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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's one thing for people far away to propose trades of territory or complicated guarantees or... arrangements that sound very good in the abstract and that will just be refused by people who have actually experienced what the war has been like in person and what it has meant to them and their families and everyone they know in terms of lives destroyed.
I think that peacemaking is going to face a very daunting task here, given all that's accumulated. And I think in particular, just from the last days of the launching of missile attacks against indiscriminate or civilian targets, that's not easy to turn the corner on.
Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike, probably. I think my concern is about the part of the equation that involves people just being desperately unhappy, laying the foundations for more trouble to come. I couldn't imagine what that looks like, but once again, these are things that escape human control in the details.
In a way, we may already be there because ratifying the use of force to change borders in Europe was a taboo since 1945. And now look where we are. If that is validated, then it sets up incentives for more of the same.
I hope not, but I think so many predictions reach their expiration dates and get invalidated. Obviously, we're confronting a dire situation in the present.
Well, first of all, I mean, the answer is very clear. I would never presume to advise you about interviewing world leaders and prominent people because the roster that you've accumulated is just astonishing. But I know what I might aim for. And that is, I think, in historical analysis, in trying to understand the role of a particular leader in
the more one understands about their prior background and formative influences, the better a fix. I think one gets on the question of what are their expectations? What is the, in German, there's a beautiful word for this. The Germans managed to mash together several words into, into one even better word. And in German, it's the horizon of expectation. So, um,
in the case of figures like Churchill or Hitler, their experience of World War I shaped their actions in World War II. Their values were shaped in their childhood. Is there a way of engaging with someone you're interviewing, even obliquely, that gives a view in on their sense of what the future might hold.
And I mean that, obviously, such people are expert at being guarded and not being pinned down, but the categories in which they're thinking, a sense of what their own ethical grounding might be or their ethical code that gives hints to their behavior. It gets said, and again, it's a cliche because it's true, that one of the best measures of a person, especially a leader, is how they treat people
from whom they don't expect anything? Are they condescending? Are they, on the contrary, fundamentally interested in another person, even if that person can't help them or be used in some way? Speaking of prominent world leaders to interview, there's Napoleon.
Napoleon psychologically must have been a quite amazing person to make a bid for mastery of Europe and then already thinking about the mastery of the world. But contemporaries who met Napoleon said that it was very disturbing to talk with him because meeting with him one-on-one revealed that he could talk to you but look like he was looking right through you.
You were more in the nature of a character on a chessboard. And for that reason, some of them called Napoleon the master of the sightless stare. So if you're talking with a world leader and he or she has a sightless stare, that's probably a bad sign.
But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints about the moral compass or the future expectations of a leader that emerge in one of your wonderful conversations.
Well, journey is probably just the right word because it's this week that the third of that trilogy, Decline of Communism, is being released. And it felt like something that I very much wanted to do because the history that's narrated there is one that is so compelling and often so tragic that it needs to be shared. Yeah.
The vast amount of material that one can include is probably dwarfed by the amount that actually ends up on the cutting room floor. One could probably do an entire lecture course on every single one of those lecture topics that got broached.
But one of the great satisfactions of putting together a course like this is also being able to give further suggestions for study to the listeners, and in some cases, to introduce them to neglected classics. or books that make you want to grab somebody by the lapels and say, you've got to read this.
There's probably few things that are as exciting as a really keen and targeted reading recommendation. In addition, I've also done other courses on the history of World War I, on the diplomatic history of Europe from 1500 to the present, a course on the history of Eastern Europe,
and also a course on dictatorships called Utopia and Terror, and then also a course on explorers and a course on turning points in modern history. And every single one of those is so rewarding because you learn so much in the process, and it's really fantastic.
That's right. Well, would a book that got turned into a movie be acceptable as well? Yes. So in that case, you know, All of us reflect on our own childhoods and that magical moment of reading a book or seeing a movie that really got you launched on some particular set of things that you're going to find fascinating for the rest of your life.
And there's a direct line to the topics we were talking about today from myself in the Chicagoland area as a kid seeing the film of Dr. Zhivago. Yeah. and then later reading the novel on which it was based by Pasternak.
Showing 381–400 of 414 · page 20 of 21
← Previous
Next →