Our obsession with the past has produced a golden age of history. Cambridge University Professor Emeritus Richard J. Evans (British, 75 years old) admits that never before has so much literature been sold in his field and never before have so many documentaries been made. His trilogy on the Third Reich is considered the most comprehensive chronicle of Nazism, but he clarifies that “the aim of the historian is to understand the past, not to learn lessons from it”. As the author of some twenty books, translated into around 20 languages, he emphasizes the importance of truth and warns that current populism goes even further than Nazi propaganda.
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QUESTIONS. Do you see anything similar between the societal context that paved the way for Nazi rule and current discourses, particularly given the rise of the far right?
ANSWER. What populists and Nazis have in common is that they blame and hate the existing political system. For them, democracy, elections, the constitution… is an obstacle to what they believe to be true democracy, a way of keeping in power the elites that caused the problems, which is why they rebel against it. There is a lack of unscrupulousness in dealing with the truth. Joseph Goebbels, the mastermind of Nazi propaganda, was a master at falsifying it, but today’s populists go one step further. In a way they don’t believe that the truth as such exists and this is very worrying because today we have social networks and this is how they spread their lies. All populist politicians strive for dictatorial power, but there are also differences: all fascists are populists, but not all populists are fascists.
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Q. A recurring parallel is to compare the current Putin to Hitler.
R Of course there are parallels, both are strong men attacking democracy in their own countries, but they are different. Putin’s goal is to reunify the territories that were once part of the Soviet Union and that he still considers Russian. Putin’s goals, while very ambitious, are limited; while Hitler had no limits. He aspired to conquer the world and his central belief was the issue of race. He viewed the story as a race struggle. However, Putin is a Russian nationalist. He sees himself, for example, with Ukraine, he believes that Ukrainians are Russians, and not that they are an inferior race, and if his attitude has become genocidal, it is because Ukrainians have betrayed their true nature, what for Putin so is Be Russian.
Q. Have we learned from 20th century history or are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes?
R History never repeats itself, also because we learned from last time. There have been few examples of outside intervention to overthrow a government since World War II. Essentially, you have to be a very evil regime committed to mass murder and atrocities for the international community to intervene. The cost of an intervention is enormous. There will be no second Hitler because the situation is very different from that after the First World War. Dictatorships usually end in an election, revolution, or insurrection, and dictators often end badly.
F. The free will It’s a recurring theme in your career: How much leeway do we have to plan our lives?
R Karl Marx said that we build our own history, not out of freely available elements, but under the conditions we inherit and receive. Regardless of what one thinks of Marx’s theories in general, this explanation is very useful. By analyzing individuals or groups and the way we make decisions, we can say yes or no to the proposals that are presented to us, but we cannot choose the conditions under which we exercise our free will. We have to accept what is there and do our best.
Q. You studied the feminist movements of the early 20th century. Are there lessons that have not been learned?
R I was fortunate to discover a radical feminist movement in the Kaiserreich whose history had been totally suppressed. It failed because it was overwhelmed by conservative middle class and right-wing feminists, although it might be wrong to call them feminists, who believed that women had their place in the family, that they shouldn’t vote and should support nationalism . The feminist movement has always been divided, at the time I was studying it, and it continues to this day. It has made great strides in terms of legislation, but now it faces a serious threat from the transgender movement, which is still an unresolved controversy.
Q. You have extensively analyzed conspiracy theories and their relation to democracy. Given the dominance of social media, do they pose a growing threat?
R Apparently because the internet is minimally regulated, making it much easier to spread conspiracy theories at incredible speeds. It is a danger to democracy because it undermines trust in institutions and in the truth. When people start believing that there is no objective truth but only an opinion, the door to the destruction of society opens, because we can only exist if we can find out what the truth is. A project I led on conspiracy theories found that they spread much more widely among those who feel ignored by the political system. People feel helpless and that is what fuels populism. Populist leaders tend to promote conspiracy theories to win over people who believe they are outside the system and conspiring against them.
Q. The so-called dropout culture is another growing trend and we are seeing it in academia.
R Freedom of expression means nothing if there is no freedom to offend and annoy. Unless it’s hate speech or calls to kill, we should be prepared to hear opinions we don’t accept. This is a fundamental aspect of democratic culture. Currently we’re seeing it with the transgender movement wanting to shut down spaces of opinion that they disagree with, but it’s a mistake to focus only on that, there’s a culture of annulment on the right as well. In the UK, for example, there is a campaign to stop research into slavery and how British institutions benefited from it. Conservatives try to suppress historical research and as a historian I cannot agree. You can love your country, you should love your country, but love doesn’t have to be blind. The more you know about the past, the better.
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