#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
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The following is conversation with Vejas Ludevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the rain, and the fall of communism. Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics. The communist ideology that has led to over 100,000,000 deaths in the 20th century. We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War 2. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG one for health, better help for your mind, notion for team collaborati
I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact. And in some ways, they were actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose, that history is not just random events, but that rather it's history, we might say, with a capital H, history moving in a deliberate direction, history having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in. At the same time, in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might, even
there's a million questions I could ask there. But so on the utopian side. So there is a utopian component to the way he tried to conceive of his ideas. Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress, Marx would have gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation because because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you're not scientific. You're not rational, you're not laying out the iron laws of history, you're merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic. That said, hidden among Marx's insistence that there are laws and and structures, as history moves through, class conflict, modes of production, towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final revolution that
So there is a long journey from capitalism to communism that includes a lot of problems. He thought once you resolve the problems, all the complexities of human interactions, the friction, the problems will be gone.
To the extent that they were based on inequalities and on, man's exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be a, a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about the history of communism, you have to include the fact that this often tragic and dramatic history produced a lot of jokes, jokes that were in part reactions sometimes to the ideological claims made by people like Marx. And one of the famous jokes was that what's the difference between capitalism and communism? And the joke's answer was capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism is the exact oppo
Yeah. You actually you actually have a lecture on humor. I love it. And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way. Okay. There's, again, a million questions. So you outline a set of contradictions, but it's interesting to talk about his view. For example, what was Marx's view of history?
Marx had been a student of Hegel, and Hegel is a German idealist philosopher, had, announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History is not a collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that the true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history history with a capital h, something that's transcendent and meaningful, was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of historical development, and that idea was the idea of human freedom. So it
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