Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion (4)
that I hope you'll notice as we go along
is that George Orwell said this,
that the hardest thing to notice
is what's right in front of your nose, right?
I don't know, this is your first week at Yale,
maybe like 50 years from now when you're an alum,
you'll be like, "My professor told me the hardest thing
to notice is what's right in front of your nose."
If you take that away, I'll also be happy, but that's true.
The things which are most intensely obvious
are very often the things that are hardest to take on
and history in a way is actually like,
"Oh, America's an empire."
I mean, history is a way of picking up on the obvious
because it gives it to you from a whole bunch
of different angles at the same time,
and then maybe the obvious
will eventually come through, right?
So the point is that Ukraine is at this absolute center
of a lot of things, which we regard as central.
I've given you the Viking Age and the Reformation,
which may seem a little exotic.
It's absolutely at the center of the First World War.
It's absolutely at the center of the Second World War.
It's absolutely at the center of Stalinist terror.
It's absolutely at the center of the Holocaust.
It's absolutely at the center
of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It's at the center of major historical developments,
not just ancient and medieval, but also very contemporary.
But the fact that it's, precisely
the fact that it's at the center of the development
makes it hard to see and hard to notice.
It's sometimes hard to direct your gaze at the thing
which is most important sometimes,
because where things are most important
is also where things are darkest, right,
and very often Ukraine is going to be a kind of
heart of darkness.
Who wrote "Heart of Darkness" by the way?
- [Student] Joseph Conrad.
- Where is he from?
- [Student] From Poland.
- Give you one more try.
- [Student] Ukraine?
- You're guessing though, right?
Yeah. So you're not wrong that he was from Poland,
but it's a very interesting trajectory.
So "Heart of Darkness" is a famous, famous book
about the race for Africa.
It's a remarkable novel.
Conrad's a remarkable writer.
Conrad is a Pole.
How does he know about colonialism?
Because he is from Ukraine, right?
There's a recent Polish history book about Ukraine,
which is called "Poland's Heart of Darkness"
which of course the Poles really didn't,
in general, like to hear,
but it's a very valid point.
During the Renaissance period,
as we'll see Polish colonialism
in Ukraine was incredibly intense,
and that gives Conrad the background
to understand the European race for Africa,
and in turn Hannah Arendt's
"Origins of Totalitarianism" is basically one long riff
on Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness."
And so it's not surprising that Arendt
actually understands that Ukraine is important.
Just kind of closing the loop here,
but a heart of darkness is something which is hard to see,
but that doesn't mean it's unimportant, right?
So things get wiped out of the history
that are precisely the things that we have to see, okay.
I'm getting towards the end of the main themes
that I wanted to make sure we got introduced here.
So we've talked about what history is.
We've talked about what a nation is.
We've talked about the difference between history and myth.
I've mentioned this sort of trigger question
of Ukraine exists, why? Or Ukraine exists how?
Which is a lot trickier than it seems at the beginning.
So if you're living through the 21st century
and I realize like this is the only century
that you guys have lived through,
which I find very troubling.
One of the, no like, if you're me,
like think about this for a second,
okay, if you're me, you guys never get older, right?
Every September I show up and you're always the same age.
That is really weird, right?
It's very strange.
And every year I get, every year I get older, which is very,
it's very troubling.
But if you're in the 21st century,
there are these moments where you say,
"Oh, look, Ukraine exists."
Like 2004, what Ukrainians now call
the Revolution of Dignity or sorry,
the Orange Revolution, 2014,
the Revolution of Dignity or 2022,
the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It's very easy and tempting when Russia invades Ukraine
and Ukraine resists to say, "Oh, look, now Ukraine exists."
But that wouldn't be a very Ukrainian perspective, right?
The fact that you recognize something because someone else
acts doesn't mean that they just came into existence.
On the contrary, I think the argument probably runs better
the other way.
The fact that Ukrainians were able to resist
the Russian invasion suggests that the nation
or the civil society had already consolidated
to a pretty impressive degree, right,
and the fact that we, and that would be my American "we,"
but it was a general assumption,
all thought that Ukraine would collapse in three days
might say more about our misunderstanding of the place
than it does about the place itself.
And after you misunderstand it and you say,
"Well, it doesn't really exist.
It's gonna collapse in three days"
and then it doesn't collapse, what's your next move?
Your next move in order to rescue your position is to say,
"Oh, well Ukraine must have just been created
by the Russian invasion" of which is something that
if you've been following this war at all,
you will have heard journalists and others say.
"Well, you Putin and Putin united Ukraine
with this invasion" right?
And of course it's true that there's a lot of solidarity
and so on that wouldn't have happened without the war,
but the idea that Putin created Ukraine
by invading it is ludicrous, right?
You can invade lots of places,
that doesn't mean that they start to exist as nations.
That's not how history actually works.
So that itself, that whole move that journalists then made
to say, "Oh, well, Ukraine exists because Putin"
is just a way to keep talking about the thing,
which people are very comfortable talking about,
which is Putin.
If you're a writer in a democracy,
you're very attracted to authoritarians.
I don't know if you've noticed this trend,
but there's a kind of seductive lure
of the distant authoritarian.
No, it's true.
Like, the twenties and thirties,
if you go back to the twenties and thirties
and you read about the way Americans wrote
about not just Stalin, but also Hitler,
you'll see this tendency.
If you're in a democracy, you're very kind of tempted
by this idea that, "Oh, there's somebody over there
and everything is orderly and they have a vision,
and this is kind of interesting" and so on,
we fall, we go for that again and again and again,
and with Putin even now though,
it's much weaker now than it was before February.
There's this idea that,
"Oh, he's interesting. It's kind of seductive.
He's a strong man, and let's talk about Putin" right?
Let's talk about Putin and then saying,
"Oh, Putin created Ukraine by invading"
is one more way of talking about Putin
rather than talking about Ukraine.
In other words, it's one more colonial move
that you're making.
Well, okay. They didn't exist, but if they do exist,
it's the paradoxical result of a foreign dictator, right?
Okay. So there are these triggering moments,
but what I'm trying to suggest are
these triggering moments should be triggers
of our asking ourselves what actually happened,
you know, as opposed to jumping to easy conclusions
that are convenient, with which are consistent
with what we already, which what we already think.
Okay. So we've done history.
We've done what history is.
You guys feel like, you know what history is now?
Cause I hope so, because we only have one lecture for this.
We've talked, we've introduced a little bit,
the difference between history and myth.
There's one more theme which I wanna just introduce
very quickly, and it's a 20th century theme
which I want you to have in mind.
The theme is genocide.
And the reason it's a 20th Century theme
is that the 1948 definition of genocide assumes
that there's such a thing as a people.
So Raphael Lemkin, who is the lawyer who's educating
what's now Ukraine, by the way, Polish, Jewish lawyer,
who's educated in the university,
and what's now Lwow, when he made up the word genocide,
he's assuming the existence of a people, right,
because genocide is about the intentional
destruction of a people.
So it assumes that there is such thing as a people, right,
what we might call a nation or a society.
So it's a 20th century construction.
I mean genocide is the antipode of the creation of a nation.
We think of nations are modern and any attempt
to destroy a nation is also modern, right?
The theme of genocide is a late theme,
but I want you to keep it in mind because of this war
and because of the way that genocide also asks questions
about where nations come from.
This war is a strangely genocidal war.
It's strange in the sense that it's very rare
for the authors of a war to actually say
at the beginning that the aim of the war
is the destruction of another people.
That doesn't happen very often.
That might be the aim, but for it to be announced openly,
as it has been in this war, is pretty unusual.
and that's the intent part of genocide.
The practical part of genocide one can find very easily
in the hundred thousand dead in Mariupol,
as it appears unfortunately,
in the 3 million Ukrainians deported,
including a quarter million children,
at least who were to be forcibly assimilated
into Russian culture in the systematic campaign
of rape and the murder of local elites
in the territories that Russia controls
and maybe more banally, but I think also very importantly,
in the systematic attempt to destroy publishing houses,
libraries, and archives, which are the way, of course,
that nations or societies or people remember themselves.
So there is a genocidal aspect to this war,
and I want you to keep this in mind as a theme
because this concept of genocide,
though it's a modern concept,
it also points us backwards towards other questions,
which we're gonna be thinking about,
which have to do with colonialism
and which have to do with why people recognize
or do not recognize other people.
Why, what were the,
if we're gonna ask the positive question,
a Ukrainian nation exists how?
Which I think is a really interesting question,
not just about Ukraine, a Ukrainian nation exists.
How was that possible?
The converse question is what were the things
which were thrown up along the way and why?
So why was there particularly Ukrainian famine in 1933
in the Soviet Union?
Why that?
Why did Hitler particularly think that Ukraine
would be a good site of Lebensraum?
Why in the 1970s were Brezhnevian assimilation policies
particularly applied to Ukraine, right?
What is it about this place which has put it at the center
of so much colonial pressure over the centuries
and the decades?
I don't want you to apply the word genocide
to things that happened before there's a nation.
That's not my point.
My point though is that I want to introduce some concepts,
which are what is history? What is a nation?
And then the kind of pendant or counterpart
to what is a nation, is what is genocide?
What are the things which lead to nation?
If there are things that lead to nation destruction,
what are the things which, sorry, to nation creation,
what are the things that lead to nation destruction?
What are the deeper impulses?
Not just a war which is happening now
