other question.

um look i have to tell you i start my intellectual wife outside my own family in latin america i worked i dropped out of university to work for a radical priest who was actually a yugoslav in fact but anyway he was his base was in mexico this was in 1970 and i left everything and just drove down to work for him and i stayed a year

And so, and I'm a lot in Latin America, and have been all my life. And if you look from the global south, the United States doesn't look like such a nice guy. And to be, you know, I remember thinking once that, of course, if you grew up in Prague, the United States in 1960, whatever, the United States seemed fundamentally benign. If you grew up in Santiago de Chile,

in that same year, the United States was the country that authorized the killings of your friends and family. So, first of all, I think one has to be very careful about perspectives, because countries can be several things at once, and different things in different orbits. In Latin America, sorry, the United States is an empire, it's as simple as that.

And it may not be as powerful an empire as it once was. And some of what it does is okay, but depending on the administration. But I don't think you can just say, oh, you know, there was this good country that got ruined by Donald Trump. I think to say that is not to look things in the face. There are many good things about the United States and those things will survive Donald Trump. But

This is, call it a counter-revolution or a revolution as you like, this is a very radical government. It's the most radical government the United States has had since, on the other side, Roosevelt basically rewrote the rules of capitalism during the depression of the 1930s. They have, I know some of these people, they are very serious people, not Trump himself who's crazy, but the people around him.

They've been thinking about coming back to power. The first time they were in power between 2017 and 2021, they didn't know what to do. They were incompetent and most of what they tried failed. But this time they've been thinking about it. All these think tanks have proposals. They have ideas about what to do with every department of government, etc., etc. And it is, again, I don't really care whether counter-revolution or revolution.

And it's a very, very radical government. And what the United States will look like, and speaking in Europe, what the European security architecture will look like, of course, is anybody's guess. Because remember, I mean, Friedrich Merz, I don't know if the new Chancellor of Germany will carry through on what I consider to be these very good statements he's made since his election. I mean, you never know about these things. But I mean, the...

If Trump continues down this road, then NATO cannot go on existing in its current form. It can't. Because you can't say that the Americans can have a policy of their own. For example, here's the consensus of the NATO countries, with obviously the exception of Hungary and Slovakia. But they don't count. They're not important countries in the European security architecture. There's a consensus there.

in favor of Ukraine there's a NATO consensus in favor of Ukraine if you're going to have the largest military power in NATO taking the opposite view you can't have NATO as presently constituted it's just impossible and I think this meeting on Monday between Starmer

I can't remember, is Meretz going, I can't remember, or Schultz, whoever it is, in which Zelensky will be also participating. I would bet you any amount of money that that's what they'll be talking about. Thank you, thank you very much. David, I finally understood the enigma of your smile. You're just a healthy pessimist, so it's fine, yeah?

And this was organized by Pan-Ukraine, Ukraine World, Ukraine Crisis Media Center, Tetyana Harkova and myself. And thank you so much for my colleagues at Pan-Ukraine and Ukraine World for helping us to do that. And please, a huge round of applause to David Ryf.

This was a podcast Thinking in Dark Times. My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I'm a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of Pan-Ukraine. I'm also the author of Thinking in Dark Times podcast. Our guest was David Riff, a prominent American writer and journalist. This was a recording of a live event in Pan-Ukraine premises in Kyiv on March the 1st, 2025.

the discussion was organized by ukraine world pain ukraine and thinking in dark times podcast you can support our podcast on patreon you will find the link in the description additionally you can support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas where we provide aids to both soldiers and civilians you can donate through paypal ukraine.resisting gmail thank you for listening stay with us