
As Ukraine Goes, So Goes the World (audio)
A lecture on fascism, genocide, colonialism -- and renewed democracy
In this lecture, I begin from a recent clip on Russian television: a Russian soldier explaining that, if Ukrainians do not accept that they are Russians, it will be necessary to kill a million of them, five million of them, or all of them.
The man in question is a known fascist (he appears in my book Road to Unfreedom), and what he says opens the way to a discussion of the character of Russian fascism.
We have no trouble seeing the genocidal aspects of the Russian invasion — the eliminationist language, the deportations, the mass murders, the rape — but we do not always grasp how they are connected to the notion of the non-existence of Ukraine.
The Russian soldier claims that Ukrainians are “possessed. This reveals a basic current of Russian fascism that one finds in a favored thinker of Putin (whom he just cited again) and in television propaganda. In this mindset, Russia’s enemy is actually “Satan” (I will develop this theme in a written post to come).
In the next part of the lecture, I move to the related topic of Russian colonialism, using history to explain how there is no basis for the claim that Crimea in particular, or Ukraine in general, were “always” part of Russia.
Indeed, the “always” claim is part of an imperial maneuver by which power is able to begin things “anew.” Both Catherine the Great at the time of the annexation of Crimea and southern Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin now, make “always” claims on the basis of obliterating actual history. Their “always” is the “never” that is insisted upon for Ukraine and for Crimea.

I conclude the lecture with the argument that democracy can succeed when those who support it are aware of history, are aware of their own historical predicaments, and choose to act.
In this sense, Ukrainian resistance is a model. If we believe that democracy will be brought to us by structural factors, then we will get more fascism, more genocide, more imperialism.
But we do not have to believe that. We can believe instead that democracy is always a struggle, but that the struggle is worth it. On this theme the lecture concludes. It was delivered 12 October 2022 at the University of Connecticut.
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TS, 14 October 2022
As Ukraine Goes, So Goes the World (audio)
If History in School was taught in context of today in this manner, many more people would take history in school
Another fabulous lecture! Thank you for all your work outside your classes each week - and it sounds like you teach quite a few! Taking on these additional lectures and then making them available is such a gift to the spirit. Keep taking your vitamins! I cannot wait for your book on Freedom. So much of the current vocabulary in our nation, a vocabulary that has been cheapened by too many loud mouthed folks with no ethics beyond being elected and or making money, must be reclaimed and you are helping all of us do that. Like Zelenskyy says we all like the warm bath but when we get out of the bath we have to deal with the rub of pluralism and all the rest. The temptation is to stay in the warm bath - glued to our screens, or whatever we're glued to. The terrible allure of the strange and dangerous lie of "reality tv" if you will. But none of that produces an ethic for the personal as well as civic work of building democracy and becoming free in our own selves as agents for a better world. And yes, we have to know some of what has already happened and where ideas have come from and who are the people whose ideas still flow through the body politic everywhere. Fascism did not die. It was defeated in a war. It is still present. I've been watching the U.S. and the Holocaust, and the clips of speeches in the US during that period of time are the same words I am hearing today from corners of the US. Not to mention in other parts of the world. I think the warm bath is a response to fear - fear of the unknown, fear that larger forces are not doing what they promised and that, TADA, it is indeed up to you personally and to you with others and that how it plays out will likely be the hardest work you personally have ever undertaken. And of course all of these realizations cut many ways - the folks in thrall to conspiracy theories and hanging on the former guy's (and his acolytes) inanity seem totally hypnotized by the banality of the evil surrounding them. I think President Zelenskyy said something similar yesterday in his speech on the commemoration yesterday, October 14. That is as true for many in our own nation. Fox is not the only purveyor. No wonder it's called Fox.