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
the new phenomenon of political religions in the modern period. And he saw fascism and Nazism and Soviet communism as bearing the stamp of political religions, meaning ideologies that promised what an earlier age would have understood in religious terms. Ferdinand called this the eschaton and said that These end times, the eschaton was being promised in the here and now, being made imminent.
And he warned against that, saying the results are likely to be disastrous.
A hidden component, one that's not officially recognized. I mean, I think that, you know, I had a chance to witness this, actually. When I was a child, my family, I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian-American family, and my father, who was a mathematician, got a very rare invitation to travel to Soviet Lithuania, to the University of Vilnius, to meet with colleagues. And at this point,
Journeys of more than a few days or a week were very rare to the Soviet Union for Americans. And the result was that I had unforgettable experiences visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's day. And among the things I saw there was a museum of atheism. that had been established in a church that had been ripped apart from inside and was meant to kind of embody the official stance of atheism.
And I remember being baffled by the museum on the inside because you would expect exhibits. You would expect something dramatic, something that will be compelling. And instead, there was some folk art from the countryside showing bygone beliefs There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors, and that was pretty much it.
But as a child, I remember being reproved in that museum for not wearing my windbreaker, but instead carrying it on my arm, which was a very disrespectful thing to do in an official museum of atheism.
When I was able to visit the Soviet Union later for a language course in the summer of 1989, one of the obligatory tours that we took was to file reverently past the body of Lenin outside the Kremlin in a mausoleum at Red Square.
And communist mummies like those of Lenin, earlier Stalin had been there as well, communist mummies like Mao or Ho Chi Minh really, I think, speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility. reverence for relics of great figures, almost saintly figures, so that even what got proclaimed as atheism turned out to be a very demanding faith as well.
And I think that's a contradiction that other scholars have pointed out as well.
We hear nature abhorring a vacuum, and I think that there are places in human character that long for transcendental explanations, right? That it's not all meaningless. In fact, there's a larger purpose. And I think it's not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes has in part come from, on the one hand, religious believers, and on the other hand, from
disillusioned true believers in communism who find themselves undergoing an internal experience of just a revulsion, finding that their ideals have not been followed through on.
That's right. I think that that last one is especially significant because it's deeply paradoxical.
I mean, trying to outline these contradictions, by the way, is like subjecting Marx to the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out internal contradictions, things that are likely to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in what's supposed to be a completely – set and durable and effective, uh, framework. Um, the one about tradition, uh,
you know, Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions that have hemmed people in this earlier, earlier ways of thinking earlier social structures, uh, and, uh, and, and to constantly renovate. And what happens instead is, um, a tradition of radical rupture emerges.
And that's really tough because imagine, um, uh, the last stages of the Soviet union where, um, keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society. There are discontents and demands that are going to clash, especially when someone like Gorbachev is proposing reforms and things are suddenly thrown open for discussion.
The very notion that you have the celebration of revolutionaries and the Bolshevik legacy at a time when the state wants to enforce stability, and an order that's been received from the prior generation. Think of Brezhnev's time, for instance. All of that is an especially volatile mix and unlikely to work out very durably in the long run.
Well, the first thing to note, obviously, is that those two works are very different. Das Kapital is an enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out because Engels begged him to stop revising. Please just finally get it into press. And then the rest, Engels had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Marx passed away. It's a huge work.
By contrast, the Communist Manifesto is a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide in spite of its comparative brevity. The Communist Manifesto, moreover, is also something of the nature of having a delayed fuse, you could say. Because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe, the work is contrary to what people often believe.
That pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national or liberal demands. The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard over the din of other far more prominent actors. It is, however, in the aftermath that this work takes on tremendous significance and becomes popularly read and popularly distributed. It's especially the...
the episode, the bloody episode of the Paris Commune in 1871, which comes to be identified with Marx, even though it was not purely inspired by Marx alone, nor were all of the Communards devoted Marxists. It's the identification of this famous or infamous episode in urban upheaval that really leads to worldwide notoriety for Marx and attention to those works. And they're very different in form.
Showing 81–100 of 414 · page 5 of 21
← Previous
Next →