Marci Shore in Byline: ‘Europe Has To Give Up Its Freudian Denial’
My print report for Byline features intellectual historian Marci Shore on why Europe needs to mobilize, how the new always appears in the guise of a miracle & why the Russian army should just go home
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I had the honor of interviewing intellectual historian Dr Marci Shore for the August print edition of Byline Times. Yesterday, the article was published in Byline Supplement — the magazine edition of Byline Times.
Below, is an excerpt of our Q&A…
'Europe Has to Give Up Its Freudian Denial About What's Happening in the United States and Mobilise'
Award-winning American journalist Heidi Siegmund Cuda speaks to Professor of Intellectual History Marci Shore on where Europe finds itself amid the aggression of Vladimir Putin
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: As I travel through Europe, there seems to be a disconcerting lack of awareness about Russia’s war in Ukraine, even though its outcome will directly impact Europe’s future. How do you see this?
Marci Shore: Heidi, you’re travelling mostly in Western Europe. I’m travelling mostly in east-central Europe, and am currently in Lithuania, where the war does feel very present. Lithuanians, while not panicked per se, are preparing for war. This is true in Poland as well, and from what my colleagues there tell me, I sense also in Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.
Are European leaders finally moving in a more united direction to combat Russian aggression? Are they doing enough?
I’m sure there are things happening behind the scenes that I don’t know about, but my short answer would be yes: they are moving in a more united direction, but painfully cautiously and agonisingly slowly. Europe has to give up its Freudian denial about what’s happening in the US and mobilise.
Marci Shore: What Vasyl Cherepanyn, head of the Visual Culture Research Centre in Kyiv, wrote in December 2023 still holds: “The EU’s major and most challenging problem underpins its very creation: war. Conceived as a unifying postwar project, to borrow Tony Judt’s famous description, the EU took ‘never again’ as its guiding principle. However … in practice the EU supposes that ‘it should never happen again to us’. Such beginnings have defined a reactive modus operandi within EU politics that is incapable of acting ahead, is constantly belated, and barely catches up with actual developments.”
Everywhere I go, I have small conversations that are very telling. While there is a huge amount of support and sympathy for Palestinians, when I mention Russian war crimes in Ukraine there is some pushback (‘oh, that’s just Slavs’ or ‘some Ukrainians want to be Russian’). When I mention that Putin has been charged with the war crime of the unlawful deportation of children, I get blank stares. Is this the power of information warfare?
Children being buried under rubble anywhere, in any circumstances, for any reason, is abominable. The war in Gaza is very different from the war in Ukraine – beginning with the fact that there are more distinctly bad actors. And I say this with the caveat that I would definitely not put myself out there as an expert: I don’t read in Hebrew or Arabic; I’ve never been to Gaza; I haven’t been to Israel in more than a dozen years. When I write about Ukraine, I’m implicitly asking readers to trust me because I’ve spent my whole adult life engaged with eastern Europe, because I understand more than they do, because the depth of knowledge matters. I can make none of those claims with respect to the Middle East.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist and Hamas is a terrorist organisation. Israelis have a clear and obvious reason to see Hamas as a threat, and Palestinians have a clear and obvious reason to see the Israeli Government as an oppressor. None of that justifies the slaughter, but the reasons are not fictitious.
In contrast, the war in Ukraine is historically unusual in its moral clarity: there’s absolutely no reason for Russians to be kidnapping, torturing, slaughtering Ukrainians. But the Kremlin, Russian television, and its troll factories have spun one fiction after another, and the Russian soldiers don’t actually know why they’re in Ukraine carrying out atrocities. The Russian Army could just go home.
What should Europe’s most powerful leaders do today to protect the EU from Russian and US aggression?
I have no military expertise at all, but my gut feeling is that Europe should mobilise, lift the weapons restrictions, defend Ukrainian air space, give Ukraine everything it needs to win, send troops if necessary, and enable Ukraine to bring about a decisive defeat as quickly as possible that will bring down Putin’s regime. This is not a negotiation situation – we need a Stunde Null moment [meaning ‘Zero Hour’, this refers to the period following the end of the Second World War in Germany in 1945, signifying the complete collapse of the Nazi regime]. Until the Russian regime is decisively brought down, all of Europe will be hostage to Putin’s threats. For that matter, all of Russia will be hostage to itself: Putin will burn through all his country’s resources and bleed through his entire population until he’s defeated.
Ultimately, can Europe survive in an age of chaos or will we just limp along from crisis to crisis as freedom and democracy recede?
Anything is possible. It depends not only on the appearance of black swans, but also on us.
I can offer a hopeful insight from Hannah Arendt: “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be unexpected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.”
This article originally appeared in edition #76 of Byline Times.
Dr Marci Shore is an American Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Toronto. She left her position at Yale University in the US – with her husband, the historian Timothy Snyder – in August 2024. She is an expert in European history and the author of The Ukrainian Night, and Caviar and Ashes
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Europe is under attack. It’s obvious that the EU must backup Ukraine 🇺🇦 to stop the old Soviet Union from rising from the dead. The world is being divided up. Ukraine is the key piece. Stop the old Soviet Union from reassembling and the FREE WORLD holds back the authoritarians for another cycle.