![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frandroidCONTENT WARNING: Discussion of literal torture and domestic violence, and metaphorical sexual violence. No graphic description of either, but discussion of both.
I had promised a podcast transcript which I thought I would post last Friday, but it was long and I could not finish it off then. Then as I was transcribing it I started to sour on it. This is an interview done by Volodymyr Yermolenko, who is a Ukrainian philosopher and host of this Explaining Ukraine podcast, of Marci Shore, who is an associate professor at Yale where she is teaching modern European intellectual history. Shore is Timothy Snyder's wife, the Yale history prof who teaches about the Holocaust and Modern East European history. I have just finished listening to his Ukrainian history course's lectures. His whole teaching is wrapped around imperialism though it's not particularly Marxist, but it's really good. I'll make a post about that series later. I've also listened to Shore on a number of podcasts and she's always giving the same interview, which is a summary of her 2014 book Ukrainian Night. It's about how she fell in love with the partly failed Ukrainian revolutions of 2004 and 2013, where both times Ukrainians managed to push back against Viktor Yanukovych and Russian influence, but not against oligarchs and corruption. (She also guest-lectured in her husband's course where she taught the same course/interview.)
So here Shore gives more of her back story of how she, an American bougie suburban Jewish woman became an East European scholar. I enjoyed it but I don't particularly recommend that you listen to this hour-long interview. However there was this striking conclusion which kind of blew my mind, and then later on made me really annoyed. She thinks it's a great feminist gotcha that Belarusians discuss President Lukashenko as a metaphorical perpetrator of sexual violence on the population through his authoritarian reign. There is a liberalism to her that really gets under my skin, it's hard to put a finger on it but it's more salient here. Amusingly though unintentionally, the host debunks this, saying that this politics as sexual violence discourse is routine in Eastern Europe. Maybe I missed the point. But anyway I still thought it was interesting, though more about authoritarianism in Russia, and I'm still struggling to figure out how and why she made the transition from authoritarianism to torture and domestic violence, but it's intense. She is big on Hannah Arendt, who I haven't read, so maybe that makes sense to other people. I've slightly edited this to eliminate repetitions and remove some of the "hum" type sentences of spoken word.
* * *
Shore: "I felt like the discussion was kind of missing the point. The point was, in my intervention, was to say that, here we have Germans, we have Russians, we're talking about Nazism, and talking about Stalinism. Is the most important question really, who should apologize to whom, on behalf of who's dead grandmother? Or maybe the most important question is really, how can we, looking back, understand how this happened? In what circumstances, under what conditions, with the exploitation of what kind of human weaknesses, does morality completely break down?
How do we end up in hell? How do we end up in a reign of terror?
How do people end up doing things they never would have imagined they would have done? How do we understand how that happened? Because clearly there is a human potential for that to happen.
If the human potential exists for it to have happened then the human potential exists for it to happen again.
How are we going to understand how that happened, in such a way that maybe we could take steps to prevent it from happening again? I felt like that was the question that should be grappled with but somehow was being subtly evaded.
I was later in Vienna, I was talking to a friend there who is a sociologist, who's originally from Kiev (sic). Grew up in Kiev but has spent her whole academic career in Germany and Austria. She writes in both Russian and German. She was doing sociological interviews in Russia. One of the questions she was asking was, "How can we prevent something like Stalinist terror from happening again?"
She came and she said Marci, not only did my respondents not have an answer, they didn't understand the question.
For them Stalinism was a tsunami, Stalinist terror was like a rainstorm, you can't stop the rain from coming. The best case, you could have an umbrella on hand but here she used the in German, "naturgewalt," like it was this kind of violent act of nature. You can try to be prepared to cover your head and open your umbrella, but there is no point in talking about how we could prevent it from coming.
This in some sense is the tragic flaw. Not that Stalinism hasn't been condemned, but that it hasn't been grappled with and understood such in a way that people feel a sense of agency to prevent it from happening again."
Yermolenko: "I think there is something even worse, because some of these people do not think of how to avoid the rain. They think terms of how to become this rain. How to be this tsunami. This is something related to the fact that they have this lack of agency. This is precisely because they cannot think about influencing the event, or prevent the terror. The only [way] they can escape from this question, morally, is to say "okay this terror is justified, I will be part of it."
This is when the masochist is turning into a sadist. This is something that is going on in the minds of those citizens who support the war. One of the things I keep on asking is, okay, you can be afraid of going to protests, etc... But 80 to 90 percent of Russians support this. This is what we see from the public opinion surveys."
Shore: "This question of masochism and sadism I've been thinking about that through the prism of Belarus. One of the things I have found really interesting and inspiring about what is happening in Belarus... I've learn about this from my friend Olga Sparer. She was both in prison and she was very active in the the feminist movement... Before she was also a continental philosopher, and anti-Lukashenko protests (sic).
One of the things I learned from her is that the language that Bielorusssian feminists have developed to speak about domestic violence, which is a huge problem there; I think Yulia Miskevich said that one is every three Bielorussian women has been a victim of domestic violence, which is extraordinary. That language to describe domestic violence became a language that men and women alike were using to understand how society was treated by Lukashenko. I found that fascinating. One, I felt like it was a revolutionary movement in feminism, an inclusive feminism, a feminism that invited in men, that had a whole new model for horizontal solidarity. But it was also something I started thinking about in a different way when that extremely gruesome phone call emerged. [...] I'm not recommending any of your listeners listen to it, in some sense I wish I hadn't listened to it, it was so upsetting.
It was a 20 year old kid, a Russian soldier, calling his approximately 40 year old mother in Russia, describing in graphic, gruesome detail these torture methods that he was using on captured Ukrainians, in such a way that... It was sadistic, in an almost, a kind of quasi-sexual titillation to it? [...] There was something almost voyeuristic and sexual going on in the conversation between the mother and the son. The mother was clearly very interested in hearing about this, in a way that of course profoundly disturbing. But then the real revelation came towards the end of this conversation, where the son says:
"Yeah, I think about, wouldn't it be great to try out some of these strategies, some of these techniques on dad?" And then they start talking about, oh, wouldn't it be enjoyable to use these torture techniques on this boy's, this young man's father. Of course we don't know exactly what the relationship is between that father and the mother anymore.
What struck me about this wasn't not just that it was voyeuristic, it was sadistic, it was gruesome, it was cruel, but that there was clearly a deep history of domestic violence in this family. I mean something was really really wrong both between the mother, and the son, and the father. It is obviously a different way of applying how to understand personal histories of domestic violence with how to understand a sadistic regime, but there is some relationship. Because there was some kind of intergenerational trauma, a deep history of a relationship between violence and intimacy and sadism that was running through this family. I thought my god, a whole team of forensic psychiatrists, what they could do with this 10 minute conversation, that's like several dissertations right there [!!!]"
Yermolenko: "That's not suprising, because we are accustomed to the fact that politics in Russia, especially external politics, is often described in sexual terms, in the terms of including sexual violence. They tend to describe Ukraine/Russia relations in terms of family relations, where the Ukraine is a bad woman who just left her good husband and therefore should be punished for that. Unfortunately this how many people think there. Look Marci, thank you so much, I think we will end this conversation but [this is just an introduction]."
This interview: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/150292985
Shore's lecture on the Maidan: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/149147534
Another interview where she expands on the same discussion as this post, in case it grabs you: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/145505577
---
#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P
I had promised a podcast transcript which I thought I would post last Friday, but it was long and I could not finish it off then. Then as I was transcribing it I started to sour on it. This is an interview done by Volodymyr Yermolenko, who is a Ukrainian philosopher and host of this Explaining Ukraine podcast, of Marci Shore, who is an associate professor at Yale where she is teaching modern European intellectual history. Shore is Timothy Snyder's wife, the Yale history prof who teaches about the Holocaust and Modern East European history. I have just finished listening to his Ukrainian history course's lectures. His whole teaching is wrapped around imperialism though it's not particularly Marxist, but it's really good. I'll make a post about that series later. I've also listened to Shore on a number of podcasts and she's always giving the same interview, which is a summary of her 2014 book Ukrainian Night. It's about how she fell in love with the partly failed Ukrainian revolutions of 2004 and 2013, where both times Ukrainians managed to push back against Viktor Yanukovych and Russian influence, but not against oligarchs and corruption. (She also guest-lectured in her husband's course where she taught the same course/interview.)
So here Shore gives more of her back story of how she, an American bougie suburban Jewish woman became an East European scholar. I enjoyed it but I don't particularly recommend that you listen to this hour-long interview. However there was this striking conclusion which kind of blew my mind, and then later on made me really annoyed. She thinks it's a great feminist gotcha that Belarusians discuss President Lukashenko as a metaphorical perpetrator of sexual violence on the population through his authoritarian reign. There is a liberalism to her that really gets under my skin, it's hard to put a finger on it but it's more salient here. Amusingly though unintentionally, the host debunks this, saying that this politics as sexual violence discourse is routine in Eastern Europe. Maybe I missed the point. But anyway I still thought it was interesting, though more about authoritarianism in Russia, and I'm still struggling to figure out how and why she made the transition from authoritarianism to torture and domestic violence, but it's intense. She is big on Hannah Arendt, who I haven't read, so maybe that makes sense to other people. I've slightly edited this to eliminate repetitions and remove some of the "hum" type sentences of spoken word.
* * *
Shore: "I felt like the discussion was kind of missing the point. The point was, in my intervention, was to say that, here we have Germans, we have Russians, we're talking about Nazism, and talking about Stalinism. Is the most important question really, who should apologize to whom, on behalf of who's dead grandmother? Or maybe the most important question is really, how can we, looking back, understand how this happened? In what circumstances, under what conditions, with the exploitation of what kind of human weaknesses, does morality completely break down?
How do we end up in hell? How do we end up in a reign of terror?
How do people end up doing things they never would have imagined they would have done? How do we understand how that happened? Because clearly there is a human potential for that to happen.
If the human potential exists for it to have happened then the human potential exists for it to happen again.
How are we going to understand how that happened, in such a way that maybe we could take steps to prevent it from happening again? I felt like that was the question that should be grappled with but somehow was being subtly evaded.
I was later in Vienna, I was talking to a friend there who is a sociologist, who's originally from Kiev (sic). Grew up in Kiev but has spent her whole academic career in Germany and Austria. She writes in both Russian and German. She was doing sociological interviews in Russia. One of the questions she was asking was, "How can we prevent something like Stalinist terror from happening again?"
She came and she said Marci, not only did my respondents not have an answer, they didn't understand the question.
For them Stalinism was a tsunami, Stalinist terror was like a rainstorm, you can't stop the rain from coming. The best case, you could have an umbrella on hand but here she used the in German, "naturgewalt," like it was this kind of violent act of nature. You can try to be prepared to cover your head and open your umbrella, but there is no point in talking about how we could prevent it from coming.
This in some sense is the tragic flaw. Not that Stalinism hasn't been condemned, but that it hasn't been grappled with and understood such in a way that people feel a sense of agency to prevent it from happening again."
Yermolenko: "I think there is something even worse, because some of these people do not think of how to avoid the rain. They think terms of how to become this rain. How to be this tsunami. This is something related to the fact that they have this lack of agency. This is precisely because they cannot think about influencing the event, or prevent the terror. The only [way] they can escape from this question, morally, is to say "okay this terror is justified, I will be part of it."
This is when the masochist is turning into a sadist. This is something that is going on in the minds of those citizens who support the war. One of the things I keep on asking is, okay, you can be afraid of going to protests, etc... But 80 to 90 percent of Russians support this. This is what we see from the public opinion surveys."
Shore: "This question of masochism and sadism I've been thinking about that through the prism of Belarus. One of the things I have found really interesting and inspiring about what is happening in Belarus... I've learn about this from my friend Olga Sparer. She was both in prison and she was very active in the the feminist movement... Before she was also a continental philosopher, and anti-Lukashenko protests (sic).
One of the things I learned from her is that the language that Bielorusssian feminists have developed to speak about domestic violence, which is a huge problem there; I think Yulia Miskevich said that one is every three Bielorussian women has been a victim of domestic violence, which is extraordinary. That language to describe domestic violence became a language that men and women alike were using to understand how society was treated by Lukashenko. I found that fascinating. One, I felt like it was a revolutionary movement in feminism, an inclusive feminism, a feminism that invited in men, that had a whole new model for horizontal solidarity. But it was also something I started thinking about in a different way when that extremely gruesome phone call emerged. [...] I'm not recommending any of your listeners listen to it, in some sense I wish I hadn't listened to it, it was so upsetting.
It was a 20 year old kid, a Russian soldier, calling his approximately 40 year old mother in Russia, describing in graphic, gruesome detail these torture methods that he was using on captured Ukrainians, in such a way that... It was sadistic, in an almost, a kind of quasi-sexual titillation to it? [...] There was something almost voyeuristic and sexual going on in the conversation between the mother and the son. The mother was clearly very interested in hearing about this, in a way that of course profoundly disturbing. But then the real revelation came towards the end of this conversation, where the son says:
"Yeah, I think about, wouldn't it be great to try out some of these strategies, some of these techniques on dad?" And then they start talking about, oh, wouldn't it be enjoyable to use these torture techniques on this boy's, this young man's father. Of course we don't know exactly what the relationship is between that father and the mother anymore.
What struck me about this wasn't not just that it was voyeuristic, it was sadistic, it was gruesome, it was cruel, but that there was clearly a deep history of domestic violence in this family. I mean something was really really wrong both between the mother, and the son, and the father. It is obviously a different way of applying how to understand personal histories of domestic violence with how to understand a sadistic regime, but there is some relationship. Because there was some kind of intergenerational trauma, a deep history of a relationship between violence and intimacy and sadism that was running through this family. I thought my god, a whole team of forensic psychiatrists, what they could do with this 10 minute conversation, that's like several dissertations right there [!!!]"
Yermolenko: "That's not suprising, because we are accustomed to the fact that politics in Russia, especially external politics, is often described in sexual terms, in the terms of including sexual violence. They tend to describe Ukraine/Russia relations in terms of family relations, where the Ukraine is a bad woman who just left her good husband and therefore should be punished for that. Unfortunately this how many people think there. Look Marci, thank you so much, I think we will end this conversation but [this is just an introduction]."
This interview: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/150292985
Shore's lecture on the Maidan: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/149147534
Another interview where she expands on the same discussion as this post, in case it grabs you: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/145505577
---
#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P
no subject
Date: 2023-01-06 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-06 03:14 pm (UTC)