NPR’s Scott Simon talks with Yale historian and best-selling author Timothy Snyder about his new book, “On Freedom,” and how we misunderstand the concept.
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PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: Russia will lose.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke in London’s Westminster Hall last year.
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ZELENSKYY: We know freedom will win.
SIMON: Yale historian Timothy Snyder explores freedom in a new book, freedom for Ukraine and throughout the West and especially here in the United States.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: In our country, we think about freedom in a too-limited way.
SIMON: Professor Snyder titled his 2017 bestseller “On Tyranny.” He calls this new book “On Freedom.”
SNYDER: The whole idea we have that if the government leaves us alone we’re free – unfortunately, that goes directly back to slavery. That’s a plantation idea because only the government can free the slaves. It’s not just an intellectual error. It’s a historical taint. You can’t be free by yourself. You have to let other people in, and you have to acknowledge that other people are people like yourself.
SIMON: I want to get you to talk about one of your earliest, clearest memories of freedom. You were – I guess it was 1976. You were 6 years old. There was a bell on your family’s farm in Ohio.
SNYDER: That was, of course, the summer of the Bicentennial, and all the symbolism of it really impressed my 6-year-old mind. When I was lining up with my cousins and my brothers to ring the bell on the family farm, I was – even at 6, I was thinking about the Liberty Bell, putting it all together – freedom as a kind of declaration. Let freedom ring. But that memory is meant to show both the power and the limits of how we think about freedom because, of course, freedom is something that you declare. But where did that bell come from? Somebody had to forge it, and my grandfather had to bring it from a different place. Where did the farm come from? Where did the lane that led to the farm come from and the road that led to the lane? A lot of work had to go in to create that situation so that I could think about freedom.
SIMON: You’re joining us from Ukraine. What draws you there? What have you learned about freedom there?
SNYDER: I’m hoping that you can’t hear the air raid sirens in the background. Yes. I’m in Ukraine now, and, I mean, what drew me to it is that I’m a historian of Eastern Europe. But during this war, I felt like it would only be honest of me to check what I thought against what Ukrainians thought. I mean, the first time I went to Ukraine after the war started in 2022, I realized that everybody I talked to was talking about freedom, as their cities were threatened, as many of them were refugees, as people were defending themselves desperately in those early months. And that helped me think about freedom as character.
You know, we sometimes think of freedom as impulse. You’re just doing exactly what you feel like at a given moment, and you’re free. I think that freedom is the moral choices that you make. And in Ukraine, that was brought home to me by the president, Zelenskyy, who chose to stay during the invasion. And he, of course, was leading a nation of people who chose to stay and resist at a time when we in America thought that their country would fall in three days. So that was important to me as well, that freedom is also that you know what you have to do because you know who you are.
SIMON: You warn about what you see as the politics of and leaders of inevitability. What is that?
SNYDER: It’s a story we tell ourself, you know? We imagine that because somebody rang the Liberty Bell or because somebody got together and wrote a Constitution or because we’re exceptional, because there’s capitalism – we imagine that freedom is getting taken care of for us. And this is a story that I think was particularly powerful in America after communism came to an end, and we got ourselves thinking, well, OK, so long as we just have the right economic system, then we will be free. And this is a huge mistake. Sorry if my voice is wavering a bit, but this is actually a rocket, which means I actually…
SIMON: Professor Snyder. Professor Snyder, can you hear us?
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SIMON: My gosh. Are you there, Professor? Let me ask our producer Andrew Craig, is the line still open, Andrew? Yes? Our line is still open, so we’re going to stay with him and hope for the safety of all around. Professor Snyder?
SNYDER: Hi there. Sorry, I lost you. I had to walk out of Wi-Fi range.
SIMON: May we ask what happened?
SNYDER: The Russians fired a rocket at Kyiv, and Ukrainian air defense shot it down. The rockets are very fast, and so you actually do have to – you can’t really mess around. But they shot it down, the Patriot, so everything’s fine.
SIMON: All right. You’re all right?
SNYDER: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m absolutely fine.
SIMON: You’ve been very affected by what Ukrainians have told you, haven’t you?
SNYDER: Well, yeah, but not in the obvious ways, you know? They don’t just mean being free of something bad. They seem to mean getting through the terrible things that they’re facing now into a world where they’ll have a lot of possible beautiful futures. Just getting the other army out isn’t enough to make somebody free. If their house is in ruins or, you know, if they’re an older person and they can’t make their way to the road or there’s no bus service – physical things like that can make you unfree, too. But at the same time, you also have to think, what are the good things that you need so that older people could actually be free or so that kids could be free? You know, Ukrainians are sad when their playgrounds are destroyed. You know, kids need these things to grow up to become the kinds of people who can be free.
SIMON: I’d like to end this interview by going back to the – your family farm in Ohio because you write later in the book that you saw your 11-year-old son ring that same bell you did in 1976, joined by one of his friends. What did you see? And what did you see in that scene?
SNYDER: I mean, there were a lot of things for me in the world that were dreamy in 1976, and I had chances to become a free person – my family and my friends and various kinds of good fortune and various kinds of institutions which were built out. I mean, to be free, you have to get together and do work, which is collective but which is also generational, which is for the people, for the Americans yet to come. And if you break that generational link, then you’re not a free country, right? You’re not a land of the free. So I ended the scene with my son because my son was there with a friend. It’s meant to be a hopeful ending.
SIMON: Two young men rang the bell together.
SNYDER: They did. And then they ran off down the lane and did something else.
SIMON: Ringing the bell and then hearing the sound of their footsteps running off down the lane – kind of the sound of freedom to you now?
SNYDER: (Laughter) You never get to the end of that road. I do like to think that we’ve made a few steps forward, and we can see the way forward a little bit better.
SIMON: Timothy Snyder, Yale historian – his new book, “On Freedom.” Thank you so much for being with us. Good luck to everybody with you there.
SNYDER: Thank you for saying that. I appreciate that.
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