The Berlin Wall Never Fell - Timothy Snyder

The Berlin Wall Never Fell

It Didn't

TIMOTHY SNYDER NOV 9

Thirty five years ago today, the Berlin Wall did not fall.

I realize that I am running against the torrent of anniversary remembrances here.  And no doubt you are thinking: he means this metaphorically; he means that some mental barrier remains between East and West, or perhaps between eastern and western Germany.

No, I mean that, quite literally, the Berlin Wall did not fall.  It did not fall thirty-five years ago today.  It never fell.  The "fall of the Berlin Wall" is a literary device, not a historical event. 

And that we have chosen a false image to stand for a moment of liberation reveals a problem.

But first, a reminder of what did happen.  At the time, East and West Germany were two different countries.  Berlin was a special island inside East Germany, itself divided between Western and Eastern parts.  A physical wall did indeed separate the two, built by the East German regime to keep their people in. 

In summer and autumn 1989, amidst Gorbachev's perestroika and reforms and gestures among neighboring communist countries, East Germans were finding ways to visit or to emigrate to West Germany.  The East German regime, in turmoil itself amid protests, was trying to formulate a new set of rules for the border.  Amidst a great deal of confusion, a regime spokesman seemed to announce, in response to a question by an Italian journalist, that the border posts at the wall would allow East Germans to depart for the West.

That was on November 9th, 1989.  The Berlin Wall did not topple over because of that press conference.  What happened was that tens of thousands of East Berliners took advantage of the pronouncement and crowded the border checkpoints, one of which eventually opened.  People rushed through to forbidden West Berlin, where they were greeted with champagne and flowers.  It was a night that changed the history of Germany, which would unify less than a year later.

But no wall actually fell.  People eventually clambered on it, and chipped off pieces of it (I have a few, somewhere).  People painted on ot for a while, which is why those concrete souvenirs are colorful. On New Year's Eve, 1989, David Hasselhoff played a concert over the Berlin Wall, in a crane.  The wall was of course still standing, because it had not fallen down. 

Words matter.  Pretty much everyone says "the fall of the Berlin Wall" as a shorthand for the "the end of communism in eastern Europe."  But something that never happened cannot be a source of an actual memory.  It cannot teach us, for example, how authoritarianism is resisted.

The image of a wall falling transforms a complicated history into a simple moment.  But when we embrace that image of something that never happened, we lose everything that we need to remember, everything that is human and interesting.

The opening of the checkpoint that night was an accident.  But it was an accident made possible by human action.  East Germans had chosen to leave their country.  They were protesting, and believed that they could protest in part because other people were doing so.  The largest and most effective protests were in neighboring Poland.  They went back to the foundation of a labor union, Solidarity, in 1980.  By November 1989, Poland had already formed a post-communist government.

And that of course is the Polish gripe with the whole "Berlin wall falling" story.  Poles will want you to know that Poland was more important than East Germany in the history of the end of communism.  And that is very true.  But the crucial thing to remember is what Poles did.  In the face of dictatorship they found concepts of cooperation and lived them.

The resistance to communism was a human story of cooperation.  Its dissidents stressed the need to work together.  Its most important organization was a union.  When a certain conjuncture emerged in 1989, it was these practices and traditions that allowed new political alternatives to emerge.  The human cooperation, called "civil society" at the time, was not enough in itself to change the world.  But when the world began to change in other ways, people were ready.  

When we imagine the Berlin Wall falling, as we will be summoned to do today, we are instructed that freedom is something that just happens.  The wall was up.  Bad.  And then it fell.  Good.  We think of freedom like that because it removes the responsibility from us.  And that is the wrong lesson, wrong historically and so wrong politically and morally.

Thirty five years ago today, the Berlin Wall did not fall. 

Thirty five years ago today, some people made history, amidst other people making history, thanks to some prior cooperation, and some good thinking about what freedom means.

We cannot change the world all at once.  But we can change the way we think.  We can clear away the clichés and make ourselves more lively.  We can work together and then, when other things are in motion, be ready to turn the change in the right direction. 

Timothy Snyder on the non-sensical war of aggression by Putin against Ukraine

Putin's Legend The Nonsensical Basis of a Terrible War TIMOTHY SNYDER AUG 25 Two-and-a-half years ago, Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, setting off the largest war the world has seen since 1945.  Although Russia's leaders have offered various spurious justifications for their illegal war of aggression, Vladimir Putin's nost consistent explanation has been ideological: Russia is an ancient state, and Ukraine is historically Russian land. Let us take advantage of this half-anniversary to consider this claim.  Anniversaries take hold of the imagination, especially the round ones.  The fullness of years and the beauty of numbers seduce us into myths of eternity and goodness.  But history, unlike legend,  is composed of fragments, of bits, of things we understand halfway, and seek to grasp ever better. This is one reason why few historians grapple with the gilded myths that Putin has put forward about the ancient past, most notoriously in a long essay in 2021 and then in a tedious interview with Tucker Carlson in 2024 (both linked below).   When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.   Putin is in love with a legend.  Historically speaking, this is very familiar: new regimes, such as Putin's, seek compensation in myths of ancient origin. Putin's idea of Russia, his justification for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, his rationalization of his attempt to destroy Ukraine as a people — it all rests on a very familiar sort of tall tale: we were here first.  These stories are generally complete falsehoods, from the “we” through the “were” and the “here” and the “first.” And so it is for Putin.  But the stories get repeated so often that they take on a kind of leaden plausibility, like a bad habit. It takes a little work to throw them off. So here goes! The legend begins with a single obscure incident, understood by Putin to prove the existence and endurance of a Russian state: Long ago there was a city called Novgorod, inhabited by people who were unable to get along.  These quarrelsome folk, the Slavs, invited three Viking brothers, known as the Rus, to come and rule them.  The arrival of Vikings began an unbroken tradition of a Russian "centralized state." As he says, Putin has the story from a medieval chronicle, "The Tale of Bygone Years," probably from the early twelfth century.  The monk (or monks) in Kyiv who compiled this text had heard about the arrival of the Vikings known as the Rus from Scandinavia, which had taken place about four hundred years earlier.  In the intervening centuries, the various parts of the fractious Scandinavian clans had founded, taken over, and lost control of a number or towns in eastern Europe. The monk or monks knew were trying to explain why the Kyivan part of a Scandinavian ruling clan still known by the name Rus was more important than other clans in other places.   "The Tale of Bygone Years" is one of dozens of helpful medieval sources which touch on the Scandinavians in eastern Europe, which mix fable and useful information.  These texts have to be read critically and together, and alongside the findings of archeologists and numismatists who have worked in the places in question.  In what follows I will be doing this. Before analyzing the legend that Putin loves, it would be helpful to spell out all of the claims it contains and that he draws from it, some of which are explicit, and some of which are implicit -- things that the listener might go away from the story believing, even though they are never stated. 1.  There was a city called Novgorod when the Vikings known as the Rus arrived. 2.  There were three Viking brothers. 3.  The Vikings accepted the invitation and peacefully and durably ruled. 4.  The people of this city were in some sense Russians because they were Slavs. 5.  These Vikings were also in some sense Russians, since they called themselves “Rus.” 6.  The existence of an ethnic group in a town more than a thousand years ago means a right to rule today by a dictator who calls himself a name that he also associates with that ethnic group. 7.  The existence of the rulers of that ethnic group more than a thousand years ago means a right to rule today by a dictator who calls himself a name that he also associates with those rulers. 8.  Events in one location more than a thousand years ago justify the existence and actions of a transcontinental empire engaged in a war of aggression against a neighboring state. 9.  An algorithm exists whereby we can justify repression and war today via obscure, distant events. 10.  This algorithm is known to dictators who tell the story, carry out the repressions and start the wars. When spelled out like this, the claims reveal their magical character.  Even if claims 1-5 were completely correct, the moral and political interpretations Putin offers in claims 6-10 are illogical and repugnant.   Such “reasoning” is why few historians will engage Putin's legend directly.  It has nothing to do with history -- with assembling evidence, with questioning hypothesis, with making reasonable arguments based upon sources and traditions of interpretation.  It is a claim to power, whose only sense arises from the power itself. That is really all that needs to be said. Having understood that, historians can choose to go the extra mile, and note that the factual claims (1-5) are balderdash.  It only really makes sense to do this in a constructive rather than in a destructive spirit, in an effort to reveal something about what we actually do know about early medieval Scandinavia and eastern Europe, and how we know it.  It is in that spirit that I will proceed.  Let us consider each claim in turn. 1.  There was a city called Novgorod when the Vikings known as the Rus arrived. There was not.  Novgorod had not yet been founded at the time of the arrival of the Rus in the territories that are now northeastern Russia.  It was founded about a quarter millenium later. (It had also not yet been founded when Vikings first began to lay claim to Kyiv, which already existed and was probably controlled by Khazars.)  Novgorod is attractive for a Russian myth because it exists now and it existed at the time the monks were writing. But it did not exist at the time of the events the monks were recounting. But this is just the very beginning of the profound untruthfulness of the story. Here is what we know. Traders from Scandinavia were present around the body of water we now call Lake Ladoga in the sixth century.  Around the middle of the eighth century, the Vikings who called themselves Rus established a trading emporium at a site that Russian archaeologists call Ladoga, but which the Vikings themselves called Aldeigja.   Packed away in storage in the Hermitage in St.Petersburg is a bronze figure from Aldeigja in its early days: Odin with his two ravens. This contemporary piece of evidence, similar to other figures from Scandinavia, and one among thousands, tells us more than later chronicles about the time and place and people. The power center associated with Aldeigja was probably called the Rus Khaganate. We believe that it was called this because of contemporary evidence: a recorded encounter between Rus emissaries and the king of the Franks. About a century after the foundation of Aldeigja, the Vikings known as Rus established another trade center, which they called Holmgar∂, and which Russians later called Gorodishche.   The town Novgorod in its turn was founded more than a hundred years after that and about a mile away. It had nothing to do with the first encounter of the Rus and the locals. It could not have done so, since it did not then exist. 2.  There were three Viking brothers. This is a different sort of claim.  One can show with considerable certainty, on the basis of the archaeological evidence, when Scandinavian Rus towns such as Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ were established, and have a pretty good idea of who lived there and what occupations were pursued.   One cannot of course disprove, on this basis, that there were once three Viking brothers.  The reasons to disbelieve this claim are of a different kind, arising from the study of political myth and its structures.   The number 3 has a profound significance in Indo-European stories about the origin of the world.  According to Tacitus, the ancient Germanic peoples (whose culture preceded that of the Germanic Vikings), believed that the earth god had a son, and that son had three sons, and those three sons founded all the other peoples.  Odin was himself one of three brothers. In Viking times, the settlement of new (from the Viking perspective) lands was systematically justified by a story of the arrival of three brothers, usually sons or grandsons of Odin.  In this manner the Viking clan who had power justified its position and its right to control lands (and native peoples).  The Tale of Bygone Years, which is essentially one saga among many others, reproduced this standard trope of the Scandinavian sagas.   It is worth emphasizing that the story of the three brothers is always about why Scandinavians get to rule other people. The survival of the “three-brothers” trope is a reminder of Scandinavian domination. That is its meaning. 3.  The Vikings accepted the invitation and peacefully and durably ruled. In the case of this bit of nonsense, both literary and archaeological methods help.  One does not have to be a student of early legends to understand that the "invitation" story is suspect.  Right down to the present, invading armies claim that they have come only at the invitation of the people whose lands they now occupy.   Contemporary Russians should be particularly sensitive to this, since the Bolshevik invasion of Poland in 1919, the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 were all justified by supposed invitations from within the invaded country.   The ancient Scandinavians also knew this trick, and the story of their being "invited" to the region of Aldeigja and Holmgar∂, in what is now northwestern Russia, is an obvious colonial tale.  Not only is it certainly fictional, its purpose was to deny (not to affirm) the agency of the local people.  The entity that Putin has in mind was the Rus Khaganate. The name Rus referred to the Scandinavian clan; the Scandinavians borrowed the term “kagan” for ruler from the Khazars, their partner in the slave trade. Vikings were in the area in order to facilitate trade southward for Arabic silver.  The chief goods they traded were at first furs and then slaves.   During the period in question, the Vikings known as the Rus understood systematic slave raids in the area, killing the adult men and then selling women, boys and girls into slavery. The power center around Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ had its ascent and its collapse. Either it was attacked by other Scandinavians, or it was challenged by local rebellions of peoples subject to slave raids, or perhaps both. The Rus Khaganate seems to have collapse in about 870. Rus and other Scandinavian traders remained active, and trade emporia would be revived and new towns founded, but the first Rus polity seems to have ended then. 4.  The people of this city were in some sense Russians because they were Slavs. Here one must apply the literary criticism not to the Tale of Bygone Years but to Putin himself.  He never actually says that the people in the Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ regions were Russians; he wrongly believes that they were Slavs, and implies a Russian identity by claiming that their actions laid the basis for a "centralized Russian state."  This is, of course, a trick.   It is absurd to imagine Russians existing 1200 or 1300 years ago, and Putin avoids the absurdity by slipping in his imaginary Russians by silent implication.  And so the point must be made explicitly: there were no Russians anywhere in the world 1200 or 1300 years ago.  There was no notion whatever of a Russian people.   The backup position would be that these people were Slavs and thus in some sense proto-Russians.   That is not how history works: there is no natural, inevitable progression from people speaking a language 1200 or 1300 years ago to the cultural identities or political regimes of today.  But even if one believes in this political magic, and even if one believes that people speaking a slavic language 1200 or 1300 years ago were somehow proto-Russians, there is still a major problem.  The people who lived in the area at the time did not generally speak Slavic languagues. They were mainly Finns, not Slavs.   For that matter, Finns seem to have been the most important group not only in the Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ regions, but in all of what is now northeastern Russia, including what is now the Moscow region. (There was, of course, no city of Moscow at the time.) 5.  These Vikings were also in some sense Russians, since they called themselves “Rus.” Here again we confront an implicit claim, one that is is backed by a semantic trick.  There is now a country called the Russian Federation, which is named after an earlier country called the Russian Empire, which was named after Vikings who called themselves Rus, or after the medieval power centers established by the Rus, the first of which was the Rus Khaganate.   There is a power in names, just as there is a power in anniversaries and round numbers.  If those people were called Rus, must they not have been Russians?  Well, no. The Rus came first. The Russian Empire was named after them about a thousand years after they appeared. The naming confuses things, but it need not confuse us.    At the time period in question, other European rulers had no difficulty establishing who the Rus were: they were Swedes.  In the poems and stories they sang and wrote, and in the traces they left in their burial ground, the Rus were unambiguously Scandinavians.  To be sure, they were influenced by the peoples with whom they came into contact: Finns, Balts, Arabs, Bulgars, Khazars, Slavs.  This was a period of the globalization of Scandinavia, and the Rus were part of an exploratory impulse that reached four continents  In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Rus were Scandinavian trading and clans.  Later on, as some Rus settled ever further south, for example in Gnezdevo, Chernihiv, and Kyiv, the Scandinavians reinforced their elite status by marrying Scandinavians from Scandinavia, by treating them as allies and friends, and by expanding upon and sharing in Scandinavian culture.   After the collapse of the Rus Khaganate, other Rus managed to establish another power center, much later, at Kyiv. Now rather than cooperating with the Khazars they were taking over their land and tribute centers. The Rus (or other Scandinavians) also built the first towns in other parts of eastern Europe, for example in the area around Moscow (which of course did not exist at the time). After telling his deeply implausible legend about Novgorod, Putin's next move is to cite the Tale of Bygone Years about Kyiv.  The person or people who wrote that saga was concerned to show that the Rus ruler of Kyiv, was the most important prince in the region. By the time of the writing of the chronicle, Novgorod did exist, and so a story presented itself which linked the two places and showed the superiority of Kyiv. The story is that a Viking from Novgorod managed to take Kyiv by dressing himself up as a trader and fooling the naive local rulers.  At his moment of his triumph this Viking produced a baby and proclaimed that the child was by blood the true ruler of the land. After this improbable succession of events that Viking of the story proclaimed Kyiv “the mother of Rus cities,” a bit of language meant to assure people in the twelfth century that the present rulers of Kyiv should dominate over other Rus in other towns. One could perform the same kind of analysis on this story.  At the time The Tale of Bygone Yearswas written, there was no Russia. There were no Russians. There were clans of Scandinavians called Rus, who were engaged in a contest of dominance, with towns and emporia that rose and fell. Part of this contest was a story, set down in the early twelfth century, describing the arrival of the Rus in Kyiv, a historical event of the early tenth century.  Rus did in fact arrive in Kyiv, but not as the story describes. The Vikings in the story could not have come from Novgorod, since at the time the Rus began to settle the Kyiv area Novgorod had not yet been founded. It was much later on, when both cities did exist, at the time of the chronicle, when the Scandinavians in Kyiv wanted to justify both their own pedigree and their own dominance. The story can only be understood in these terms. Otherwise it is just comical.  The baby thing is ridiculous; no Viking ever went to war with a baby on display, nor did any Viking have the idea of a royal dynasty of which the baby would be the heir. The dressup game is a fictional stratagem familiar from Scandinavian sagas as well as contemporary Byzantine war stories. Even if one ignores the legendary and preposterous character all that, the timing of the events is challenged by the recorded birth and death dates of the clever wardrobe Viking and the portable baby Viking.  The hero of the Kyiv story, the clever wardrobe Viking known as Helgi (or Oleh or Oleg in Ukrainian or Russian) is a semi-mythical character. There is no reason to believe that he represented a dynasty coming from Novgorod, since Novgorod did not exist yet, and since the Rus khaganate had ceased to exist. It is likely that, if he came at all, Helgi came from Gnezdovo, which was a rival of Chernihiv and Kyiv at the time. Helgi means “hero” and this Helgi is one of dozens who populate medieval Scandinavian stories. This Helgi supposedly died by fulfilling a complicated prophesy involving his horse, a story which features in multiple north European settings. The Kyiv incident could not have happened, did not happen, and even had it happened would have no implications for the present war.  It is not really worth the effort to press the point further about Kyiv, not least because the validity of the Kyiv tale, which is nil, would depend on the validity of the prior Novgorod story, which is nil.   You can seewhy historians hesitate to engage in all this.  What Putin is doing has nothing to do with history as a discipline.  He is engaged in building a legend, which us based on other legends. And each of his sentences is so rich in various kinds of error that it takes hundreds of words to explain all of the wrongness!   And in taking the tale seriously, the historian fears that he has made it more serious. This is what I called “dancing with a skeleton” in my book Reconstruction of Nations, where I discourage it. I am only doing it now since the both the myth and the war persist, and people (even outside Russia) persist in justifying the war by the myth. By concentrating upon the fundamental legend, the one on which all the others depend, I hope to have shown that the structure itself is empty. The rules Putin sets down for interpreting the past cannot be accepted.  It is nothing more than fantasy following force. This is the most important point. If we grant that tyrants are right to start wars because of fictions of brothers and babies, because of stories that are not even wrong, then every single corner of the world is subject to invasion and the entire international legal order is void. Even were we to accept the way Putin thinks about the past, which we absolutely should not do, it would lead to a very different conclusion than he thinks. The best guesses of long-dead monks are not a solid basis for contemporary statehood.  Tbe Tale of Bygone Years cannot do what Putin asks of it. If, in order to exist today, states have to prove their ancient pedigree and their durable ethnic and political history, then Putin would have to accept that there is no basis for the existence of today’s Russian Federation. Were Putin to follow his own logic, he would not be invading Ukraine, but handing over European Russia to Finland or Sweden.

Ukraine and Harris, American foreign policy - Timothy Snyder

 Ukraine and Harris

And Ukrainian-Americans and the Ukrainian Future

TIMOTHY SNYDER JUL 27

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Ukrainians have been asking me what it means for their country that President Joe Biden has decided to withdraw his candidacy and that Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.  

I think that it only means good things. 

The Biden administration now has more time for Ukraine.  Until last Sunday, Joe Biden had two jobs: president and candidate for president.  Now he has only one job: to be president.  This means more time for policy, including foreign policy.  The people on his team who work on Ukraine will find it easier to get his attention.  Aside from that: President Biden will now be thinking about his legacy.  He knows that whatever policies he wants attached to his name must be formulated and implemented in the next six months.

Though it is impossible to be sure, I would guess that Ukraine will likely as central to a Harris presidency than it was to the Biden presidency.  On a number of foreign policy issues, including Ukraine, the Biden administration began from traditional assumptions that were outdated, and then worked quickly to catch up.  I do not think that this will be the case for Harris, in part because the Biden administration has caught up.  The vice-president’s foreign policy team might well be more decisive on Ukraine than the Biden team.  Vice-President Harris made a point of traveling to Geneva for Ukraine’s peace summit when it became clear that President Biden would not attend. In fairness, we should remember that President Biden visited Kyiv itself!

All of that, though, is far less important than the main issue, which is beating Donald Trump.

Harris has a better chance of doing so than did Joe Biden.  If you are on Ukrainian social media, you are dealing with Russian bots and trolls saying that Harris is unpopular in America and can’t win.  In the United States, the Russian bots and trolls are spreading racism and misogyny.  The Russian demobilization serves the same goal: to stifle any hope for something good in both countries.  

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Here are the basic facts.  Just a few days into her campaign, Harris polls even with Trump, whereas Biden was behind by several points.  Her campaign has been energetic and effective.  She has mobilized several constituencies who might otherwise have been indifferent.  Trump is obviously afraid of her (as are the Russian propagandists who support Trump).

Now, I understand that there are Republicans who maintain that Trump would have a good Ukraine policy, including people whose views on foreign policy I admire.  Respectfully, I believe this this is wishful thinking.  In some cases, Ukrainians also think wishfully, confusing a thoughtful proposal by a Republican with Trump’s own views or likely future actions.  So let me take a moment to explain why I believe that a second Trump administration would be disastrous for both countries. 

In Ukrainian terms, Trump is a Yanukovych figure, a wannabe oligarch backed by actual oligarchs and the Kremlin.  Unlike Yanukovych, he is personally charismatic and politically talented.  The essence of Trump’s agenda is the transformation of the American political order.  Whether or not this succeeds, the attempt at regime change will remove the United States from the international scene for an indefinite period.  Insofar as we have a foreign policy at all under a Trump administration, it will amount to allowing Russia and China to do what they want. 

When thinking of how the United States matters to Ukraine, it is also worthwhile considering how Ukrainians (Ukrainian-Americans) will matter in this election. 

Given the strange American electoral system, certain states matter more than others.  Ukrainian-Americans are 1% of the population of Pennsylvania, and 0.5% of the population of Michigan.  If Trump wins those two states, he will win the general election.  If Harris wins those two states, then she will win the general election. 

In Michigan, the number of Ukrainian-Americans is greater than Trump’s margin of victory in the state in 2016.  In Pennsylvania, the number of Ukrainian-Americans is greater than Trump’s margin of victory in that state in 2016, and also greater than that of Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.   

In other words, the votes of Ukrainian-Americans might decide whether Ukraine continues to exist. 

Timothy Snyder sobre a guerrilha de mentiras conduzida por ditaduras como China e Rússia - 17/04/2024

 

Political Warfare and Congress

My Testimony from 17 April

TIMOTHY SNYDER APR 19

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The essence of “political warfare,” in the sense defined by the Chinese communist party, is that Beijing uses media, psychology, and law to induce adversaries to do things counter to their own interests. 

Political warfare works through you or it does not work. So if you are not willing to think about yourself, you are not thinking about political warfare.

I had the honor of testifying to Congress on the question of Chinese political warfare this past Wednesday, April 17th. This testimony was before the Oversight Committee, which has devoted months of time, money, and attention to an impeachment inquiry which is based on a mendacious claim by a man in contact with Russian intelligence services. 

That congressional impeachment inquiry, based on a Russian fabrication, then became the subject of Chinese propaganda tropes, designed to spread the lie that President Biden took a bribe. This false notion, generated by Moscow, can only be spread by Beijing because there are Americans in the middle, American elected officials, who do their part. 

A hearing on political warfare in Congress, and especially before this particular committee, requires self-reflection. 

The hearing had some moments of interest, many of which are circulating as clips. Feel free to post your favorites in the comments.

The below text is my formal written testimony, which you can find in with all the notes and references on the congressional website. Video of my opening remarks is here. The entire session can be viewed here.

•••

Testimony to Oversight Committee, “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare, Part I”

Professor Timothy Snyder, 17 April 2024

Democracy is in decline, dragged down by the autocratic lie. The autocrats offer no new visions; instead they lie about democracies and insert lies into democracies. The test of disinformation is its power to alter the course of crucial events, such as wars and elections.

Russia undertook a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the basis of a big lie about Nazis.

Even as we meet today, Russian (and Chinese) propaganda shapes House debates about Ukraine, the most important foreign policy decision of our time. In domestic politics, the most important matter in coming months the coming presidential election.

To begin with the war. Beijing cares about Ukraine because it is the decisive conflict of our time. It can spread lies about Ukraine thanks to prior Russian labor. Beijing wrongly blames the war on Washington. Chinese information actions seek to attract American actors around to Russian propaganda tropes meant to justify Russian aggression and bring about American inaction.

Though Americans sometimes forget this, Ukrainian resistance is seen around the world as an obvious American cause and an easy American victory. So long as Ukraine fights, it is fulfilling the entire NATO mission by itself, defending a European order based in integration rather than empire, and affirming international order in general. It is also holding back nuclear proliferation.

Given these obvious strategic gains, American failure in Ukraine will lead other powers to conclude that a feckless and divided United States will also fail to meet future challenges. The fundamental goal of Russian (and thus Chinese) propaganda is to prevent American action, thereby making America seem impotent and democracy pointless -- also in the eyes of Americans themselves.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is intimately connected to a possible Chinese war of aggression against Taiwan. As Taiwanese leaders continually and urgently remind us, Ukrainian resistance deters Chinese aggression. Ukraine deters China in a way that the United States cannot, without taking any action that Beijing could interpret as provocative. A Russian victory in Ukraine, therefore, would clear the way for Chinese aggression in the Pacific. It would strengthen China's ally, force Europe into a subordinate relationship to

Beijing, and discredit democracy. It would also bring into Russian hands Ukrainian military technologies that would be significant in a Chinese war of aggression.

Russia's one path to victory in Ukraine leads through minds and mouths in Washington, DC. Russian and Chinese propaganda therefore celebrates the inability of Congress to pass aid for Ukraine, and praises those who hinder the passage of such a bill. But the specific propaganda memes that China spreads (and some American leaders repeat) about the war are of Russian origin. Russia is the leader in this field; China is imitating Russian techniques and Russian tropes.

A central example is the Russo-Chinese invocation of "Nazism." Russian began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the grotesque claim that its aim was the "denazification" of Ukraine. (Ukraine is a democracy with freedom of expression, assembly and religion, which elected a Jewish president with more than 70% of the vote. Russia is a one-party state with a leader cult that is fighting a criminal war and suppressing all domestic opposition.) This "Nazi" meme was immediately boosted by the Chinese government. Over the weekend before this hearing, a Member of Congress tweeted this Russian disinformation trope.

The Russian war of destruction in Ukraine is the pre-eminent test of democracy; U.S. elections come next. Russia is also the leader here.  China has has no Paul Manafort.  It lacks American human assets with experience in directing foreign influence campaigns and close to American presidential campaigns. Nothing China has done (as yet) rivals the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

On social media, CCP propaganda demeans the Biden administration. But China's social media campaign on behalf of Trump in 2024 looks like a copy (a poor one) of Russia's on behalf of Trump in 2016. CCP propaganda invokes the false charges raised in impeachment hearings, but the lies that China magnifies arose from a person in contact with Russian intelligence. What China can do is try an influence campaign based on a Russian initiative -- and American impeachment hearings. Insofar as this works at all, it is a cycle: Russia-America-China -- with the Chinese hope that the propaganda it generates from Russian initiatives and American actions will cycle back to distress Americans and hurt the Biden administration.

The CCP's internet propaganda is posted on X (Twitter). Likewise, Russia's denazification meme did not need a Russian or a Chinese channel to reach Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Nor did she need a Russian or Chinese platform to spread the disinformation trope further. She and her American followers used X (Twitter).

Marjory Taylor Greene is not the only member of Congress to have presented the Russian "denazification" trope in public debate. In the case of Matt Gaetz, we know that the transmission belt was Chinese, because he cited a Chinese state propaganda source in congressional debate.

It is not clear in what sense X is an American platform; in any event, its owner, Elon Musk, has removed prior safeguards identifying state propaganda outlets, driving much higher viewing of Russian and Chinese propaganda.  Under Musk, X (Twitter) has been particularly lax in policing known Chinese propaganda accounts, ignoring their flagging by government and other platforms. Musk has also personally spread specific Russian propaganda tropes.

Russian lies are meant not only to disinform, to make action more difficult, but also to demotivate, to make action seem senseless. Russian memes work not by presenting Russia as a positive alternative, but by demoralizing others. No one wants to be close to "Nazis," and the simple introduction of the lie is confusing and saddening.

The same holds with the Russian meme to the effect that Ukraine is corrupt. A completely bogus Russian source introduced the entirely fake idea that the Ukrainian president had bought yachts. Although this was entirely untrue, Representative Greene then spread the fiction. Senator J.D. Vance also picked up the "yacht" example and used it as his justification for opposing aid to Ukraine.

The larger sense of that lie is that everyone everywhere is corrupt, even the people who seem most admirable; and so we might as well give up on our heroes, on any struggle for democracy, or any struggle at all. Ukraine's president, Volodymr Zelens'kyi, chose to risk his life by remaining in Kyiv and defending his country against a fearsome attack from Russia which almost all outsiders believed would succeed within days. His daring gamble saved not only his own democracy, but opened a window of faith that democracies can defend themselves. It confirmed the basis lesson of liberty that individual choices have consequences. The lie directed at Zelens'kyi was meant not only to discredit him personally and undermine support for Ukraine, but also to persuade Americans that no one is righteous and nothing is worth defending.

Insofar as legislators such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and J.D. Vance are vectors of propaganda, they are themselves playing a part of the Russian (or Russo-Chinese) operation. As such they are not merely spreading fictions; they are also modelling a "Russian" style of government, a politics of impotence, in which big lies are normal, corruption is thought to be routine, and nothing gets done. Russian lies about Ukraine are meant to prevent action to help Ukraine; but in a larger sense they are also meant to spread the view that those in power are incapable of any positive action at all.

When legislators embrace Russian lies, they demobilize the rest of us, conveying the underlying notion that all that matters is a clever fiction and a platform from which to spread it. A first step legislators can take is to cease to spread known propaganda tropes themselves. Russian (or Russo-Chinese) memes work in America when Americans choose to repeat them.

Republican leaders quite properly raise concerns about Russian memes in the Republican mouths. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have warned in recent weeks that Russian disinformation has shaped the views of Republican voters and the rhetoric of Republican elected officials. Representative Michael R. Turner said that "We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages — some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor."

For this and other reasons, the problem cannot be dismissed as "foreign." Elite American actors such as Congressional representatives and billionaires know what they are doing when they spread Russian memes. Most Americans, however, confront them unknowingly.

From the perspective of Russia (and China), all social media platforms present an attack surface. Non-Chinese platforms are the main vectors of Russian and disinformation. During the 2020 presidential election, for example, the largest Facebook group for American Christians was run by people who were neither. While ByteDance/TikTok is important, it is less so than Twitter and Facebook. Social media as such favors hostile interventions over locally reported news. During the 2020 presidential election, for example, the main Facebook site for American Christians was run by people who are neither.

ByteDance/TikTok is an attractive target for legislation, but a ban on TikTok unaccompanied by other policy will have limited effects. It will not prevent China from carrying out influence operations in the United States, nor would it stop China from gathering information on American citizens. To hinder Russian (and Chinese, and other) operations, all platforms would have to be regulated.

In the contest between authoritarian and democratic regimes, it will ultimately be not just self-defense but creative initiative that defines and saves the democracies. The era of hostile disinformation is also the era of the decline of reporting, and the two phenomena are linked. An American who has access to reporting will be less vulnerable to disinformation, and better able to make navigate the demands of democratic citizenship. A victory over disinformation will be won in a climate in which Americans have access to reliable information and reasons to trust it.