Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Trotsky also, who dabbled in so many things in his intellectual life, also spoke in almost utopian terms that are just astonishing to read, in utopian terms about the construction of the new man and the new woman.
And that out of the raw material of humanity, once you really get going and once you've established a system that matches your hopes for the future, it'll be possible to reconfigure people. And I talk about ambition to create essentially the next stage in human evolution, a new species growing out of humanity. Those don't sound like very modest or limited approaches.
And I guess we just really won't know.
One should add to those factors that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own, the sheer fact that communism comes to power in most of these instances as a result of war. as a result of the destruction of what came before and a power vacuum. So think of the Russian revolutions in the wake of the fall of Tsarism.
Think of the expansion of Stalin's puppet regimes into Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II and the Red Army moving into Occupy areas in Eastern Europe, although they announced that they're coming as liberators. Consider the foundation of communist China on the heels of World War II and yet more Chinese civil war. Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam. It's likely that this
already is a key element in setting things up for further crisis because upon seizure of power, if your expectation is, well, it ought to be relatively easy to get this system rolling and put it on a basis that's, after all, we have the roadmap to the future, there will follow frustrations and impediments and resistance.
And there's a ratchet effect then there because it'll produce more repression and producing even more problems that follow. What drives the whole thing forward, though, especially in its Leninist version, but already visible with Marx and Engels, is the insistence on confidence. If you have the key to the future, all of these things are possible and necessary.
This leads to an ethos, I think, that's very hard for historians to quantify or to study in a methodical way, but it's the insistence that you hear with Lenin and then especially with Stalin that to be a Bolshevik means to be hard.
to be realistic, to be consequential, meaning you don't shy away from doing what needs to be done, even if your primordial ethical remainders from whatever earlier experience you have rebel against it. Under Stalin, there's a constant slogan of the Bolshevik tempo. The Bolsheviks, there's no fortresses that they can't storm. They can do everything.
And in a way, this is the assertion that it's will over everything. History can be moved forward and accelerated and probably your own actions justified as a result, no matter what they were, if you are sufficiently hard and determined and have the confidence to follow through. And then that obviously raises the ultimate question, what happens when that confidence ebbs or erodes or when it's lost?
Right.
Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch of terms that are in play here, right? And when we speak of fascism, fascism in its original sense is a radical movement founded in Italy, which, though it had been allegedly on the winning side of World War I, is disappointed with the lack of rise in national prestige and territory that commences after the end of the war.
Bizarrely enough, it's a socialist by the name of Benito Mussolini who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the state, the people at large united in a militaristic way on the march, ready to attack, ready to expand, a complete overthrow of liberal ideas of the rights of the individual.
or of representative democracy, and instead vesting power in one leader, in his case, the Duce Mussolini, in order to replicate in peacetime the ideal of total military mobilization in wartime. Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired
and borrow heavily from fascist ideology, there also are different emphases that they include, and that includes their virulent racism from the outset, which, in addition to a glorification of the state, glorification of the leader, and preparation for national greatness, race is absolutely core. And it's that racial...
radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea, along with antisemitism, the demonizing in particular of the Jews and this insane racialist cosmology that the Nazis avow, it is The assertion that the Nazis will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people, unity in the society, that leads them to give themselves this odd name of national socialist.
Some leaders like Goebbels among the Nazis accent the socialist part to begin with. Others put the accent firmly on the nationalist part. In part, the term they chose for their movement was meant to be confusing.
It was meant to take slogans or words from different parts of the political spectrum to fuse them into something unfamiliar and new and claim that they'd overcome all earlier political divisions, that the Nazis claimed that they were a movement, not a party, even though their party was called a party. So what did Nazism and Bolshevism and communism share, or how were they opposed to one another?
What we need to start with, but making clear, they were ideological archenemies. In both worldviews, the opposite side represented the ultimate expression of the evil that needed to be exercised from history in order for their desired utopia to be brought about. And this leads to strange and perverted beliefs about reality. From the perspective of the Nazis, the Nazis claimed that because they saw
the Jews as a demonic element in human history, the Bolsheviks didn't really believe all of this economic dialectical materialism. They were in fact a racial conspiracy, it was alleged. The Nazis use the term of Judeo-Bolshevism to argue that communism is essentially a conspiracy steered by the Jews, which was complete nonsense.
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