Pontos de Vista: o historiador Timothy Snyder fala sobre a Ucrânia e a visão mitológica de Putin do "celeiro da Europa"

Timothy Snyder na Wikipédia

A ENTREVISTA (transcrita ou para ouvir o podcast)

EZRA KLEIN: A core argument of your book, “The Road to Unfreedom,” is that different understandings of the past — myths, histories, memories — they create different politics. And I want to begin by focusing on the kind of politics that you see as defining and maybe blinding the United States and Europe in recent decades, which is the politics of inevitability. Can you tell me about that?

TIM SNYDER: Yeah, thanks for asking about that. I think time is a really essential component of politics. But it has the feature, like many important ideas, that it seems self-evident or natural to the point of invisibility. So time is a kind of parameter for everything else. The way we think about time just becomes as natural as breathing. But actually the way we think about time is an idea.

So by the politics of inevitability, I mean the notion that sometimes goes under the heading of progress. I mean the idea that some kind of outside force is going to guarantee that the things that we desire and wish for are actually going to come about. And if that seems abstract, then what I mean in particular with reference to the United States after the end of communism in 1989 is the notion that there are no alternatives left in the world.

To quote Margaret Thatcher or to quote Frances Fukuyama, history is over. And it’s inevitable that a larger force, namely capitalism, is going to bring about the thing that we desire, namely, democracy and freedom. And that idea was in the air. That idea shaped everything else. And I think that idea has a lot to do with the crisis of democracy and freedom that we’re in right now.

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