What matters during dark times? | Czyżewski, Shore, Pezuashvili, Yermolenko
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Do dictators have ideas? Do they rule by death and nihilism? Do they want to make us powerless? And do they succeed? Is today's crisis also our chance? This episode is an online conversation between Polish philosopher Krzysztof Cizewski, American historian Marcia Shore, Georgian writer Iva Pisałszwili, and myself, Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Jermolenko.

This event was held under the aegis of TELEMA project implemented by the Institute for Central European Strategy with the support of the European Commission.

And this recording is made on Explain Ukraine podcast. Explain Ukraine is a podcast by Ukraine World, an English language media outlet about Ukraine. You can support our work at patreon.com slash Ukraine World. Your support is crucial as our media increasingly relies on crowdfunding. You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas via PayPal, Ukraine.resisting, Gmail.com. You can find these links in the description of this episode. So let's begin.

Good afternoon, dear friends. I hope that you hear us and you can see us. My name is Andrei Luka. I am a writer and director of the Institute for Central European Strategy. It is an independent think and do tank based in Uzhhorod, in Western Ukraine.

I'm very glad that everyone is back to the work written right after Easter and ready for fruitful intellectual discussions. I'm pleased to welcome you today for the first webinar of the Dilemma series. The Dilemma is an academy of thought and a laboratory of ideas, but also in a very formal sense, it is a joint project implemented by several organizations from different parts of Europe.

the Borderland Foundation from Poland, the Institute for Central European Strategy from Urhhorod, Ukraine, Pan-Armenia and the Georgian Literary Association. This project is supported by the European Commission and started in the end of last year and will last for another year and a half. Our webinar today is kind of introduction to the offline meeting in Urhhorod which will take place in early May in Urhhorod and will bring together 30 intellectuals from seven different countries.

And now I would like to invite Veronika Cierzewska-Ponciliusz, the leader of the Dilemma Project, to speak to us in more detail about this work. Good evening. I'm so very happy and grateful that tonight we are starting the Dilemma Academy online presence with this webinar, first of our webinar series, and that you are joining us for this event.

I will just say a few words about the broader Dilemma Academy program so you know from where we are coming from, but not to take too much time from our discussions. So the Dilemma Academy program

dilemma is from the Dialog Mobile Academy was started around year and a half ago with a group of interlopers from Central Europe and the Caucasus region and our most important motivation and a neat and dream at that time was to create this very

for these two regions, but also other European countries to co-create and to share the original thought and art from the regions which are, because of the geopolitical situation, put in the middle of the most important European, but also global dilemmas.

What we felt that is really needed was this format which will take us out of existing structures and allow us to work together in different formats. So our academy is mobile because we meet in different places.

It has different formats of meetings. We have these mobile academy meetings, but we have also summer schools. We have a residency program supporting the members of the academy in developing their own projects and programs. And now we are starting also our online presence with this webinar series.

but also a website which will be

like online journal, which will happen soon. So I really hope that you will follow us and join us for different kinds of events, offline and online. Please follow us on our social media, which are just starting. And I hope to see you in person and in different online events of the Dilemma Academy.

Deva Runjuka, thank you very much for your introduction. I wish you a pleasant communication and maybe briefly we'll introduce our speakers today. So first of all, I would like to greet Marcie Shore, professor of history at Yale University and now at Munk School in Toronto. Probably you will also speak about this dramatic shift and change.

Her research focuses on intellectual history of 20th and 21st century in Central and Eastern Europe. We also have here Iva Pesuašvili, Georgian writer.

and the winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. We also are very glad to see Volodymyr Yermolenko, philosopher, writer, volunteer and the president of PEN Ukraine. And of course, Krzysztof Czerzewski, who is the founder of Borderland Foundation,

in Krasnogoroda in Poland, who is writer, philosopher, fractioner of ideas, culture animator and many, many other roles. And I'm very happy to see you, Krzysztof, and I'm glad to give the floor to you. So please start this first and very...

very important dilemma webinar and our start of internet presence of dilemma all over the world. Thank you very much, Andriy, and I'm very glad to be with you, all of you, for this discussion and debate. Under the title, and I'm sure you feel the irony under this title, The West and the Rest,

about the crisis we are facing between the decline of values and the crisis of culture. Usually in the past, we use this frame, you know, the West and the rest to describe our situation.

in both piles of the world, the Eastern one, which still had problems with autocracy and nationalism and some other problems with democracy and the West, which was clear that it was democratic, stable on the strong institutions and

And we are facing now the time when this title became ironical and

and the West and the rest. There is no anymore the West and the rest because we are on the same board of the Titanic, as Marcy would probably say, and frame it. Yes, all together. And I remember for many years when we had these discussions, you know, about Central Europe, the idea of Central Europe,

We were always facing this reflection from other side that

Don't idealize Central Europe. Don't tell that there is something like Central Europe in positive terms existing, that you are immersed in nationalism, you have the problems with democracy and so on. So don't make Central Europe idealistic. Yes, that was this common attitude to that.

And even during that time, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I always had in my mind this question, but maybe we also...

idealizing the West. That is that there is a common tendency in Caucasus, in our post-Soviet countries, in Central Europe to idealize the West and to

to think about the world like the West and the rest. And it came. For me, frankly speaking, the beginning of this reflection was the Yugoslav War, which was a big disillusion for us, not only about what's going on in former Yugoslavia, but about the...

position of the West towards this war and towards this conflict, that the West didn't have power, didn't have values, didn't have instruments to prevent this war, which was war of new borders, of new separations, new nationalism, and so on. And for many of people in the West, you know, this position of being nationalistic

in terms like Karadzic did, about defending their own borders, ethnicities and purifying, or at least wanted to purify the country from the others.

it became more or less normal, you know, for many people in the West. So for me, it was, you know, this alarming signal that there is no power in the West to prevent it, you know, in a very clear way.

And more and more of the consequences came of that. And I remember, you know, that debate we had about...

the position of Peter Handke at that time or intellectuals like Peter Handke or Kusturica who were relativizing the guild of Serbs of the genocide in Srebrenica or saying that there is no white and black

and everybody is guilty and everybody is killing everybody. So this is the war, you know, this is the war, you know, so everybody is guilty, everybody is shooting and killing. And it was the way of erasing the guilt, the responsibility,

for it from our reflection and so on. That was a way to undermine the guilt of self-nationalists, of genocide in Srebrenica and so on. And for me, it is not contradictory today hearing Handke

you know, supporting Russia against Ukraine and saying that, you know, the West is guilty for the war in Ukraine, that the Russians were legitimized, you know, in defending their identity and values and invading Ukraine. And Kusturica being on the Putin's side. So,

I see that continuation of all this, you know, all the time. And sometimes we only know these fragments, you know, of the positions of different people, intellectuals, messing our clear view, what the truth is, what the guilt is, what the responsibility is.

And we tend to undermine it under this term, nothing is black and white, but even more that something different is what they write as artists, as writers, as filmmakers, and something else is their political position.

or they stand in public life, in media and so on. So we should separate these two things. I remember our first discussions in Georgia when we initiated Dilemma, that it was very much about

the question what happened with us when we made this separation between beauty and goodness, this betrayal of Greek stand of unity between good, truth and beauty.

And I'm saying all this because my deep conviction is that we are facing all these mistakes and failures and axiom for many decades dominating our culture in the West.

And that this time for us is to make a big change in our thinking about ethical values, about culture, about this, what Greeks would say, phronesis, you know, this art of making a line between what is good and what is bad.

that of course we are not perfect people and we have our sins and weaknesses, nobody is questioning it. But something else is to develop an art of phronesis, of being aware about this line dividing good and bad.

And at least to know and to be aware when we are crossing it and having this critical capacity to know about that. Because otherwise, if we understand the world of intellectual life, of ideas, of culture and art as an autonomous kingdom,

which has its own rules and doesn't matter what do we do in public life, what is our stand with ethical values toward dictatorships, toward tyranny, toward propagandists, and so on. Then it comes as a big problem. And it has a big impact not only on cultural life, but on...

on our mind, on our common mind, which I see as a source for this tragic situation we face today.

So I would agree with Marcy and with Volodymyr who very often write about this time as dark times, referring to Hannah Arendt's statement. And I would agree also with Volodymyr that being in dark times means also a chance.

an opening window for a change. Because at least knowing that we are immersed in dark times means that we don't know everything, that we are in the situation of being challenged for creating new ideas, new ways out.

of darkness, that the old systems, you know, the old world doesn't work anymore for that, that it is our failure what's going on around us.

that our failure, not only as Arendt was saying, as facing these phrases from Germans after the Second World War, that we are ashamed being Germans, yes, and mercy after the second election of Trump for presidency,

was saying, I'm ashamed as being American, but I'm also ashamed as being human beings, or being the same as Arendt did, that I'm always thinking not only about the guild of Germans, but also about ourselves, who we are, the humans, you know, that makes all this possible. Because

Why is this universal attitude so important now? Because we are in the situation now where more or less everything is visible.

Yes, that we are living in time of a full exposure of what's going on in terms of evil and in terms of tyranny. Our tyrants, new tyrants, don't pretend to hide anything. They don't pretend to hide that they are fascists. They don't pretend to hide that they are instrumental businessmen or playing these games.

And we can see all these atrocities going on, on our eyes, on the screens of computers and medias. Nothing is hide. Nothing is hide in Gaza. Nothing is hide in Syria. Nothing is hide in Ukraine. We all see it. And we all understand that we don't have power, instruments to prevent it, to stop it.

to change it. So it is not about being manipulated, being people unaware of what's going on. No, it's very much about us, a majority of us, wanting this.

This kind of leadership, this kind of ideologies, this kind of attitudes to the others, to the neighbors, to the strangers. This is what Marcy was saying or writing, that more than half of the American population don't see fascism in pejorative terms. So that's nothing about to hide. So we have this time of full exposure

what's going on. And the question is why it is possible. What happens with us that these all can

happened and all powers, all belief in institutions, in courts, in law, in international law doesn't matter anymore so much.

So what would be one of the answers from my side to our discussion about that is about having people on the board with us. So from one side, we understand that they want it because there are some reasons they want it.

at least a big part of us wants it. But the problem, the source of this situation is very much because we lost somehow, I mean we, the liberal world, lost...

many of voters like that, people who believe in that, because we were never treating them seriously in terms of trusting them that they can be our partners in our most

avant-garde, most brave, that somehow it happened to us that we distrust so-called people, that we should rather develop for them a kind of pop culture

you know, pop products, easy, on the surface, not going deep, because otherwise they will not understand us. They will not be engaged. It will be too difficult for them. It will be too complex for them. They are too simple for that. It was this kind of arrogancy. It was this kind of distrust.

which has a damage, a damageful effect on our societies. Because my belief is, and my experience from the practices I do, is that everything should be built on the trust with people, with communities, with local communities, with on the grass, loose level, that we should believe that the most courageous ideas

can be discussed and proposed to them and can be implemented together with them. If we will

level of communication and treat people from above as knowledgeable class or any way we will call it, and trying to step down as artists and intellectuals, as politicians and others to communicate with them, something is lost from the very beginning. Because

Because this is a very false understanding of the situation. There is nothing like being above and being more knowledgeable and more experienced and then another class of being less knowledgeable and less experienced. Here in Central Eastern Europe, for example,

People have all this deep experience of what existence is, what politics is, what human nature is. Nothing is to explain them and nothing is to understand that we know more or better from their hands.

And I remember this moment of transformation in Central Eastern Europe, when we should step down from these ideas of democracy, of building tolerant society, fighting xenophobia and nationalism, to communicate with people.

And this stepping down, resigning from ambitious programs, from the trust, affected with distrust and with losing communication, with breaking this bridge.

which is still prevailing in our societies. So, saying all that, I want to make you think about a new culture we need, a new narrative, story we need, which will

which will erase this separateness and

And that's the way how to struggle. One of the ways, I believe, to struggle with growing evil we see around us and this is

The presence of evil is so visible and apparent of us. Marcy is developing the phenomenology of evil today. Volodymyr is saying about evil seen from the Ukraine perspective, which is not...

only an abstract evil, but it's a very specific evil which enjoys the impunity of evil from the past, you know, which enjoys not being punished.

which enjoys this situation of becoming a normal thing or accepted by majorities. A specific type of evil you can see from Ukrainian side confronting Russia. That you suddenly see this evil for many generations not being punished.

not being put in the court and so on. So it's a different kind of evil. We should also be aware about that. So it comes

It comes to our life again, to our language. You know, these words, I remember how surprising for Western intellectual was the language of Leszek Kowakowski, a philosopher, when he started to tell the presence of devils.

in 20th century, whom he and other people experienced in ghetto or in gulag. Yes. And I remember reaction of Tony Judd, very surprising, being very surprised that somebody in second part of the 20th century used this word, Davial. Yes. In a very serious way.

serious way. So it shows you that this presence of evil was to a certain extent erased from our consciousness, from our Western culture and reflection. So it all comes back and we now

a challenge to think how to face it, how to struggle it, how to find the ways out from this dark reality. So coming to

somehow to summarize my introduction, I would quote a few sentences from Hannah Arendt's essay on humanity in dark times when she's writing

The world lies between the people, writes Arendt. And this in-between, much more than as if often thought, man as individual or even man as humankind, is today the object of greatest concern. And when she writes about being in-between, it makes me think about

Another understanding of freedom, you know, which is less as autonomy than as interdependence. Being in between is more and more important.

People, writes Hannah Arendt, more and more people in the countries of the Western world, which since the decline of the ancient world, has regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms, makes use of this freedom and have retreated from the world and the obligations within it.

This withdrawal from the world meet not harm an individual. He may even cultivate great talents to the point of genius, and so by a detour, by useful to the world again. But with each such retreat, an almost demonstrable loss to the world takes place.

What is lost is the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow man. So I'm quoting these words because my feeling, deep feeling is that we are again in time when we should enter the space of in-between.

We should go out of our own oikos, our own homeland, our own hours, not crossing, even not crossing from one country to another. It's not about immigration, not about escape. It is about freedom.

Finding ourselves in the space in between when we are responsible in something more than our own concerns and interests and belongings. That this world in between is the kind of responsibility of something which goes beyond us.

our narrow interest, and also something beyond humankind even. Beyond human it means, you know, toward something what is unknown, what is unhuman, what is nature, what is maybe another dimension of our reality. So all kinds of beyond our own

It's a challenge for us to create this new story, to create these new ideas for the future, for the future community building, for the future practicing something together with people and making them engaged.

you know, in this in-betweenness. So living this space of

our own, which dominates our time now. I have this feeling that we live in the obsessiveness of what is our own, that America should be our own. But even when we quote this, never again, never again, after atrocities of Second World War,

The question becomes never again for all of us, of all of ours, or just never again. So once it was very universal and without any appendix, never again to every human being, to every nation, to every country.

But it became more and more because of the fear, because of these radical changes that never again for hours, for hours. And that results in new crimes, new wars and new tyrannies we are facing around us.

So this is my short introduction to our discussion and I'm very now eager to hear maybe Marcie first, how you would react to that, to this situation of being again in dark times, Marcie. Oh, thank you, Krzysztof. I'm happy to see everybody.

Yes, I always like to kind of beam some positive energy out to everybody. And I feel like it has been, it's been a very dark time for me, both as a Slavicist and as an American and as somebody who is watching my own country descend into this abyss.

Somebody who has left my own country and feels enormous amounts of guilt about this, I feel like the moment should be subtitled Vindication of the Neurotic Catastrophist. I was always the very neurotic, anxious one who saw the possibility for horrible things to happen. This is a kind of professional deformation if you're a historian of the 1930s.

Being a historian doesn't tell you what will happen. You never know what will happen. But it gives you a sense of what can happen. And once you know, you can't unknow. Once you understand the range of possibilities, there's no way to take them out of your mind. And so looking at my own country and just the heartbreak of what's happened there is

has been difficult. And as Shestov mentioned, this word we don't have in English, "Obnazhenia," this "everything is visible," this exposure of everything, which for me is one of the, in some ways, a very postmodern inflection of what we could call a kind of, let's call it a neo-fascism, you know, for lack of a better word.

It is something that both conceptually and technologically is very different from what happened in the 20th century. I keep obsessively returning in my mind to what Jan Karski went through to bring news of the Holocaust to the West. And I'm sure most of you listening know this story, but Karski, who was an underground courier for Poles,

He was for the Polish government in exile, who had been smuggled by Jewish friends into the Warsaw ghetto, who saw the transports to Treblinka, who himself had been tortured by the Gestapo, went through extraordinary lengths to take a report.

about what was happening to the Jews in Poland out of the country. It involved a microfilm and a tooth. It involved getting across war-torn Europe, getting to London, eventually getting to America. There's a very famous scene where he goes to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court justice is saying, I'm not able to believe you. And Karski says, Your Honor, are you accusing me of lying?

And the justice says, no, no, I'm just not able to believe you. And what the story that Karski was telling about what was happening to Jews in Europe was so fantastical and inconceivable that there was this delayed sense of people not being able to believe it, not being able to take it in. Arendt writes about this too, too.

And three years ago, when the full scale invasion of Ukraine happened, and I was talking to a lot of journalists then, and one of the questions that kept coming up was, how is this different from what happened in the Second World War? You know, and the first thing I told them was, was, you know, the internet, like now it's as if we have a live stream into the gas chambers.

Now we know everything that's going on in real time. We might not know some details, but essentially we know everything. Essentially, we're watching it. It's all in front of us. And so not only are we looking at evil and choosing whether or not to see it, because it is right in front of us, but there is also this attitude of Obnazhenia on the part of the tyrants.

Trump doesn't even remotely attempt to conceal anything. The mistake Americans made several years ago waiting for the revelations of the Mueller report to come out was thinking that these secrets were going to be revealed and that would unravel this tyrannical regime. But the problem, the pathology was not in what was concealed, but in what we had normalized.

what had been in front of our face and what we had normalized. And that's what we need to be shaken into seeing. And now I'm in this strange situation where, as Shostakov knows, my family and I had thought about accepting these job offers in Toronto for years. It is not something that happened suddenly in connection with the elections.

But the timing is such that for some reason it became an international media story that myself and my husband and our philosopher friend Jason Stanley were leaving Yale to go to Toronto. And so I've spent the past three weeks giving dozens and dozens of interviews to journalists. And what baffles me is that this

Really very banal story of a handful of professors moving from one good university to another good university, which happens all the time.

It's completely ordinary. People make mid-career moves all the time for all sorts of reasons, personal and professional. It's not particularly radical in any way. But that this seems to be the thing, for whatever reason, that was shaking, especially the Europeans, and everyone else here can tell me from the perspective of Europeans,

what this means, into finally looking at what's happening in America. And I'm having these strange conversations with these European journalists who are very smart, well-informed people who are asking me things like, well, do you really think that, do you think that, isn't the Trump administration, is there an argument they're really trying to protect Jews from anti-Semitism?

And I say, you tell me. You know, it's all right in front of you. You can see everything that I can see. Do you really need me to tell you? I mean, I keep getting these versions of the questions like, well, but this couldn't really happen in America. This isn't really happening in America. I mean, and I've had this strange feeling in these interviews, like I'm playing the role of the psychoanalyst trying to coax

Europeans out of this Freudian denial that liberal democracy could collapse in America. And it's a very surreal, it's a surreal feeling. I mean, perhaps because I'm an Arendtian, so I have this universalist inclination that, as Christophe said, I keep using this Titanic metaphor, that, you know, Americans are like people in the Titanic saying, our ship can't sink. You know, other ships can sink, but we've got the best ship, we've got the strongest ship, we've got the biggest ship, our ship can't sink.

What you know as a historian is that there's just no such thing as a ship that can't sink. The vulnerabilities...

you know, that lead us to evil and lead us to tyranny. They are inherent in the human condition. Nobody gets this magical pill of immunity against them. You know, Americans don't either. And so I've been in this surreal situation of trying, of talking to, spending hours and hours talking to journalists, just telling them in some sense to see what they're seeing.

It's not like I have secret information that they don't or that they don't have access to. You know, I can tell them what's happening in America. But as you said, everything is visible now. You know, there's nothing I can know that they can't know. There's a piece that Vasil Cherapanin wrote. I'm sure many of you, most of you know Vasil. He's a brilliant Ukrainian art curator, curator and author.

He wrote a piece for Eurozine maybe last year, I can't remember anymore. And he said Europeans need to learn to unsee in order, need to unlearn to unsee in order to learn to see again. And this is very phenomenological. Like, can we just take a moment? Everything is exposed. Everything is visible.

And so what does it mean to shake ourselves into actually seeing what is right in front of us? I mean, I think Vasyl's right that that is the task of the moment. And I think Volodya would have some thoughts on how Ukrainians being in this extreme moment are in a somewhat privileged position to actually see what's in front of them.

And this obsession with seeing, I mean, it goes back at least to Shklovsky and Ostranenia, the role of poetic language is to estrange us in such a way that we're shaken into actually seeing. It certainly goes back to Husserl, what does it mean to really see, to purely see? And I think that

That is where we have to start. We have to start by seeing, can we look at what is right in front of us and at least try to name it, try to recognize it so we know what we're grappling with? I think our advantage is that

that we have speakers, partners from front lines of the most challenging places and situations in the world.

wanting or not, Mercy became a frontliner living in America and Canada. And we have also Volodymyr, who is on the front line in Ukraine, and I'm sure he

He just came back from another trip to visit and to support soldiers on the front line, as usually the Ukrainian pen is doing all the time, this kind of work. So, Volodymyr, we are very curious to hear from you, you know, your perspective to these dark times. Thank you, Krzysztof. It's amazing to be here.

and amazing to listen to people whom I admire, Krzysztof and Marci and other colleagues. Look, I have a little bit different perspective, right? I have much more

optimistic perspective, and probably you do. It's strange that in Ukraine we usually, Marcia was telling about the psychoanalysis. Yeah, I have the impression that I am doing the psychoanalysis in Europe with people who are very much complaining about what is happening. So why am I optimistic? Krzysztof already said that, look,

I'm very much into this metaphor of darkness and I'm very much into this metaphor of chiaroscuro, which is darkness, light through darkness, right? I've written about it. I've made a podcast about it. And I think this is something that we can think about because chiaroscuro, you know, that chiaroscuro is a technique of painting, right? It's mostly Baroque painting.

people like Caravaggio and Rembrandt and Juan Honhorst and De La Tour. What I think is amazing about this technique as a way of seeing is that it's basically... We had recently discussion with Krzysztof about this, by the way, very interesting, with Asian partners.

And I think we both agree here that it's in chiaroscuro that you can actually see light. You cannot see light in painting like Michelangelo. Light is just there. It is just the air you breathe. You can only see light when there is darkness.

And not only you can see light when there is darkness, but you can actually understand that our reality is kind of formed with this light, is shaped by this light. And I think people who are going through the very harsh conditions like war understand it very well because war is making you go into the extremes, the extreme pain, but also extreme love, the extreme death, but also extreme life.

And this extremity, when everything becomes clear, yes, clear, but in a different way, not in this panoptic way, but in a very, very different way, I think it's very important. So why I'm optimistic? Because, I mean, yes, freedom now is in danger, but freedom cannot exist without the danger. So it's only the danger that makes freedom, freedom.

And we had, you probably heard our conversation with Tim Snyder about his book on freedom. And I think it's an amazing book. And my point about freedom is a little bit maybe different because I'm focusing not on freedom from and freedom to, but freedom despite. Right.

So this is my focus all the time. I always say that Ukrainians are producing this kind of freedom of despite. I'm sure that Georgians are producing this freedom of despite. I feel it in Georgia when I come to Tbilisi. And I hope I will be there again in June.

So because we kind of train our muscles, you cannot really have something, it's like the body, you train your muscles only with having obstacles. You train your muscles only when you need to overcome a certain challenge.

It's like a great idea of the romantic music once expressed by Slavoj Žižek, which I found very interesting, is that what is peculiar about the music in the 19th century is that it's no longer moving into this reality, Mozart-like reality that

You drink music like an air. You breathe it like an air. And it's like there. It's always there. Music in the 19th century always needs to overcome obstacles, overcome the obstacle of the material. And I think it's good for freedom. It's like training is good for our body and fighting against oppression is good for freedom. And therefore, I always say that, look...

The European civilization in the 20th century took only one pillar out of two on which it has been based. This is a pillar what I call Agora and not the pillar which I call Agon. So it's a pillar, the idea of conversation and not the idea of a fight, struggle and challenge.

And the problem is that the liberal thinking just set aside all this side of thinking which thinks about the challenge, fight and said, "This is all far right." Well, it's not far right.

Republican thinking was very, very good at thematizing all this story, all these concepts that basically you need to protect freedom, you need to train freedom. Freedom doesn't only come in conversation, doesn't only come in dialogue. There is a next thing about this. So, you know, I have some problems with the way how we tell the story of the 20th century. Because the story we tell usually in the Western universities is a story of victims.

And this is very, very good that we tell this story. But this story is not enough. You cannot only tell the story of the victims. If everybody were victims of the Nazism, the Nazism would not have been defeated. So the question of how you defeat the evil is a very important question. And we focused our conversation on two other questions, on the questions of the victims of the Nazism

of the evil, of victims of communism, and on the question of how to avoid evil. But we didn't focus the conversation on the question how we actually fight against evil when it is there. And basically why this story was spread in the Western academia, because it's a comfortable story. It's not a story of resistance. Because when you ask a story of resistance,

you start asking very difficult questions. Like why the Soviet Union, for example, won against the Nazis, of course, with the whole bunch of support from the West. But why the Soviet Union contribution was decisive, including the contribution of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians and others? Well, because the Soviet army was fighting against the Nazis without any respect to human life.

in the same way as the Russian army is fighting now. So this is what I call thanatocracy, the rule by the death. You basically do not cherish human life and therefore you sacrifice it in huge quantities. And this is one of the reasons why Soviet Union was successful against the Nazis. So in a way the Soviet Union was even more thanatocratic than the Nazis. And this is a very uncomfortable question because then you see

The victory over Nazism in the Second World War, and this is the perspective the Central and Eastern Europeans have, and this is a perspective very difficult to prove in the West, is that the end of the Second World War was not a victory of good against the evil, but the victory of one evil against another one in our part of the world, in our region.

And more to that, the victory over Nazism actually brought this impunity of evil in our part of the world, the impunity of communism, the impunity of Stalinism, which in fact created Putin right now. Because Putin is not only evil, but also the unpunished evil, as Krzysztof said, the repetitive evil, the evil that hadn't ever faced the justice system.

Why am I asking these uncomfortable questions? Because if you don't ask this uncomfortable question, then you don't ask the question what actually the resistance means, what actually the fight against evil means. Because it's very, very complicated. It's very, very hard. And here, again, to the beautiful metaphor of seeing, I'm not satisfied with the metaphor of seeing. And I... Why? Because...

There are two ways to respond to the metaphor of seeing in the Western metaphysics. One is by Heidegger and another is, again, by Hannah Arendt. So Heidegger says all the Western metaphysics was bad because it was all focused on seeing. And by seeing, we actually objectify the reality. We turn it into a Gegenstand, into an object. And then we kind of deprive it of life and everything.

And therefore we should invent something else and it should be hearing or something else. Well, Hannah Arendt says, well, this is probably true, but the opposite of seeing is actually action. Is bios politikos, is vita activa, is basically what Krzysztof was quoting, is being in the world, is acting as if you can change the world.

I'm using this phrase "as if" because it's a famous Kantian phrase "als ob Philosophie" - you should act as if you can do something, even if you think you can't. So basically the problem of this story of the 20th century that I described to you is, I think, this is one of the causes why

why we have this conversation today when we have Trump and we have Putin and this conversation very often in the Western milieu is the conversation of powerlessness. I feel it very much in Germany. I feel it very much in France. People already see that this is evil, but they feel that they are powerless. And here let me inverse the famous Václav Havel saying

metaphor. We're also living in the world not of the power of power, but in the world of powerlessness of the powerful. I mean, Europe is powerful. Even if it without the United States, it is much more powerful than Russia. Why are you so scared of Russia?

So I do think that our example, Ukrainian example, I also feel it in Georgia. I also feel it in the Baltic states. I also feel it with many of my friends in Poland, in Czech Republic. I feel that we have, we feel this power.

And I think it's important that people in America, in Europe, when they're facing Trump or facing far right also feel this power. This self-imposed powerlessness is a very dangerous thing. It's the first thing that actually promotes the advance of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

I think we can do something with it. I don't know what exactly, but of course we can oppose to it and Americans can oppose to Trump and Europeans can oppose to the new fascism and we all together can oppose to Putin and Russia. And this is what Ukrainian example tells us. But I think the reasons of this, you know, self-imposed powerlessness is

are actually very deep in the way how we see our history, our recent history. So maybe we should return, maybe our narrative not should be 20th century, but our narrative should be the 19th century, the century of big liberation movements, the century of springtimes of the people, the century of the new heroism. And the word hero, I repeat it again and again, I use this word often,

Not in a pathetic way. Hero in the ancient Greece means a person, a mortal being that challenges the stronger. He or she is a son of God. So the connection between the mortal world and the infinite world, the immortal world and the gods tell him, okay, here's the challenge. Proof. And I think this is the very simple, very pragmatic sense of the world hero.

So I will end on this, responding to the title that we use so many dark words here, decline and crisis, but again, from the darkness, there always is light. And the darkness is actually the way, the reality in which we can train the muscles of our freedom.

Thank you very much, Volodymyr. And it happens again and again to me that the hope comes from Ukraine. And you see my meetings, our meetings with Ukrainian friends, you know, when we have them in a residency, for example, here in Krasnogoroda, it's very often, you know, they are coming from the front lines with traumas.

But they have this power of giving hope, of being against any depressive thoughts and this strength, inner strength of not allowing themselves to be passive and immerse only in darkness is something that comes from Ukraine very often to us.

I would only add, when you are saying about having the possibility of seeing light thanks to darkness,

there's also having possibility of true thinking. And I think you wrote about this, that we start to think when we are in the dark reality, yes? That the darkness makes us to think and that's probably also the situation we should be aware about and take advantage of that as well.

And now I want to turn to Iwa, another frontliner. And I know that Iwa came back from the manifestation, another daily protest. Each day they are protesting in Tbilisi and not only against Ivanishvili's regime and so on.

So we are all in this in-betweenness of engagement. And it brought me also to think about the recent message we got from our common friend Irena Grudzińska-Gloss, you know, the person who...

who was protesting in 1968 in Poland against communist regime and went to exile in United States against a new tyranny, you know, in the name of activists in Columbia University and so on. So we have this very surprising but circles of continuing protests

action of protest, which we have also in Georgia in a very strong way. But all our questions and thoughts, Iva, coming to Georgia, are about how do you feel about

in that city, endless protesting and waiting for results, for change. Is it a hope that it can bring a change? What is your perspective to that? Hello, evening, thank you for having me. To answer that question, I am not that optimistic that our protest can change something.

the way we are protesting right now because there are lesser and fewer and fewer people on the main when you listen because some of them lose the faith in this process and we are against the russia and we must understand that like they are very strong and they have made all these steps like two or three years ago so i'm not that optimistic but

To give up, I can't give up because it's the only country that I have and I must defend it.

after this webinar I'm still going to the manifestation even though they are fining the people just for standing on the main street and it's kind of 1500 euros per person the deal what the government is sending to you if you are on the manifestation or they can beat you the police force etc but I want to start my like

I had a speech with this really strange fact that in 2016, after Trump's first election when he won, Oxford Dictionary, which is quite a conservative dictionary and they don't have this huge PR or marketing stuff, etc. They choose the word of the year and the word of the year was the post-truth.

It's not a kind of lie, but it's a truth in which you are engaging with the emotional way and you don't need a reality. You are just emotionally engaged with this post-truth. So it's kind of a new way to change the narratives for authoritarians and they are using it very well in the propaganda. For example, right now, two weeks ago,

There was a commission in the parliament of Georgia and they were interrogating the 2008 war. And they somehow concluded that Georgia was one to blame to start the war against Russia. So it's a totally new thing.

for me how to fight against something which was already truth but the authoritarian regimes are building another truth on it because someone does not need the real facts they need just lies what they can digest I mean the ordinary people

people. And another thing like to connect this with the United States, we changed our government in 2012.

And back then I was reading Philip Roth's plot against the America. Maybe you know these books that there also is this kind of post-truth thing in it that Delano Roosevelt is weak, he can't be elected anymore, so let's choose Lindbergh instead. Because why to collaborate with the Russians when you can collaborate with the Nazis?

like right now America is going through something like this and because America like

bacon of the freedom, or I don't know what to call it, the most democratic country is kind of weakening its democratic grasp. The small countries and small authoritarians, like in Georgia's case, Bidzina Ivanishvili, he uses this time of period to manipulate with the people and with the decisions. Right now,

Georgia is not an independent country or Georgia is not a country which is ruled by the pro-Russian government. Right now, Georgia is ruled by the Russians. And back then, when the truth was that Russians are enemies, for me, it was way more understandable because I knew that Russians

someone in the military uniform was the enemy of mine. But right now in Georgia, my enemy is the Georgian guy with a police uniform on it. My enemy is the guy in this fancy suit and fancy watch who must rule the country, but he is giving the country to the Russians.

So for me, this post-truth thing is kind of a new obsession of me, how they changed everything that was reality and built something on it. And maybe it is happening everywhere. It happened in the United States. We know that in Poland you have this far-right, ultra-right guy, right? And he almost won in the election, right? In Ukraine, right now Ukrainians are going through something...

which is not connected in the politics, but how in the world someone trusts that Ukraine started war in its own land and

they are the ones to blame, if not this post-truth, if not this propaganda. So these are totally new questions for me. Because when I'm looking back to the modern Georgian history, for example, from the 90s or '89, when we had the 9th of April, we paid for our freedom and independence with our blood. And how we can

erase all this and build something which is definitely lie. And to just give a small example of this post-truth and this propaganda, you know this vulgar European musical show, Eurovision or I don't know, it's not show but competition, like it's Eurovision and people are saying, the countries are sending their singers

So Georgian singer on this year's Eurovision went with a song named Freedom. And we know what the freedom means. But in for Georgian interviews, she translated freedom as a peace. So it's really small example, but it's how this propaganda works and how it can change meaning of everything. Yeah.

I don't know what to add. I'm trying to find ways to fight against it. Because... And very last thing. I went to the student manifestation. And there were like 50 students and hundreds of elderly or like millennials, etc. And I was asking myself, where are the students? They must be a main force. And they are a main force in Serbia, for example. But where are the students in Tbilisi? And they are in...

service in service like they are assistants in cashiers and I don't know delivery guys and right now in Georgia majority of us don't have a chance to think about existential things because really majority of us does not have enough food for their family and when I'm thinking about this it's like

When it happened that we lose the language to speak with them, when we close our eyes, when our government was bringing our country to this line of poverty. Because right now there is no language between us. I can't ask them to go to the manifestations because they are hungry. They must survive. And the surviving country is a lesser priority for them.

So yes, it was really emotional and I'm sorry, but yes, it's the all the ideas and thoughts I have right now.

So I just want to clarify what you said about translating freedom to being a peace, because I think all the narrative of the regime in Georgia goes along this line of keeping peace and showing that we are not like Ukraine, you know, and...

in Georgia. So it's this kind of manipulation they use to convince people that they should support the Georgian regime, who is keeping the peace or peacemaking, yes, against

against what's going on in Ukraine, but it shows also us how interdependent we are here in this discussion also, how relevant for Georgia is what will happen in Ukraine and what the war with Ukraine will bring to us. And it

It makes me thinking, and maybe this is a question I want to pose to you, about the understanding of victory. From the very beginning, we discussed it with Marcia and with many others, you know, understandings that Ukraine brought to our common consciousness, the nuance,

understanding of the term which is something else than just victory but paramot is like

And this is a new answer to that situation of not having the possibility of finding the way out of compromise, you know, dirty compromises and so on. There was no victory in the Balkan-Yugoslav war. There was no question about that. So now we have this...

at stake. You know, that we think about victory. At least they have in Ukraine this at stake in a very serious way. But if I would, because I think the dark time is also the time

courageous in our ideas for the future, to be more radical in our fight about new world, about new future, about finding new ideas and bringing them to the light.

that this is not time for compromising with the previous pastime compromises and so on. So thinking about when Marcy, when Volodymyr, when Iva, when you are thinking about...

being victorious in your fight, in your fight with Trump, in your fight with Putin, in your fight with Ivanishvili, or in your fight on the level of the society in America, in Ukraine, in Georgia. What for you, what would be the real victory, a real achievement of overcoming

this evil we are talking about, how we can imagine, even it could be kind of utopian, something idealistic, but without that, without this perspective of what we are fighting for,

you know, to abolish Trump, yes? Or we are not, Ukrainians not only fighting for... There is something else in all these fights. How you will define, you know, visualize the victory for your fight, Marcy, if I may ask you first?

What would be the victorious victory for you? Okay. So for me, one of the differences between looking at something like Stalinism and looking at our present neo-fascist moment is that there is no grand narrative.

There's no, you know, there's no, well, you have to, you know, break some eggs in order to make an omelet and we're going to eventually get to a utopia of social and economic justice. And one of the things that terrifies me looking at, you know, looking at both Putin and looking at Trump is that you're just looking into this nihilist abyss.

And there's not even, I mean, it's just pure destruction. I mean, I love Volodya's neologism of thanatocracy. Like you're just, and you're, Putin will burn through all his country's resources and bleed through his whole population until he's defeated. He just doesn't care. The lives of other people don't care. I mean, it doesn't mean absolutely nothing to him. You know, and this,

atmosphere of siopos volono, everything is permitted, it's a liberation that comes from not caring. When other people's lives mean nothing to you,

Then you have a free hand. I mean, after this grotesque meeting in the Oval Office, the Lord already knows how I feel about this because we were texting afterwards. Lindsey Graham, the senator, after Vance and Trump had just been shouting at Zelensky and telling him he needs to express his gratitude and he needs to say thank you. And Senator Lindsey Graham said,

went on television right afterwards and said, Donald Trump has just given us a masterclass in putting America first.

And I tweeted back at him. And Tim, my husband, said that I have to stop this rage tweeting. I tweeted back at him. I said, no, Donald Trump has just given us a masterclass in moral nihilism. And Lindsey Graham has just given us a masterclass in selling one's soul to the devil. People like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio know exactly what they're doing.

You know, they started out as anti-Trump as they know that they have crossed over to the dark side. And so looking at it's not just a question of, well, OK, we have these Western values. Maybe we want these more traditional Eastern values. No, there are no values. There is nothing. You're just looking into this moral abyss.

There are no first principles. And Trump's whole idea that he is the dealmaker is an open agenda of his attitude that all human interactions are purely transactional.

That there is no other category of relationship. There's no real love. There's no real friendship. You know, there's no truth. There's no lies. There's no good. There's no evil. There is just what is advantageous or not advantageous to himself at a given moment. I mean, so you're looking at this Obna Genia of the absolute absence of values, which is just terrifying. And this kind of nihilist abyss.

And here I'm going to sound like a kind of nostalgic Central European liberal, but I've never found a better answer. And Shostakov talked about our friend Irena Grzeginska, who when Irena texted me the other night that she had been at these demonstrations at Columbia University,

I was so moved, I mean, because as most of you know, Irena, who is just one of the most wonderful people on the face of the earth, she was out there, you know, as a 19-year-old, you know, and she went to prison in 1968, you know, and now she's a grandmother, you know, and nearing 80, and she is still out there, you know, and when there's a, like, when there's a call to be out there, she will be out there, like there are

There's such a thing as good and evil and right and wrong. And that you might misjudge that at a given moment, you might pick the wrong strategy, but that's different from giving up on the notion that there's any kind of distinction entirely. And Irena, of course, comes from this tradition that in Poland developed into Solidarność.

And I think the intense empathy that so many of my Polish friends who were veterans of Solidarność had for the Maidan came from an appreciation of how both extraordinarily fragile and extraordinarily precious that moment of solidarity can be. That moment of the transcendence of the self

when you realize that you are willing to stand for somebody else as well. Yurko Prohasco talked about this in an interview I cited in my book, that miracle of revolution is that sense, that experience of solidarity that so many people never experience in their lifetimes.

I mean, I very rarely engage publicly explicitly as a Jew. I mean, I've always thought of myself as a kind of bezrodny cosmopolite, you know, generally alienated from everything and flitting around the world.

But in the case when, you know, when the guys in balaclavas who are operating according to the principle of praizvol, which is another word we don't have in English, this kind of arbitrariness that's always already tinged with tyranny and terror, when they took away Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia who had been active in the pro-Palestinian protest,

and just disappeared him illegally into this prison in Louisiana on the basis of no crime and on the basis of nothing. There was a petition that some of my Jewish colleagues started called Not In Our Name that was Jewish faculty

saying that, you know, if we accept this administration's disingenuous and cynical pretext that it is protecting Jews from anti-Semitism, if we accept that as a justification for abusing the rights of other people, instead of standing in solidarity with those people whose rights are abused, we have morally bankrupted ourselves.

And I felt like it was really important to make that statement. And it was one of the rare occasions when I was willing to kind of step out and explicitly as a Jew make that statement. Because I don't see any other antidote to that kind of tyranny apart from solidarity, which is always fragile and always precarious, but is still the best thing that we have.

I'm addressing this question to Volodymyr. Can you reflect on the meaning of being victorious for you today in Ukraine? How you may understand it? What it would be? Look, first, I'm very grateful for you, Krzysztof, to basically for the first time

directing my mind to this paradox of "Peremoha". And I remember the exact place when I heard you saying this, by the way, also orchestrated by Andrii Lyubka and his wonderful team and this Reopen Zakarpattia forum in Zakarpattia.

So I really thought a lot about this. And I can say that I remember giving a big speech based upon this and, of course, quoting you because it also tells us that, look, we sometimes better know ourselves thanks to the voice of the others and thanks to the seeing by the others, like

If you know one country, you know no country, as the wise person has said. So I really think that is very interesting because the word peremoha really has something to do with mochte, with our capacity, with what the Germans called mögen. And if we remember the mögen, the noun from the mögen, from the verb mögen, is macht.

And here again, we come and this is the same when in French, pouvoir means capacity. It's primarily means capacity to act, to achieve something. The same in English with power comes from the potestas. So interestingly, in France,

In Ukrainian language, we have, in Russian language especially, we have this concept of last. And in Ukrainian, I really hate this concept of Vlada, which comes from the possession rather than capacity to do something. But I think we really need to think about what is really in our capacity to do. Maybe in our capacity to do is something that we think to be impossible.

I remember many Ukrainians, by the way, I heard it from several Ukrainians quoting Nelson Mandela's phrase or attributed to Nelson Mandela that it all seems to be impossible until it's done. I think it's a phrase that kind of this exemplifies this capacity of acting in despite this capacity of acting as if you can change something.

And this is this word, "moha peremokhti", meaning that you kind of go even beyond your own capacity, right? So, peremoha is going beyond your own capacity, is overcoming yourself. I think it's a very important thing to think. But in more practical terms, look, I think we need to be prepared that there will be lots of losses until we win.

And it can be much worse until it will be better. I'd rather see a scenario... When I told you that I'm optimistic, don't take me literally. I mean, usually the pessimists are the funniest people on earth and the optimists are having the gloomer perspectives because...

I'm much more on the side of this chiaroscuro thinkers like Pascal who are optimists maybe somewhere, but he really thinks into the depth of our existential problems. So Marcia said very skillfully about this titanic map of Earth. And I think it was one of the mistakes of the liberal thought of the late 20th century thinking that we achieved the end of history, we achieved the end of times.

And I think the very progressivist idea of the 18th and 19th and 20th century was a mistake. I'm much more a Rousseauist here. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was basically saying clearly that technical progress doesn't mean moral progress. And sometimes it even means moral regress.

So I'm really a student of old philosophers from Aristotle to Polybius who think about politics in terms of cycle, in terms of anarchy clauses, and who understand that democracies can fall because democracies also have certain deficiencies which come from their very positive sides.

And one of them is that I think at the moment when people perceive their freedom as a gift, as something that you take for granted and not as something that you need to train and fight for, I think this is the crisis of democracy. This is when freedom becomes consumerist.

This is when you basically think that you consume freedom as other commodities, as you consume coffee and espresso and you go to a shop and say, I want a latte freedom, I want an espresso freedom, I want a ristretto freedom. At this point,

We have the failure of a system because everybody thinks about his own rights and here what what solidarity is Solidarity is a very important term because at the moment we think We go into extreme individualism. We think about only ourselves This is the moment of the crisis of democracy. So this this is what happened in the in the past decades so like

I think we need to learn, the intellectuals need to learn from football players. The football players know very well that you can lose 5-0. I really admire the Barcelona-Real Madrid matches, you know. One season Barcelona-Real Madrid 5-0, another season Real Madrid-Barcelona 5-0.

So we always need to understand that nothing is finite, that there is no end of history, that if we lose a battle, that doesn't mean we lose a war. And...

And therefore, I'm afraid we need to be also prepared for losses. And I mean, there are lots of Ukrainians, there are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians for whom this is already a loss, a loss, a defeat, because they lost their lives, because they lost their homes, because they lost their family members. And we also should not devalue their experience and their sacrifice.

So it's really, I'm very, we are now very careful in Ukraine about this word, перемога, actually. But to formulate in one word, what перемога means to me is the incapacity of Russia to wage wars. It's basically incapacity of this thanatocracy. When we see thanatocratic rulers, and by thanatocracy, I understand a specific approach to ruling the world,

when you rule people by death, you basically produce death to produce fear because people are afraid of somebody who is producing death and destruction and therefore people are afraid of Trump because he's producing destruction and people are afraid of being the object of this destruction. But

By the way, it's a very interesting conversation. Would Trump be possible in America if, for example, the world would react very, very strongly to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008? I'm not even saying about the invasion of Ukraine or invasion of Syria. I'm saying about 2008 or even the Chechen War. So would Trump be possible in America?

uh and weren't the liberal americans totally wrong when with they thought that it's somewhere very far away does not concern us of course people like marcy and and team and and many others are exceptions in this rule but i generally feel even in among the liberal americans a certain indifference to sometimes sometimes not often but certain indifference to the topic of of ukraine and russia

So would Orban be possible if Putin was stopped initially? So it's all very interconnected. And the more we will have retreats of democracy around the world, the more we will have the idea that empires are good, that tyrannies are good. And we will have these ideas all over the world.

We'll have this idea in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, in Europe, everywhere. And I'm afraid we will have it. We will have this kind of anachronism, the return of the tyrannies for the next decades, as it happened one century ago. Therefore, we have to be strong. Therefore, we should absolutely...

Like, cut the very feeling of disappointment and powerlessness, because it can be even worse. And we need to be prepared to face the even worse scenarios. When, for example, there is no country to escape, when even in Australia, we will have, you know, a tyranny, or I don't know, in Switzerland, for

So I'm not saying this to transfer you the dark mode, but I'm saying this to tell you that the victory will take a lot of time. And because it's a systemic struggle around the world, it's not just a battle for one particular village in Ukraine or...

or another protest in Georgia where people are imprisoned, or, you know, another imprisonment of an immigrant in America. This is increasingly a global story. And I...

Well, I disagree a little bit with Marcy, who thinks that they don't have a big narrative or a big idea. I do think that they have a big idea, both Putin and Trump. And this is a thanatocratic idea. This is an idea that

only the strongest will survive and we don't care about the weak and we don't care about diversity and only violence actually rules and violence equals power. This is everything that Hannah Arendt was struggling against, right? It's a big idea. And basically we can say that this idea was dominating in the world, in the world history for the majority of its time. And in a way, the 19th and 20th century was the exception.

And our task is, I think, to continue this exception, but the fight will be long. Thank you, Volodymyr. We are coming close to the end of our debate and I'm now addressing this question, last question to Ivan. I was thinking about that what is the main goal of our manifestation and our protest.

just to change the government because I'm not a fan of the opposition either. Like, okay, I understand the Georgian dream is pro-Russian and we have the opposition who are pro-European. But, like, I don't trust them. But I realized it was that

We are always reacting. We never reflect because either we have a hangover from the victory or we are grieving because of the war. And we are always reacting and we don't have time, enough peace to reflect on something, to realize our mistakes and to learn from that mistake. So what was our...

in which to, in what to blame yourself, like personally me, like what was my mistake in this 12 years with the Georgian dream? And like,

For me, the main goal in this fight against the Georgian Dream is to reflect on my steps, right ones and especially on wrong ones, to improve it. Because it's kind of generational in Georgia. I'm standing on the manifestation with my mother and I don't want to stay in the manifestation 20 years later with my two daughters right now. I want to just to reflect, just to...

rethink and reimagine imagine what is happening how far right guys took the power and they are not swallowing only liberals but they are following the conservatives like the people who chew them yeah

It will be a long fight. I totally agree with Volodymyr. It's not a fight that maybe will change the Georgian dream. But the fight will continue because there is too much to consider to make the same mistakes in the future. Thank you very much. I just want to add to our reflection this feeling of mine because it comes very often to me during the debates like we have now.

the victims you know mostly in ukraine now when we speak with voldemir about hope about giving some light about opening some new perspective being you know active and being

hopeful for something. Sometimes it looks like a big contrast between the darkness of the victimhood, of the people who passed away, who lost their life and lost their land and properties. And of course, we have these rituals of mourning, of visiting the graves,

of being present with death with us. And this is something necessary, what we need. But at the same time, my feeling is that we owe to all of these victims

the discussions like we have now, you know, about the prospects, about new ideas, about making new life, about rejuvenating, revitalizing, or finding way out of the darkness. Because without that, without these practices, without this ground for hope and for the future, the price we are paying of their life

is vanished. So, these kinds of discussions, this kind of developing our reflection, our engagement in the fight for the future makes some response to the cost of the victimhood.

in Ukraine and elsewhere. So with this reflection, I will come back and give voice to Weronika and Andrii. I don't know if there are some questions or we should finalize our discussion on that stage. Weronika, please come in. And Andrii.

Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. And I'm very happy that this discussion was more philosophical than political. It was really interesting. And in these dark times, I think that this meaningful discussion, meaningful talk is really needed by people. So I'm very happy to see

really huge number of people who registered for this webinar. And of course, we are out of time. But we said at the beginning that it will be a possibility to ask the question. So I

I will express my gratitude for everyone who asked actually the question. And thank you, Milena Renata-Findais, for your meaningful comments to the discussion. Thank you, Irina Davydenko. Thank you, Mr. Ivan Ilin. And I will quote only one question because it is really philosophical and I think that it reflects in some way

the very core of this discussion. So this question came from Bohdan Pechenyak and I quote, my question is related to Agora and Dagon mentioned by Volodymyr. What would you say about the notion of the game, the homo ludens? Are people now too gamified and don't see the evil as anything as just another game rather than a threat? So it is...

Very nice. Very, in a way, Krzysztof at the beginning told us that this topic, the West and the rest, is a bit ironic. But I think that it is not only ironic, but also provocative. And this question also is a bit ironic, but also provocative. Because how do we

see the danger and we Ukrainians know it really well that when you are speaking about the war and everyday routine of the living during the war, a lot of the people in other countries, especially in the Western countries, they see it like some kind of exotic adventure that, okay, it is some kind of a game. It is some kind of adventure.

a test for Europe, a test for democracies and so on. But it is not a threat, not a real death danger for you, but some kind of a game. So once more, question from Bordan Pechenyak. Are people now too gamified and don't see the evil as anything as just another game rather than a threat? Who will be able to ask this question? I think Bordan is right. I think...

This gamification is present and another... So, the game, what is the game? The game is a text. The game is always infinite. The game is never over, actually, because there will be another game. The game always refers to something else. While when we are facing life and death, death does not refer to something else. Death is not a metaphor. Death is death.

They just lose everything. It's the biggest stake. And I'm also kind of... Therefore, we need really to change this always geopolitical vision of everything that is happening. And therefore, for example, it's such an important thing to have presence as a value, to have people present in the reality when they understand that

People in Ukraine are not playing, you know, you're not playing with your life. It's much more serious. It's remarkable how it actually happened in the Oval Office that Marci mentioned when in this famous exchange about cards, do you have cards? And I am not here to play cards. And I think that Zelensky sometimes expresses, I think he has this very, very deep intuition of expressing sometimes what people feel.

But we cannot eradicate this gamification. So people will play the games. And I mean, the geopolitics is seen always as a big game, as a small game, as something other. I think we need just to reintroduce this dimension that it's no longer a game when your stake is your life. I want to jump onto that and say something about

the relationship between gamification and death. Now, I also thought that exchange, you're not holding any cards, we're not playing cards, encapsulated something very profound. There are two more points I want to make in connection with that. One is the

The creation of this virtual world in which the distinction between the video game and the virtual reality and the actual reality has been progressively effaced, I think has had profound psychic existential consequences that we're not yet able to fully grasp in real time.

the extent to which so much of life takes place in this virtual realm where things are not quite real. But something that I've actually been thinking about writing about, but I haven't quite worked out my thoughts yet, and hopefully you'll all give me some ideas, is this relationship between a refusal to accept the reality of death

and this kind of fanatocracy. A few years ago, I was teaching a seminar about truth and post-truth, and one of my students sent me a video interview with Elon Musk. This is before we realized that he was going to come to play this just dire role in world history. But he was talking about the fact that he was sure that

That we were not living in a base reality. I don't know how to translate this into any other language. That we're all living in a simulated reality in all likelihood. That basically we're all in the matrix. You know, we're all just, you know, it's all just a game that some other higher civilization is likely playing.

And then I was reading a little bit about Peter Thiel, who was very interested in having his body frozen so that he can be resuscitated. And all of these people for whom somehow death is not quite real. There's an actual active refusal to believe in death, whether because you can freeze your body or you can go live in Mars or we're all living in a simulated reality anyway.

And the last thing I'll say, and this gets to the question people are just beginning to ask about the relationship between the technical world of Silicon Valley that has come into alliance with Trump and what people are starting to call techno-fascism.

So a few years ago, I went to Stanford, for those of you who don't know. And it was a long time ago. So Silicon Valley wasn't what it is today. But it was becoming Silicon Valley. And one of my very beloved professors there is Hans-Ulrich Umbrecht, a German philologist.

And a Heideggerian, a Heideggerian who has enormous amounts of guilt for being a Heideggerian because he also comes from a Nazi family. And Zep's whole life has been kind of wrapped up in trying to work through this.

And he had a Festschrift conference a few years ago when he retired. And I flew out to Stanford for this Festschrift conference. And Zep's former students and his colleagues came from all over the world. He's done a lot of work in Latin America. People were there from Brazil. They were there from all over Europe. People came from Asia, from Israel.

And we were having this discussion about Heidegger's idea of Sein Sumtoda, you know, of how the humans are, as Kowalski would say, not just mortal biologically, but mortal ontologically, that the fact that we are facing our own death is what can shake us into authenticity. Right.

And at a certain moment, one of Zep's current then undergraduates stood up to ask a question. So it was a 19, 20-year-old young man who was double majoring at Stanford in philology and computer science and was working in Silicon Valley as a kind of, you know, moonlighting part-time thing. And he stood up and said, well...

I really don't understand this conversation. You know, I live in Silicon Valley. Death is just one more problem we are working on a technological solution for. You know, I have no expectation that I will ever die.

And this wasn't a gratuitous provocation. It was completely straight up. I mean, you know, here was a young man, you know, a very smart kid, you know, a student at Stanford, just standing up and announcing that he actually did not believe that he would ever die, that he actually did not believe in human mortality.

And I was so flabbergasted that I didn't know what to think, but I bookmarked that. And I'm now trying to work my way through the relationship between, I'm now going to use Volodya's idea of thanatocracy, the relationship between this wreaking of all this death and destruction by people who don't think death is real. Thank you so much, Marcy. Christoph?

Andriy, just one sentence to add what Vladimir and Marcy said, because of course at the stake is the death, yes, against the game, yes, but not only. And the problem is that

that in our reality everything becomes the game in terms of the whole reality, but also the love, the friendship, the all kind of relationships, the truths.

All this becomes a game, not a serious thing. And when we make a game with love, we make a game with human relationship, we make a game with truth, that's we have the word of Vance and Musk and Trump.

So I would put not only at stake the death as a contrast to the game, but all other serious things like love, human relationships and everything which becomes, you know, when it becomes the game. Now, because of that, we are losing the feeling of reality, which is something what the power of

can manipulate with us and make this post-truth a reality. Thank you so much, dear Krzysztof. And now I would like to finish this event and express my gratitude on behalf of all of the Dilemma team from different countries to all of our distinguished speakers. It was really important what you said.

have said, and I would like to address our listeners and highlight the fact that it was first but not last webinar by Dilemma. We will be active on social media, so please follow us on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, and maybe even on TikTok. I'm not sure, but we will try our best. Today's topic was really

was really ironic, but also deep. And, you know, the West and the rest, it was some kind of linguistic game. We didn't give you some proper answer about the question in the topic. But, for example, actually, Marcy's

real-life example show us that West probably is not the best place for living and work today. Maybe we should look to North now and the West and North and try to find some safe place in the world. But actually, after Trump returned to White House, I think that it is our common feeling that there is no

other safe place in the world. Before that, it was like, okay, we live under the umbrella of NATO and we live under the umbrella of other shapes of the geopolitical partnership. But now everyone should count on your own

and your own armed forces. And it is really important to have voices from all over the world, not only from European Union, not only from the USA or Canada, but also from Ukraine, also from Georgia, also from Armenia, and find out that we live now in some kind of civilization

self-isolated, even intellectual discourse, because all of us have some different worries and different problems in our societies, in our angles of the world. But actually, we share a lot. And we share not only problems, but we share values. And I think that probably it is the base for us to build something in the future.

and to rely on in the future. So values, culture, dignity is once more very important, not only in Ukraine, but also in Georgia, also in the United States of America. And

I wish everyone in the world be so strong as Ukraine, be so strong as Ukrainians. And I really believe that, I'm sure actually, that we will win, but we do not know when.

So thank you once more for being with us on this Dilemma webinar. Dilemma is a project which is supported by European Commission and we will produce more and more content, intellectual content for you. Thank you and stay tuned. Bye-bye.

This was a podcast explaining Ukraine, run by Ukraine World, an English-language media about Ukraine, founded by Internet Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Hermolonko, I'm a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World, and the president of PEN Ukraine. This episode was an online conversation between Polish philosopher Krzysztof Cizewski, American historian Marcia Shore, Georgian writer Iva Pisauszwili, and myself, Volodymyr Hermolonko.

This event was held under the aegis of the TALEMA project implemented by Institute for Central European Strategy with the support of the European Commission. Let me remind you that you can support UkraineWorld at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas via PayPal Ukraine.resisting gmail.com. You can find these links in the description of this episode. Stay with us and stand with Ukraine.