Unbroken
A deep and meaningful conversation with Dr. Marci Shore on the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, from RadPod Ep 161, on a world run by gangsters and how history can help
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Author’s note: On February 26, RadPod brought back Dr. Marci Shore, an intellectual historian formerly of Yale University, who is now the Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Ukrainian Night, Caviar and Ashes, and Taste of Ashes, and a frequent contributor to Bette Dangerous and RadPod. Here is a print version of our interview, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.–hsc
‘We are always mobilized and ready to work whatever comes…’
Marci opens with a story she shares about a conversation she had with two fearless women Ukrainian journalists four years ago, as she told them she was with them, one said: “We are always mobilized and ready to work whatever comes…”
Marci: And I thought, wow, I have never in my life felt ready whatever comes, but I did know that whatever came, those women were going to be out there, and they were going to be unbroken. And that is still true four years later. But of course, they never should have been in this position, and Ukraine shouldn’t have been in this position. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about trying to understand these past four years… I have this feeling you may have had this too, Heidi, because we’re kind of similar in this sense, like all of my crazy, paranoid, nightmarish, apocalyptic fantasies – the kind that your therapist tells you are just in your head and will never actually happen in the real world – we’re just watching them play out.
We wake up every day and all of those things that should have been crazy, paranoid fantasies that somebody who grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors and then went on to study East European history, and has a neurotic disposition might naturally tend towards.
The Nightmares Inside My Head Are Now Real
And then here we are: they’re playing themselves out in the real world every day. We get up and we turn on the news and it’s like, ‘Wait, this is not just inside my head. The nightmares inside my head are now real.’
And journalists keep asking me, ‘Is there any going back? Both with respect to Trump and the United States, and with respect to Russia and Ukraine… no, there’s no going back. History only goes forward. But that doesn’t mean that we’re stuck in this moment forever. It doesn’t mean that we don’t eventually come out on the other side. And Serhiy Zhadan, the extraordinary Ukrainian writer, originally from the Donbas, based in and associated with Kharkiv, just gave a talk at the Munich conference last week.
War Fractures Time
And he talked about time and how war fractures time. And he said, ‘You know, it’s a mistake for us to think that there’s any going back, that the war is this kind of nightmarish pause, and then we return to how things had been. There is no going back. That world is over, that world has been shattered, that world has been destroyed, that world is not coming back.’
But that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be something better, or there’s not going to be something happy on the other side, but we have to understand the break in time, and we have to not idealize the past, and we have to think about what it’s going to mean to move forward and come out on the other side.
And I think that’s right.
Heidi: Thank you so much for that. Thanks to you, I have become friends with a Croatian journalist, Slavenka Draculić. She, of course, covered the war criminal tribunals in The Hague of the former Yugoslavia. And it’s really important, she said, that we push on. She said the world is relying on Americans to fix this.
And Marci, as I have interviewed you over the years, we keep looking at the muted response in America to what is something that is affecting all of us.
We are living through an undeclared war for all mankind, as we have talked about on this show dealing with cognitive warfare, and we have this kinetic war right here in Europe, but the response still does not feel like what it needs to be. Help me and HiFi find better words so we can inspire and motivate people to understand the proximity of all our danger.
Marci: Well, let me say two things about that… the first about how do we understand this, and then the second about Slavenka, one of my favorite people in the world.
I do still have this feeling that we are sleepwalking, and that Europeans are sleepwalking. And one of the reasons I’m continually drawn back to Ukraine, there are various reasons I’m drawn back to Ukraine, and I should first say, I’m generally a coward. It’s not like I’m so brave that I keep crossing the border into a country that’s in a state of war. I’m generally very cowardly. But there is something very seductive about being there now, both to support my friends as an act of solidarity, as moral support, and that means a lot to me, but also intellectually.
Kyiv feels to me like the only European capital where people are not sleepwalking, where people have a sense of what’s actually happening, and the thinking is so sharp there. You can feel your mind being pushed because people are not sleepwalking.
They’re not in this daze. So much of 20th century philosophy was actually about how to wake ourselves up from sleepwalking…
All of Husserl’s phenomenology is about that… how do you actually see the thing that’s in front of you? Which turns out to be really, really difficult.
This is what the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization…was about. What is the purpose of poetic language? It’s to make the familiar strange so that we actually see it, because otherwise we don’t see things. We kind of habitually sleepwalk through life, not really noticing them.
Atrocity as Atrocity
And I see that there are all sorts of ways we do that now – we get distracted by insane conversations or technicalities, or debates about legal points about genocide, and then we don’t look at atrocity as atrocity, like we lose somehow, what should be that immediate visceral reaction when you see a child being buried under rubble, that this is evil, and that all of these other distracting things are just ways in which we allow ourselves to sleepwalk and not actually see the thing that’s in front of us.
(Author’s note: one way to cure this is an absurdist play from 1959 Marci had me read: Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco.)
So often when I talk to journalists about what’s happening in the United States, and I’m not in the United States, but after these murders in Minnesota, various journalists, European journalists, Canadian journalists, were saying, ‘What happened? I don’t, I don’t understand what happened.’
And I said, ‘Okay, I’m happy to talk to you about this, but really, you know, just as well as I do what happened. We’re all watching the same news. I have no special intelligence that you don’t have, so let’s see. We just watched on a residential street in broad daylight, a guy with a mask fire three bullets into the head of a 37-year-old mother, who had just dropped her child off at school, who had no intention of harming anyone, with no provocation, for no reason. We just watched him murder her with impunity in front of our eyes, and then we watched the highest levels of the American government justify that and say it was perfectly okay. Clearly, she was a terrorist. Now you know that just as well as I do, but if you need me to tell you to somehow shake us into actually seeing the thing that we’ve all just seen, that’s fine, I’m happy to do that, but really, we’ve all just seen it.’
(Mic drop.–hsc)
Let me also tell you a story about Slavenka, who I just adore – there are these women who deserve more acknowledgement in the world, who have been out there documenting the most gruesome things, and Slavenka’s insights into the war crime trials in The Hague have been very important to me.
After the first Trump election in 2016 when I was just in this state – it was right around the time of the inauguration, and I was thinking, ‘Should we leave the country? Should we not leave the country? Our students need us. What’s the best thing for my kids? They were four and six at the time. How much time do we have?’
I was totally hysterical. And Slavenka was coming through the States. She was going to be in New York for a day or two. I was living in New Haven, and we arranged to meet for lunch in New York. So I take the train down to New York. We’re sitting at this little cafe in Greenwich Village, and I’m in a state of total anxiety, as usual.
And she said, ‘Marci, don’t worry. Take a deep breath. It took Milosevic some time to teach us that we wanted to kill one another. It didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t 24 hours. It wasn’t 48 hours. It took him, you know, months, maybe a year, to coach the population into wanting to commit murder. So you’ve got time to get your kids out. Let’s relax. We’ll order a glass of wine. We’ll have a nice lunch. You don’t have to leave today.’
I said, ‘Oh, thank you, Slavenka, I feel so much better now…’
Step By Step
But this experience of how she watched people, who had completely normal neighborly relations with one another – normal people, who you may have loaned one another eggs when there were not enough eggs to make a cake – and suddenly, how do you create a situation when they’re ready to actually kill one another and they do kill one another? And how does that happen?
Step by step. And that step by step thing that she describes is very important, and it’s what Toni Morrison was trying to explain in her famous 1995 speech at Howard University; when (Austrian president) Alexander Van der Bellen said at the commemoration of Auschwitz, ‘Auschwitz – it’s not von Himmel gefallen,’ – Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It was step by step by step. And those people who have observed how that happens step by step by step have really important lessons to teach us.
Heidi: Thank you so much for that. I had a conversation with a family member in Germany who’s very liberal and very politically astute, who’s falling sway to the anti-immigrant rhetoric. And I asked him to please pause and acknowledge that much of what we saw a decade ago and onward were operations driven on Facebook, by Russia, to get people to war against each other, and of course, the GOP has picked it up from there. So it’s just incredibly important to be fully, fully aware. And as you said, listen to people who’ve already been there and already been through that.
Deep Sense of Catastrophism
HiFi: For months, if not years, I’ve been telling people on this program that Russia started World War Three. And it’s not just Russia. It’s Russia, China, we have North Korean troops in Ukraine. We have Saudi Arabia involved, UAE, Qatar. Ukraine right now is the kinetic warfare part of World War
Three, where people are actively being murdered by Russia. However, if we look around the globe, if we look at Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Russian operations in Romania, Czechia, Slovakia, if we look at, their funding of political warfare in France, in Germany, in the AfD, if we look at what they did in Spain with the separatist movement there. If we look at what they did in the UK with Brexit, if we look at the installation of Donald Trump in the United States, Russia is carrying out warfare. And we can call it political warfare, cognitive warfare, narrative warfare, whatever you want. The real word there is warfare. Recently, President Zelensky came out and said, ‘Yes, Russia has started World War Three, and Ukraine is the only outpost standing in the breach before that war goes wider (author’s note: recall this interview took place two days before the Iran war was launched.–hsc). Do you disagree with this point of view, that this is World War Three, or do you agree?
Marci: It’s felt to me like World War Three from the beginning. But you know, again, that’s my lens as a historian and as somebody who has a deep sense of catastrophism.
I had this terror back in 2014 with the little green men, the illegal annexation of Crimea, the instigation of the war in the Donbas. And as a historian, I kept hearing Neville Chamberlain go back to London in September 1938 and say, ‘You know how horrible, fantastic, it would be if we were trying on gas masks and digging trenches on behalf of a quarrel in a faraway country between people about whom we know nothing.’
And as I watched the beginnings of that war in the Donbas, and I watched Russia instigate that war in the Donbas, I thought, ‘This is that quarrel in a faraway country between people about whom we know nothing.’
That is going to be the beginning of the Third World War. And I have not been able to shake that feeling. But again, for me, it’s very visceral, right?
Heidi: I always hear Neville Chamberlain and his ‘peace for our time’ speech, all this talk of peace, and how peace continues to be weaponized, and how we don’t have US envoys meeting with Putin. These are crime bosses, and these are the better words that we learn from the incredible guests who we interview.
Marci: This is right out of Arendt’s ‘Origins of Totalitarianism,’ where she talks about the mob coming out in the historical stage and leading the masses, that the liberals falsely believe that when the masses come out in the historical stage, they’re going to have been schooled by the liberals. But no, in fact, it’s the mob, who manages to seduce them.
And this is the world ruled by the gangsters. And I’ve been watching the expose of the Epstein files, and you really run out of words, just to express the disgust, like, how is it that these particular people have got their claws in around the world?
Heidi: All sharing each other’s dark secrets and all with kompromat on each other. I am very grateful for your continued work. Your husband, Timothy Snyder’s continued work, Jason Stanley’s continued work, you’ve all given us better words. You’ve never pulled any punches. I wish that you had been wrong, but I’m very, very grateful because we need the framing. And my question for you is, how do you feel being in Canada? It seems like the school that you’re now at is brilliant and doing incredible work. There must be some words of inspiration you have there. Particularly Mark Carney really inspired pro-democracy people around the world just a few weeks ago with his rousing speech. HiFi and I would be quite happy if he was the leader of the free world, and maybe at some point he will be… t’s very courageous picking up and moving. And you took a lot of heat for it, but it sounds to me like the school you’re at is allowing you to continue doing brilliant work.
Different Sides of the Border
Marci: First of all say, it was not courageous at all. A handful of middle-aged academics going from one good university to another good university, like, this is not dramatic. I’ve been extremely fortunate to be at the Munk School, which is a place run by another remarkable woman, Janice Stein, who is like a force of nature, who has done everything possible to create the best possible conditions to do this kind of work, who has a very strong sense of the stakes of the moment, and who is very devoted to turning this into a place where people can speak and people can research and people can do this work. So I feel very fortunate to be here. I, of course, feel very guilty about having abandoned the States at this particular moment. And in that sense, I feel all the more obligated to speak clearly and to speak unequivocally from here, where I’m in a much more privileged, secure situation than so many of my friends and colleagues on different sides of the border.
(Author’s note: just think about that statement – ‘different sides of the border…’ That is where we are in this moment.–hsc)
Heidi: As somebody who is in Europe, I can tell you that I often hear your words that you told me when I left about the people that I’m going to meet, the connections that I’m going to make, the experiences that I’m going to have, and all of that has been true. This moving around during times of turmoil allows us to connect with people we would not have otherwise met and to really be able to bring their experiences from different parts of the world back to the US and say, ‘Hey guys, you know, stop sleepwalking.’ So very, very grateful to you and grateful to HiFi for always being my dedicated partner on this particular project of RadPod. Thank you so much.
Marci: And let me just add that moment of watching Mark Carney’s speech – that was really a very special moment for me. For the past 20 years, I have made all of my students read Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, which has often seemed a kind of niche, obscure text – Czech dissident literature. How many people work on Czech dissident literature? That was was the reason I learned Czech. And when I saw Mark Carney stand up at Davos and tell the story of the green grocer, very much in the spirit as Havel intended it, and say, ‘Okay, it is time to take down the signs,’ that was really a tremendously gratifying moment for me.
Heidi: Yeah, me too. I studied Havel all last year thanks to our friend Alex Alvarova, who grew up under Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, she tipped me off to how important his work was. So it felt very good for those who actually care about freedom, and also seeing the middle powers step up, uniting with smaller countries. We just learned the other day from our friend, Vesna Pusić, who’s a Croatian politician and sociologist, that the only ally small countries have is international law. So this is all very important, very serious business. And thank you so much for sharing your experiences of how when you are in Kyiv, you know that nobody is sleepwalking. So that’s what we’re trying to inspire around the pro-democracy West.
Marci: Yes. Thank you.
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Here is Ep161 of RadPod with Dr. Marci Shore:
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