Yuval Noah Harari: evaluation

Transcript context

…Again, I can’t tell you the why. I can tell you the how. I don’t think it was inevitable. I think that, if a few things were different, there would’ve been no Third Reich. There would’ve been no Nazism and no Holocaust. Again, this is the tragedy. If it would’ve been inevitable, then what can you do? This is the laws of history or the laws of physics, but the tragedy is, no, it was decisions by humans that led to that direction. Even from the viewpoint of the Germans, we know for a fact it was an unnecessary path to take because, in the 1920s and ’30s, the Nazis said that, “Unless Germany take this road, it will never be prosperous, it’ll never be successful. All the other countries will keep stepping on it.” This was their claim. We know for a fact this is false. Why? Because they took that road, they lost the Second World War and, after they lost, then they became one of the most prosperous countries in the world because their enemies that defeated them evidently supported them and allowed them to become such a prosperous and successful nation. If you can lose the war and still be so successful, obviously you could just have skipped the war. You didn’t need it. I mean, you really had to have the war in order to have a prosperous Germany? Absolutely not. It’s the same with Japan. It’s the same with Italy. It was not inevitable. It was not the forces of history that necessitated, forced Germany to take this path. Again, Hitler was a very, very skillful storyteller. He sold people a story. The fact that he was nobody made it even more effective because people at that time, after their defeat of the First World War, after the repeated economic crisis of the 1920s in Germany, people felt betrayed by all the established elites, by all the established institutions. All these professors and politicians and industrialists and military, all the big people, they led us to a disastrous war. They led us to humiliation, so we don’t want any of them. Then you have this nobody, a corporal with no money, with no education, with no titles, with nothing, and he tells people, “I’m one of you.” This was one reason why he was so popular, and then the story he told. When you look at stories, at the competition between different stories, and between stories, fiction and the truth, the truth has two big problems. The truth tends to be complicated and the truth tends to be painful. Let’s talk about nations. The real story of every nation is complicated and it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good. We sometimes do bad things. ed and the truth tends to be painful. Let’s talk about nations. The real story of every nation is complicated and it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good. We sometimes do bad things. Now, if you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them don’t want to listen. The advantage of fiction is that it can be made as simple and as painless or attractive as you want it to be because it’s fiction, and then what you see is that politicians like Hitler, they create a very simple story. We are the heroes. We always do good things. Everybody is against us. Everybody is trying to trample us, and this is very attractive. One of the things people don’t understand about Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about Fascism and Nazism as this ultimate evil, the ultimate monster in human history. At some level, this is wrong because it actually exposes us. Why? Because people hear of fascism is this monster, and then when you hear the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, “You are wonderful. You belong to the most wonderful group of people in the world. You’re beautiful. You are ethical. Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong. There are all these evil monsters out there that are out to get you, and they’re causing all the problems in the world.” When people hear that, it’s like looking in the mirror and seeing something very beautiful. Hey, I’m beautiful. We’ve never done anything wrong. We are victims. When you look and you heard in school that Fascism, that fascists are monsters, and you look in the mirror, you see something very beautiful and you say, “I can’t be a fascist because fascists are monsters. This is so beautiful,” so it can’t be. When you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful thing in the world, and that’s the danger. This is the problem with Hollywood. I look at Voldemort in Harry Potter. Who would like to follow this creep? You look at Darth Vader. This is not somebody you would like to follow. Christianity got things much better when it described the devil as being very beautiful and attractive. That’s the danger, that you see something is very beautiful, you don’t understand the monster underneath. You write precisely about this. By the way, just as a small aside, it always saddens me when people say how obvious it is to them that communism is a flawed ideology. When you ask them, “Try to put your mind, try to put yourself in the beginning of the 20th Century and see what you would do,” a lot of people will say, “It’s obvious that it’s a flawed ideology.” I mean, I suppose, to some of the worst ideologies in human history, you could say the same. In that mirror, when you look, it looks beautiful.…

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