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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So there's no repudiating of him. They are stuck with that formula of 70% and acknowledging that there were some problems, but by and large, arguing that it was the correct stance of the party and its leader that was paramount. And the results of this wager are where we are today.
China has been transformed out of all recognition in terms of not all of the living standards of the country, but many places. Its economic growth has been dramatic. And the new dispensation is such that people ask, is this a communist country anymore? And that's probably a question that haunts China's current leadership as well. With Chairman Xi, we've seen a return to earlier patterns.
Xi insisting that Mao's achievement has to be held as equal to that of the reform period. Sometimes imitations or nostalgia for the Mao period or even the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution are part of this volatile mix. But all of this is outward appearance. Statistics can also be misleading. And I think that very much in question is China's further revolution in our own times.
Well, you mentioned in the context of the claims of science, humility as a crucial attribute. I think that humility, sobriety, realism are tremendously valuable in trying to understand another society, another form of government. And so...
I think one needs to be very self-aware that projection onto others of what we think they're about is no substitute for actual study of the sources that a society like that produces. It's declarations of what matters most to them, the leadership's own pronouncements about what the future holds.
I think that matters a lot more than pious hopes or versions of being convinced that inevitably everyone will come to resemble us in a better future.
So I think the answer that a historian can give is a historical answer, right? That we have to inquire into what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today. We have a regime that's claiming to be communist or has an even better version of Marx's original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called Yuche.
How does that mesh with the reality that we're talking about a dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy, if that's what it is? I think that examining... As much as we can learn about a closed society that goes about its everyday in ways that are inscrutable to us is very, very challenging.
But the only answer, when an example like this escapes your analytic categories, probably there's a problem with your analytical categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness.
Yeah, I mean, there's... Realists see states following their own interests and prioritizing their own security. And there's probably not much that can be done to change that. But conflict arising as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or misinterpretation, those are things that policymakers probably do have some control over.
I think that there's internal processes that'll work their way out in even as opaque a place as North Korea. It's also the reality, just as we saw with the divided Germanys, that...
It's a precarious kind of twinned existence when you have countries that are across the border from one another that are derived from what used to be a single unit that now are kind of a real-life social science experiment in what kind of regime you get with one kind of system, what sort of regime you get with another kind of system. And that's a very unstable setup, as it turns out.
It's fascinating to observe this story because one longstanding commonplace had been that socialism has less purchase or radical socialism in the United States than in European countries. So to the extent that that was true, it was an uphill battle for the communists to get established in the United States. But it makes it all the more interesting to follow the development of the movement.
And there were two challenges in particular that played a role in shaping the American communist experience. One was the fact that to begin with the party was often identified with immigrants. The, the, that had come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong socialist contingents.
And when this break happens within the socialist movement between radical socialists and more moderate socialists, um, There were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to help shape the American communist movement. But the result was that for many American workers, they saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference of this movement as something that was unfamiliar.
It would only be with the rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder, a American-born political leader with vast ambitions for creating an American communist movement, that that image would start to be modified. Earl Browder had a meteoric rise and then fall over the promise he made that went by the slogan, communism is 20th century Americanism.
The notion was that communism could find roots in American political discourse and experience where Earl Browder fell afoul of other communists was in his expectations during World War II that it might be possible for the Soviet Union and the United States to make their current cooperation permanent and to come to some sort of accommodation that would moderate their rivalry.
As it turns out, with the dawning already of Cold War tensions that would later flower more fully, that was unacceptable, and the movement divested itself of Earl Browder. Another point that shaped American perceptions of the communist movement in the United States involved issues of espionage. During the 1930s and the 1940s,
American communists, not all of them, obviously, but select members of the movement, were called upon by Soviet intelligence to play a historical role by gathering information, winning sympathies.
One of the most amazing books of the 20th century is the book written by Whitaker Chambers, who had served as a Soviet spy, first a committed communist, then a Soviet spy, and then later a renegade from those allegiances.
Showing 341–360 of 414 · page 18 of 21
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