The Best and Worst Thing About America: Konstanty Gebert on the Interlibrary Loan and Yalta

00:00:30 Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello, everyone. We are on the road today. We're in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. I think it would be fair to call Warsaw and Poland one of the friendliest places for America. There's a huge statue of Ronald Reagan opposite the American Embassy, and there's a wonderful statue of an American war hero, also has a statue outside the White House in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, Tadeusz Kościuszko - I mispronounced his name, of course, but things are changing, it would seem, after many conversations I've had, some broadcast, not some not on the show, people are becoming more and more ambivalent, questioning, and sometimes deeply hostile or critical about the United States. My guest today, I think, would be fair to say, neither loves nor hates America. He's hopeful, but also critical. He is a very prominent figure in Polish politics and culture, very prominent Jewish activist, very much involved in solidarity in the democratic movement. Konstanty Gebert, welcome to Keen on America.

00:02:18 Konstanty Gebert: Thank you for having me.

00:02:19 Andrew Keen: So, Konstanty, I did my best not to pigeonhole you when it comes to America. Perhaps you could put your view of the country in your own words, either historically or in current terms.

00:02:36 Konstanty Gebert: There's a lot I very much like in America. The interlibrary loan system being probably topped, I think it's an extraordinary contribution to civilization. I've got tons of friends I've taught there, and politically the US has been a force rather for the good in the balance. Its impact on world affairs, until recently, has been overall positive this changed drastically in under the first Trump presidency, and the downwards trend is continuing under the second Trump presidency, which also made Poles who are notorious for being pro-American in Europe, French President Jacques Chirac called us America's Trojan Horse in Europe. This made Poles reassess their attitudes towards the United States, although not necessarily towards America. The United States is a state a political structure, a government policy, a president, an executive, and we're not happy with the policies of the United States, but America still attracts a great emotional pull for Poland, for a number of reasons, the over 10 million Polish Americans. Every other family has some kind of relative in the States. The history of American-Polish relations: America is the only ally who has not betrayed us yet, but also the idea of just a mythical idea, but myths do shape perceptions of the land of possibilities. The golden Medina, the Jews would say rags to riches, everybody would say at least the idea that this is possible, and then, of course, there is the entire production of popular culture. Popular culture is immensely popular in Poland too, so it's a very mixed bag, and the policies of the Trump administration are only part of that mix, but that's what is becoming more and more prominent, especially now as Poland is watching with battered breath Ukraine's struggle for its independence, and we're. Very clear that Ukraine is fighting for us. We in Poland have a long history of fighting for other people. This time somebody else is fighting for our freedom too, and the fact that Ukraine cannot rely on wholehearted US support is immensely worrying, because it also means neither can we, and this is a neighborhood in which you need allies.

00:06:02 Andrew Keen: Konstanty, before we get to Ukraine, or even Reagan, we might remind ourselves of the role of Woodrow Wilson, not an uncontroversial figure in the creation of modern Poland. I'm sure there are streets in Warsaw and other cities in Poland named after Wilson.

00:06:21 Konstanty Gebert: There's a big Wilson Square in northern Warsaw. Actually, it's very funny because it was named Wilson Square when it was designed in the 20s, and then after the communists take over, it was called Paris Commune Square, and nobody would use that name if you'd ask somebody on the street, so how they get to Paris Commune Square. Never heard about it. Everybody said the Wilson Square. Yeah, I didn't care.

00:06:49 Andrew Keen: Wilson sounds a lot better than the Paris, but wait, wait,

00:06:52 Konstanty Gebert: wait. After the fall of communism, it was renamed Wilson Square, and that's when people started saying, "Oh, that's Paris Commune Square. So today you can safely use both names. There's, well, that's a

00:07:07 Andrew Keen: very Polish way, perhaps, of challenging orthodoxy, but Konstanty, you might just remind our viewers and listeners, of course, most of whom are not intimately acquainted with modern Polish history, of Wilson's importance in terms of the creation of a modern Poland. Well, the

00:07:27 Konstanty Gebert: reestablishment of independent Poland was one of Wilson's 14 points ending World War One. Poland disappeared from the map of Europe and was partitioned between its three big neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the late 18th century, and the Poles never stopped fighting for their independence and lost each battle until World War One, we were immensely lucky to have the three partitioning powers fight each other, and all of them lose. Wilson declared that the reestablishment of an independent Polish state is one of the goals America is fighting for. At the same time, Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, made a similar statement, and Poland would have probably recovered independence even without those two endorsements, but they made it so much easier. So, yes, we are grateful to Wilson, we are grateful to Hoover for the aid that was sent to Poland immediately after World War One. Poland was completely ravaged in the war. Many of the major offensives took place on Polish soil, and Polish soil and Polish villages and towns suffered, and Hoover organized post-war relief for Poland, and there is a Hoover Square in downtown Warsaw as well. So, there are many reasons for Poland to feel connected to the US and grateful for American political initiatives.

00:09:06 Andrew Keen: It's probably there are more Hoover Squares in Warsaw than there are in, certainly in Washington, DC, or New York. Konstanty, I've talked to other polls about the situation after the Second World War. Is this still a great deal of hostility or ambivalence about the American role in enabling the Soviet colonization of Poland after the Second World War.

00:09:33 Konstanty Gebert: There is no ambivalence. We were sold out. Having said that,

00:09:38 Andrew Keen: Who were you sold out by? FDR, Churchill, mainly

00:09:41 Konstanty Gebert: FDR. Churchill would have probably sold us out as well, but at least without pretending he's doing something else. FDR sold us to Stalin, taking Stalin at his word that Stalin will protect Poland's independence and democracy. Having said that, we've been treated worse by allies, so in the balance, even this act of betrayal, it was an act of betrayal, did not make polls turn against America, because if we turn against America, we are left exactly with whom, and when you have this kind of real estate situation setting between Germany and Russia, you. You tend to be very careful in unselecting allies. My mother of blessed memory, who had fled Warsaw when the Germans invaded, found herself in the Soviet Union, eventually fled east, and at a certain point contracted typhoid fever, and was dying on the street in Tashkent, Soviet Central Asia, and their local Uzbek family took her in, a complete stranger, and nursed her back to health, which was an incredibly brave thing to do. First of all, typhoid fever is very contagious, but second, the NKVD did not look kindly on people talking to foreigners, and they took a foreigner in, they nursed her back to health. Anyway, when she recovered, the patriarch of the family asked her, "So, where are you from? Mother said, "Poland. Poland, what's Poland? And she said, "Well, it's a country, you know, in Europe, between Germany and Russia, between Germany and Russia. That's no place to have a country. It was right, of course, but then can choose.

00:11:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah, well, if God exists, He's probably responsible as well. I don't know how the Catholics or the Jews view God's decision to put Poland between Germany and Russia. Maybe that's the subject of your next book. It's interesting, Konstanty, that your narrative, or maybe the progressive Polish narrative, or Polish nationalist narrative, is different from the American narrative when it comes to FDR and Wilson. Wilson, because of his racism and his failures at Versailles, now doesn't have a great reputation, and there's a deep nostalgia for FDR, so it suggests that history is viewed very differently from different places, but

00:12:13 Konstanty Gebert: of course it is. It always is. History is what we make of it, right? We interpret and perceive history from our vantage point, which means that we were not affected by Wilson's racism, but we scored points thanks to his support for our independence. There is no great love lost in Poland about Roosevelt's New Deal. What we remember is Yalta. This doesn't mean that all that there is to be remembered about MDR is Yalta. It simply means that from Warsaw, this is the most salient point of his presidency, and this will always be the same case. You can't have one history, there are histories that take simultaneously place on the same pieces of real estate. Hell, Poles and Jews can't agree on the common history. Well, we've shared with geography for hundreds of years,

00:13:24 Andrew Keen: but Konstanty, I'm assuming you're not a radical relativist. I mean, if you extend your argument, then there are Germans who will tell a very different history of the Second World War and even the Holocaust,

00:13:37 Konstanty Gebert: and we need to learn that history to know what they are thinking now, what they were thinking then. We don't have to agree with them, but there is no way of understanding our history without understanding how others see that history. This is not about relativism in the moral sense. Aggression remains aggression, genocide remains genocide, alliances remain alliances, but it is about understanding that people coming from different perspectives and nations coming from different experiences can legitimately have very different understandings of what happened.

00:14:21 Andrew Keen: It's also worth reminding ourselves of the catastrophe of the Second World War, not just for the Jewish community. I was at this wonderful new museum, and I know you're involved with the Polish Museum, which gives a very moving, deep history of Polish Jewry, and of course their genocidal elimination by the Nazis during the Second World War, but also of the non-Jewish Poles. How traumatic Konstanty was the Second World War for Poles. Is it a country that, in some ways, is still recovering?

00:14:56 Konstanty Gebert: It certainly is a country that is still recovering, and just to understand the scale of it, just the city, Warsaw, lost more dead in the war than any of the Western allies, the civilian and military deaths in occupied France, in fighting but bombed Britain, in the safe US, in each of those countries, the civilian and military deaths combined were less than the. Deaths just in Warsaw,

00:15:32 Andrew Keen: and how many were killed in Warsaw? Over

00:15:34 Konstanty Gebert: 600,000 The city was razed to the ground. The Warsaw we see today is a new city built on the same spot, has the same name, and some streets are the same. Most of the people who live here are not descendants of people who lived here in 39 Most of those people are dead, and the country has been kicked around the map for several 100 miles. We lost the eastern half of the country to the Soviet Union. Now that eastern half of Poland is part of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, and Poland was compensated by territories taken from Germany. 1/3 of Poland today was Germany in 45 So it's impossible not to see the war as the defining element of Polish history.

00:16:28 Andrew Keen: Let's fast forward to Reagan, if FDR is not admired for his supposed sellout at Yalta, is Reagan still viewed in heroic terms? There is that remarkable statue of him, a very Polish-style patch statue outside the US Embassy. Also saw one of De Gaulle, so he's not the only foreign dignitary with the statue,

00:16:53 Konstanty Gebert: a plaque commemorating Willy Brandt, the German chancellor, who had knelt in front of the Warsaw Ghetto monument, plenty of statues of another foreign head of state, John Paul the Second, the Pope of the Vatican, and the first pole become pope, but yes, we do keep a very fond memory of Reagan. I do myself, although I probably wouldn't endorse any of his policies, but am immensely grateful to him for two words he said: evil empire, we lived under the evil empire, we suffered, and nobody seemed to care, and at a certain point you question your own sanity, maybe, yeah, well, maybe that's the way the world is simply built, we are supposed not to be free, we're supposed to shut up and take it lying down because nobody else seems to call it an evil empire, and then the American president says it's so immensely important to realize that somebody else understands your experience, and Reagan did all those symbolic things, the lighting of the candles in the White House window after Jaruzelski, whatever, but those two words, evil empire, still warm me up when I think of this incredible solitude we felt, so yeah, that is the reason to be grateful,

00:18:33 Andrew Keen: yeah. It's worth reminding ourselves that, of course, John F. Kennedy didn't come to Warsaw, talk about evil empire, he did come to Warsaw, his brother came as well in 1964 So certainly other prominent American politicians and presidents came to Poland. Well, he

00:18:51 Konstanty Gebert: did. Gerald Ford did as well, but nobody called the Soviet Union an evil empire. So, the contrary, there, the feeling was, well, guys, this is the cards you have been dealt, stick with them. And, as the Czar said to Polish nobility, [unclear], don't have any illusions, right,

00:19:12 Andrew Keen: and it's interesting, of course, that JFK's most famous speech was in Berlin about free Berlin, as he didn't make the same speech in Warsaw. Also, Konstanty remind us of this Kościuszko character, who has a wonderful statue here. I saw it yesterday. It's in a rather quiet square, just in central Warsaw, but, of course, he has a more, in some ways, a more certainly to Americans, a more famous statue in Lafayette Park, right opposite the White House. The

00:19:49 Konstanty Gebert: Warsaw statue, actually, is a copy of that Lafayette Park, and the big statue to Kosciuszko is in Krakow on Market Square, where he had declared his uprising against the Russians. Kościuszko is fascinating. He is petty Belarusian nobility. Remember that Poland, until the partitions, was a multi-ethnic state, and there were times when the Poles were simply the plurality, not even the majority of its inhabitants, and Belarus used to be a great duchy, I. And much bigger than this today was an important part of the Union of Poland and Lithuania, which at a certain moment was the largest state in Europe, and Tadeusz Kościuszko came from petty Belarusian nobility, Polish-speaking, very strongly Polish patriotic, and he had organized an uprising against the invading Russians at the times of the partitions, for the first time mobilizing the peasantry to the national cast, and that was the first in a series of glorious Polish defeats, militarily, we couldn't really stand up to the numbers that Russia could produce. Politically, this was emancipation. The peasants, for the first time, were told, "You're citizens, you have obligations, which means you have rights. Kościuszko to the defeat. of the uprising, went to America, fought in the Revolutionary War, built the fortifications of West Point, and also was very strongly anti-slavery, emancipated some slaves, and he is one of a series of Polish fighters who would fight for freedom of different places, different continents, believing that the fight for freedom is always in Poland's interest. It doesn't really matter whose freedom we're fighting for. If somebody is freer, then we can be freer too. And the slogan for our freedom and for yours was really the slogan of 19th century Polish revolutionaries, and in our shul, when we say the prayer for Poland, we then say now a prayer for Ukraine, which is fighting for its freedom and ours. This is the same spirit.

00:22:47 Andrew Keen: I want to come to Ukraine in a second, but speaking of freedom fighters, your career has been interesting in that sense as well. You may not be as prominent as Wałęsa or other figures within Solidarity, but much of your life has been bound up in the struggle for freedom. Do you see it as a Polish life in that sense?

00:23:06 Konstanty Gebert: Oh, very much so. Yeah, but look, I was strictly second tier or third tire,

00:23:13 Andrew Keen: which isn't bad. It

00:23:14 Konstanty Gebert: isn't bad. These are the people who make things happen. I was an underground journalist and publisher, and occasionally printer, and that is during the 80s under the military dictatorship of General Jaruzelski, which turned out to be the last stage of the history of Communist Poland. Then we helped make it the last stage. I'm pretty proud of what we did, actually. What you see here is my underground newspaper costs. A copy is hanging hanger here on the wall. We the underground press under the military dictatorship was so pervasive, so present that the authorities estimated that some 10% of the polls have regular access to underground publishing, which means that we have effectively broken the government's monopoly on information. In fact, back in 83 or 84 I no longer remember, we published in my magazine in Cos a circular issued by the local prosecutor in the provincial town of Płock informing his personnel that if they do a house search in a criminal investigation, mind you not political, regular criminal investigation, and they find no underground literature in the house, they are to assume that the inhabitants had been forewarned. In other words, the prosecutor of the regime assumes that it is unnatural not to find underground publications in a random Polish house. This was our success, and this helped bring communism down. Yeah, I'm very proud of that.

00:25:12 Andrew Keen: In a way, you were the internet before the internet.

00:25:16 Konstanty Gebert: We were the internet the way we had hoped the internet will be. Didn't turn out exactly that way.

00:25:23 Andrew Keen: Some American observers, of course, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, talked about this famous end of history Fukuyama came up with the idea, old friend of the show, although I'm sure he quite meant it in the way it got used by others, but for Poland, in a way, the revolution was profound. Walking around Warsaw today, it's a remarkably vibrant, wealthy city up there with Paris and London and Rome and all the other great European cities. What's your take? I know it's complicated, Konstanty, and you're an expert on the complications of history, but in broad terms, the history of Poland since the collapse of communism has been astonishingly successful, hasn't it? It

00:26:14 Konstanty Gebert: has. This is this has easily been the best 35 years of recent hundreds of years of Polish history. We have been given the chance, and we did the best of it, and it was not just a gift, it was something we had fought for and gained ourselves. It's very kind of you to put Warsaw in the same league as Paris or Rome. Sadly, it's not nearly as pretty to see a pretty Warsaw. You should have been here 90 years ago, before the war.

00:26:57 Andrew Keen: It's, it's prettier than I remember it, I think it, because of the vitality of the young people. It may even, even if it isn't maybe beautiful, like Paris or Rome, it has an attractive quality, which is hard to reproduce.

00:27:11 Konstanty Gebert: It is vibrant. It's culturally fascinating. You do need to have Polish to really follow that, but we have one of the best theater scenes in Europe. We've got fantastic intellectual debate scenes, great literature, and that compensates in a way for the ugliness of the capital. Make no mistake, I love the city. I couldn't live anywhere else, but if I wanted to live in a pretty city, I should have been born several generations before. Well, before our neighbors came in and took care of the city, but yes, we have been a success, not an unqualified one, but when I think of everything I was afraid might happen when we finally won, I really think we, we did a good job of it. First thing I was afraid of was territorial revisionism. We lost half of the country, and my fear was that we will want at least parts of that back, which would engage us in permanent conflict with our neighbors. This never was a realistic political threat, which points to a maturity, political maturity that I never hoped I can realistically expect. We also deceived expectations. We made the transition from a falsely egalitarian socialist system. I say falsely egalitarian because it was a hugely unjust system, not only in terms of distribution of freedom, but distribution of income. We made the transition into a free enterprise system, in which disparity of income is a given, but with that transition we promised people, yes, that there will be inequality of income, but there will be equality of opportunity, and this turned out to be a lie, and I saw this develop in throughout the 90s. It turned out that so many people, including the industrial proletariat, which had been the backbone of the solidarity movement, ended up as losers of the transformation. If you're a 40 year old single mother of two, you worked your life in a textile mill, you've got an elementary school education, and your textile mill closes down because the jobs have gone to Bangladesh well, you will not retrain as a computer programmer it's over. But we said yes, but your kids will have as good a chance as everybody else, they didn't, they didn't, because education, health care is finest from the local tax base, and if the jobs have gone, the local tax base has gone too, so even though our Gini coefficient is still very decent, we did not. Cannot live up to our promises of social justice, and probably we cannot live up to promises of social justice within a free enterprise system. Period. The point is the alternative is a system which may declare social justice, but sure as hell does away with every other kind of justice, so if this is the choice, free enterprise is better. Although probably I wouldn't be saying that if I were unemployed, which kind of limits the credibility of my assessment.

00:31:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah, when it comes to social justice, Konstanty, you know as well as I do that however tricky things are in Poland, they're much worse in the United States. Of course, Americans like to think of themselves that celebrating their 250th year anniversary of the war of the creation of their republic. America, American history is premised on the idea that the rest of the world is, was, or continues to be inspired by the American narrative, but in a way, perhaps things have been reversed. What do you think the last 30 or 40 years of Polish history, since the revolution of 89 should teach Americans, particularly the way in which you seem to have overcome your chapter of illiberal authoritarianism.

00:32:02 Konstanty Gebert: We haven't. Polish history is like many other countries, history of a constant tension between two ideas of the state, one is the state as an organic and authoritarian creature, the ethnic nation state of the people living here with a gradation of rights, depending on how genuinely Polish or French or German you are. The other is a civic contract of citizens who agree on institutions to protect common freedoms and in Poland, the conflict between the two is not over. We've got a liberal government, both a nationalistic president. We've got an election coming up next year. The

00:33:05 Andrew Keen: President Nawrocki, who's been involved in a recent, highly controversial dispute with Ukraine.

00:33:14 Konstanty Gebert: Sadly, yes, he withdrew Poland's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, from Ukraine's President Zelensky, because Zelensky had given a unit of Ukrainian army the name of the Union of the Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was a military formation that operated during World War Two, initially collaborating with the Germans and participating in murders of dozens of 1000s of Poles and Jews, and eventually the Germans were being expelled by the Soviets, turning against the Soviets to defend a perspective of Ukrainian independence and this is their claim to fame in Ukraine and today Ukraine, fighting heroically a Russian invasion of course looks at the soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as heroes, hence the name of the military unit for Poles. These are mass murderers. Poland lost about 100,000 civilians murdered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army on territory that are now Ukraine and were Poland before World War Two, and recognizing the unit that committed those crimes as heroes is unacceptable to Poles, whatever their political orientation. Having said that, that name was given to that military unit not because they had murdered Poles, but because they had fought the Soviets, and Ukraine is fighting a defensive war against Russian aggression. We should have protested this decision by President Zelensky, but to revoke the declaration is an insult. An insult was cheered in Moscow, of course, but which is a grave breach of what I believe is our obligation to Ukraine, which is fighting for our freedom and fighting in our defense. Frankly, the whole thing has been going on for. Almost a month now, when Zelensky, when Zelensky gave this name to the Ukraine military unit, and President Nawrocki said that he is considering withdrawing the decoration. I was hoping that Zelenskyy will make a grand gesture and send it back himself. You don't think I deserve it? Fine. Other people have gotten this medal. One of the first recipients was Empress Catherine the Second. The medal was instituted by Poland's last king, who was hopelessly in love with Catherine, and he gave her this medal. I was never withdrawn. Among other recipients were Benito Mussolini, never withdrawn, Gerhard Schroeder, the German Chancellor, who's now sitting on the board of Putin's Gazprom. Never withdrawn. So, frankly, Zelensky could have made a grand gesture and said, well, I don't want to be in the company of Schroeder, Mussolini, and Catherine the Second. You say you want to withdraw it? Fine, take it back, and that would be a grand gesture, and the moral victory. I'm sorry he didn't do it, and left us without, I believe, is a deeply insulting gesture towards the Ukrainians. They don't deserve it, and also a bomb thrown under the carriage of the liberal government, because under the Polish constitution this presidential decision needs to be counter-signed by the Prime Minister. If he doesn't, he will be open to attacks as a Ukrainian stooge, and anti-Ukrainian sentiment has been growing in Poland, and the right wing is whipping it up. If he does, he endorses and embraces the ideas of the right. I fear he will do the second out of fear of being defeated in next year's elections. He will still be defeated. It's the old Churchill quote, right? You have a choice between war and infamy. You chose infamy, and you will still have war. Tusk had a choice between defeat and infamy. He chose, he will, I fear, Tusk is the prime minister. He will, I fear, choose infamy, and I fear he'll still have it.

00:37:48 Andrew Keen: And this is Donald Tusk,

00:37:49 Konstanty Gebert: yeah,

00:37:51 Andrew Keen: as a pole and as a Jew, Konstanty, I would say the poll comes before the Jew. Probably speak of both

00:38:02 Konstanty Gebert: pushy

00:38:03 Andrew Keen: both demand to be first, but perhaps with you neither has the right to be first. That come together, how troubled, insulted are you by Trump's behavior on not just Trump's behavior on Ukraine, but the language of his minions, people like JD Vance. It is

00:38:25 Konstanty Gebert: immensely disappointing because club standards are only as good as the strongest member of the club, I feel deeply sorry for Americans to have to live under this kind of embarrassment of a regime, but I also think that the damage done to international standards is irrevocable. When you push standards down, they stay down. It will become more and more common for people to use offensive language with international relations to act in stupid and egoistic manner, and this great hope that was born out of the disaster of World War Two, the rules-based world will be over, and we know what is the alternative to a rules-based world. It's a violence-based world. We cannot afford that. Poland cannot afford that. I don't believe the US can afford that either, but that's definitely.. I'm stunned, however, by how unprepared the US seemed to be for this second coming of Trump as president. It so happened that I was teaching in the US at the time of

00:40:06 Andrew Keen: where were you teaching

00:40:07 Konstanty Gebert: Grinnell College.

00:40:08 Andrew Keen: Oh, yes,

00:40:09 Konstanty Gebert: it's Iowa, in Iowa, it's one of..

00:40:11 Andrew Keen: it's a top college.

00:40:13 Konstanty Gebert: It's a top college. It's wonderful. I love teaching there, because, okay, it's so isolated, so in the middle of nowhere, that if somebody chooses to study at Grinnell, while they could go to Berkeley or Columbia. It means that what they want to do is study. There's nothing else to do, and I can actually assign to a class homework in terms of take those two concepts and think them over. And next class, about a third of the kids will have done just that, sat on their asses and thought this is what teaching is all about. I can't do that at Berkeley anymore. I have, I've stopped teaching at Berkeley. Um, they expect sound bites. I teach UC Berkeley, Martin, UC Berkeley. Yeah, I teach comparative genocide. It's not sound bites, it's complicated,

00:41:10 Andrew Keen: and that's a miserable subject.

00:41:13 Konstanty Gebert: Well, actually, I've been told that some of my students, and this was a critical comment, were distressed by my course. Well, I certainly hope they were. I'm teaching comparative genocide, right? Anyway, when I came to Grinnell, I asked my colleagues, how are they preparing for the second Trump presidency? That was August, and they go, come on, haven't you seen the polls? It will become a level. So, okay, what do I know? And then on election night, I got an email that the college sent out to all staff and students, whatever, that they had set up psychotherapeutical emergency teams 2547 so that people can work through their traumas. They said you're not supposed to therapeutize, you're supposed to organize. Hasn't happened. I actually came in with a new course about the new authoritarians in Central Europe, and how to defeat them. I expected the course to be mocked. I had four students, none of them American.

00:42:22 Andrew Keen: This was Berkeley or Grinnell,

00:42:24 Konstanty Gebert: Grinnell, Grinnell, which has a very large international contingent, and all my four students were international, they were interested. One was from India, one was Qatar, one was from Georgia, one was from Thailand. None of the American students seem to think that this is something that might be of interest.

00:42:43 Andrew Keen: I take your point that maybe you haven't quite overcome your own rather unpleasant chapter with illiberal authoritarianism, but things are better here than they are in the United States. Things are better here. Yes, big in the year, but given that you, you polls confronted it, not all poles, I guess some still are sympathetic to that period, but the Polish system survived, and now it's a relatively liberal democracy, certainly compared to many other places in the world: United States, Hungary, Turkey, India, Israel. What lessons can you offer that the United States turn, turn the turn the tables, Konstanty, let's, let's, let's America. You may not get any of your kids at Grinnell signing up for your college, but they're going to be Americans watching and listening to this. What can you teach America?

00:43:42 Konstanty Gebert: Well, I actually tried to. One of the things I did is organize a course in silkscreen printing, that is how we printed our underground literature in the 80s. Now I know that even under dictatorship nobody is returning to print anymore, right? But I actually do think that democracy is people arguing around a piece of printed paper. You can't argue around the computer screen. You can have two people, three tops watching the computer screen at the same time, but also whatever is on the screen is not your property. You're on somebody else's playground. The internet is run by someone. Your software comes from someone you didn't produce it. When I printed an underground newspaper, I stole the paper, I organized the ink. We had made our own printing presses. We distributed the stuff the way we wanted, and this is how we kept a debate open and going on, and what I did at the end of the class, that was already after the elections and after Trump's second victory, I organized a course in underground printing, and that was mobbed, and we learned how to print on silk screen, printing the Bill of Rights, just to make sure that people will have a copy. So, the first thing that anybody can learn from our experience is things are doable. It takes organization, it takes patience, it takes. Hard work, but things are doable. Second, don't expect miracles. Until 88 I never thought I'd live to see the day. My expectation was that if we play our cards right, our kids will get a better chance in fighting when their turn comes next year, I was living in the free country. Bottom line, nobody who has witnessed 1989 retains the right to be a pessimist. 1989 should have never happened in good logic. The world's most oppressive empire just dissolving, saying, "Oh gosh, we didn't know you don't like us. So, okay, we're going up. This should have ended in the bloodbath, right? And the bloodbath then produces authoritarian dictatorships that defend the hard, hardly won conquests. It ended by popular suffrage, and popular suffrage is still the rule of the day. So things are doable, they simply are not doable quickly. And yes, freedom can be lost. It also can be recovered, and given the experience of 89 nobody has the right to be pessimist, because if that impossible thing happened, who knows, you might rebuild that sensible republic after Trump is over. Hopefully, well, he'll be over when his term is over. You might even, he might even lose the midterms, so one does not have the right to decide that it's hopeless. You can always find whatever it is you're doing, it can be education, it can be resisting eyes, it can be offering lodgings to migrants, it can be suing the government in court. There's so many things we still can do, and keep on doing them, and eventually, and of course, nobody can tell you how long they eventually will take. You will get a republic back. We had to wait from 39 till 89 Okay, that's a long half century, but we did it.

00:47:55 Andrew Keen: Doing this any equivalency, morally or otherwise, perhaps uplifting between the way in which the Ukrainians are giving the Russians a bloody nose and the Iranians seem to be doing the same to the United

00:48:10 Konstanty Gebert: States, there is a strategic analogy in the sense that military power alone doesn't do it. The differences between the two cases are huge. First of all, Russia decided on the land invasion, America mercifully didn't, and you can't defeat a country from the air. There's just one example that Japan 45 and I hope nobody wants to repeat that experience, right, but the idea that might is not everything is reassuring in a world in which everything seemed to point the other way. Now I'm thrilled by the resistance of the Ukrainians, and I'm heartbroken when I think about the Iranians have been betrayed by everyone now by the Americans as well.

00:49:14 Andrew Keen: It's a Polish story, isn't it?

00:49:15 Konstanty Gebert: Very much. There are lots of connections, interestingly enough, between Iran and Poland, including the Iranians taking in several dozens of 1000s of Polish refugees in World War Two. Long story, but each time that nationalists in Poland say, well, we don't want people from foreign cultures coming here and spoiling our pure Polish culture, is yeah, we'll tell it to the poors who survived in Iran during World War Two, there were people coming from a foreign culture, and the Iranians didn't seem to mind, ah having said that, there's also the other side of the coin. Okay, America lost, Russia didn't win, but there's nothing stopping them from doing it again if they so choose, and this, of course, is a very important piece of information about the world we live in. This is where we go if we don't have the rules-based order that America was so intent at building and protecting by the. 80 years that followed World War Two, and the fact it got a bloodied nose maybe will make it think twice next time. Although, frankly, I wish it hadn't attacked, but once it had attacked, I wish it would have had the endurance and intelligence, well, not to suffer a shameful defeat as it did. As one

00:50:59 Andrew Keen: of the few Polish Jews remaining, he was once the heart of the world's Jewish population. Konstanty, how troubled are you by the American relationship with Israel when it comes to a rules-based system, and the way in which, at least in many people's minds, Israel seems as guilty as any country in breaking those rules, and in, of course, getting it would seem again mostly a carte blanche from America to behave in any way it wants to.

00:51:36 Konstanty Gebert: That's a difficult question to answer. First of all, I think Israel is making a fundamental mistake in putting all of it, all of its eggs in one basket, the Ukrainian example, the Iranian example, the Kurdish example show that it is not necessarily wise to trust the US to have your best interests at heart, and this is the consequence of a policy decision made by Netanyahu years ago that he is not interested in maintaining the bipartisan consensus on Israel. He's happy if he has Republican support. He's lost the Democrats, he's losing the Republicans, meaning that he is losing the US and this is devastating in this situation in which Israel has painted itself in a corner by losing much of international support. There are elections coming in a couple of months, which Netanyahu is almost sure to lose. The next government will be will have a huge advantage. It will no longer be burdened by Netanyahu, his crimes, his court cases, his corrupt bodies, and his total indifference to anything that is not his own personal interest, that means that Israel can start having policies again. Those policies probably will not be that different from those being followed by Netanyahu. You don't turn a huge ship around in a matter of days, but the government, after the one that will be formed, will have the possibility, the obligation, indeed the necessity of confronting what is the fundamental problem of Israel, and that is not relations with the US, that's not the Haredi secular split, it's relations with the Palestinians, and until and unless this is tackled, everything else is footnotes, and I think that is contrary to what we seem to see now, that there is a fair chance Israel will finally have to address this question, because they will have run out of other possibilities, no longer being able to count on the US and not being able to count on anybody else. That is a very bad situation, but there is something good can emerge from it, actually. If this disastrous war will have led to the electoral defeats of Netanyahu and of Trump, there still might be a silver lining.

00:54:45 Andrew Keen: You teach, as you noted earlier, comparative genocide, but my understanding, at least, Konstanty is, you wouldn't include Gaza in that. Why not?

00:54:54 Konstanty Gebert: Because it's not a genocide. A genocide is, as per the Lemkin definition in the UN Convention, actions committed in the intent to exterminate, in whole or in part, an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group, and a genocide can be declared only if no other reasonable interpretation of those acts can be given, but the intent to exterminate Israel in fighting a very brutal war and. Has certainly committed war crimes, in all probability also crimes against humanity, and this is atrocious enough. But had Israel wanted to exterminate the Palestinians, it would have already done so, even if the death toll of 73,000 on Gaza is to be considered accurate, and nobody really knows that, but these are the figures supplied by the Hamas Ministry of Health. We don't have anything better. I mean, those

00:55:57 Andrew Keen: are Polish numbers, aren't they? I don't mean Polish statistical numbers, but those are the kind of numbers that Poland experienced in terms of its own population in the Second World War.

00:56:09 Konstanty Gebert: Well, Poland lost 6 million. There is a slight difference, but

00:56:14 Andrew Keen: I mean the power. There are fewer Palestinians than Poles as well.

00:56:18 Konstanty Gebert: Fair enough, but also in just one German air raid in Warsaw in 39 we lost 14,000 people. One air raid military technology since 39 has moved forward, if the Israeli intention was to exterminate the Palestinians, they would be all dead. There is no evidence that of extermination of intent to exterminate, and frankly, many critics of Israel agree, Amnesty International that has declared that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza has also said that the current definition is too restrictive and needs to be liberalized for Israel to be accused of genocide, and they're right, if we change the definition of genocide, if we exclude intent, if we decide that genocide might be declared, even if the objective of the action was not the extermination in whole or in part, then yes, Gaza can be declared as genocide, but then the American and British bombings of Germany during World War Two, are also genocide, and World War Two becomes a war that was genocidal on both sides, and simply the stronger genocidal killers won the war. This is the logical consequence of declaring Gaza genocide. Now it might be a price wealth well worth paying for the pleasure of accusing Israel of genocide, and we have the right to change legal definitions. I simply happen to disagree with that line of reasoning. It's like murder, for murder you need to have a dead body. Now, you might say that well, somebody who beat somebody else up so badly that person might have died, didn't die, but might have. It's also guilty of murder, and we can redefine murder to mean that beating bad enough is murder the way that today Israel being accused of genocide, because what it's doing is bad enough. It simply means that people have no understanding of the meaning of the term genocide, which incidentally means that the decades of Holocaust education have brought us really nothing, and the recent public opinion poll in Poland proves that dramatically respondents were asked, Do you agree that there is no difference between what Israel is doing in Gaza and what Nazis did to Jews in World War 240-5% agreed with that statement. They were also asked, Do you agree that there is no difference between what Hamas did to Israelis in this attack on Israel and what the Nazi did to Jews in World War Two. 30% agree there is no difference. It simply means that for so many people genocide simply means something awful.

00:59:30 Andrew Keen: It's like fascism, it's just become a word of insult, but,

00:59:33 Konstanty Gebert: but, but this is of relief only to those who really are guilty of genocide. Okay, the neo-Nazis might say, "Hey, look, see, first of all, we weren't that bad, second, the Jews are as bad or worse, and third, had you allowed us to be successful, we won't have the Jewish problem now today.

00:59:54 Andrew Keen: I'm not quite sure what we know what they mean by the Jewish problem. Well, exactly, but it comes back to these terms, these words that get thrown around when people now just use the word genocide indiscriminately, although you acknowledge that Israel may be guilty of what you call crimes against humanity, Konstanty. So, as a Polish Jew, and your history is marked or defined by crimes against humanity and genocide, does it really make any difference to you morally whether or not Israel is guilty of genocide versus crimes against humanity?

01:00:30 Konstanty Gebert: It does, because I have yet to see a war in which war crimes and crimes against humanity have not been committed. It's a, it's an illusion to believe that once we classify certain acts as crimes of war. Everything else is okay. War is about killing people, destroying their belongings. It's a criminal undertaking. It might be necessary. It still stays a criminal undertaking. It is a good thing that we have labeled some particularly obscene acts as crimes of war and crimes against humanity in every military conflict I had witnessed or studied, both sides engage in this behavior, which is no excuse for Israel when it engages in this kind of behavior, but it doesn't make it different from any other combatant. Genocide is different. Genocide, mercifully, is much rarer, and yes, genocide is the absolute evil which disqualifies any legitimation of the activity that the genocidal state might claim. This is why it is so important for the enemies of Israel to call Israel a genocidal state, and this is why this is not only scribbling about words, it's a fundamental difference. Israel is either as evil as anybody else who engages in war, or is specifically evil the way the Nazis went.

01:02:18 Andrew Keen: Speaking of the Nazis, we're always one way or the other, I guess. Speaking of the Nazis, Konstanty, final question, had the Nazis won the war, and had they success, were they successful in their so-called final solution against the Jews? I've had a number of historians on the show to suggesting that next in line would have been the non-Jewish Slavs, particularly the Poles. Do you think that's true? Do you think by definition the Nazis was just a genocidal regime, and had they successfully killed all the Jews on earth, they would have then turned their attention to the Slavs.

01:03:00 Konstanty Gebert: This is very plausible. We can only juggle hypothesis, of course. Mercifully, this was never tested, but there were German plans for the gradual extermination of most Slavs the general plan Ost, and the success of the Shoah would have probably encouraged the Germans to continue in that direction. On the other hand, a genocidal regime is a regime of exception. We don't have examples of regimes that continue to engage in genocide year in and year out. Genocidal activity tends to undermine the functioning of institutions and the sanity of those who engage in it, and this is why after genocide is committed, if a regime doesn't collapse, it usually does, it is phased out, slowed down, discontinued, so it's anybody's guess whether the Germans would have engaged in another genocide, would have ended with the success of the Shah, but the hypothesis they would have engaged in another genocide, this time directed against the Slavs, is plausible.

01:04:25 Andrew Keen: Final question, Konstanty, let's come back to America. This is supposed to be a show about America. Do you include US behavior towards Native Americans in your history of your comparative history of genocide?

01:04:40 Konstanty Gebert: There were acts of genocide, definitely, but the extermination of Native Americans was not a genocide in the sense that their deaths were not intentional. Most of the deaths were caused by disease brought in by Europeans. In many cases, exterminating Native Americans run against the interests of the invaders who wanted to exploit them as slave labor. Now this is different from selling them infected cots to have them catch disease and die or murder them outright, and we have acts of genocide of this kind all. Over not only North American, but South American history as well, and we can use the Srebrenica example to analyze them. Srebrenica is astounded in Bosnia, yeah, where Serb Bosnian Serb forces murdered over 7000 civilians. It was recognized by International Court as an act of genocide, but the National Court refused to consider the entire Bosnian Serb campaign as genocidal, as the court decided that the objective of the terror was to force Bosnian Muslims to flee rather than exterminate them all, and I think that this is valid also in regard to Native Americans, many individual acts of genocide, not one general genocidal campaign.

01:06:23 Andrew Keen: Well, Konstanty Gebert, real honor to have you on the show. I need to come to Warsaw more often. Lovely to talk to you, and even if we've been talking about genocide, I hope many of our listeners and viewers will find your optimism, even if you might not acknowledge it, to be uplifting. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again,