Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 40

Garry Kasparov on the ‘post-truth world’ | CNN | Reliable Sources | Dec 22, 2019

Garry Kasparov says Trump has succeeded in creating a “red state reality and a blue state reality.” He says there should be a stronger “response from the media” when politicians dissemble. S.E. Cupp says journalists deserve more credit for pushing back on political misinformation. Catherine Rampell also joins.

Garry Kasparov 2020 Holiday Greeting

Hello, again my friends, 

2019 is almost over, although it seemed like every day of this year contained enough news for a normal month, so there may still be a few surprises to come. It’s worth mentioning here at the start that this flood of crises and controversies can easily exhaust you, forcing you to tune out. But we cannot falter! Fighting for what you believe in is a marathon, but we must always be ready to sprint when the moment comes.

While I continued my usual advocacy and professional activities in human rights, artificial intelligence, and chess in 2019, much of my attention was dedicated to the Renew Democracy Initiative. American democracy is under direct assault and the battle has been joined in the impeachment process. Many presidents have evaded or bent the norms and rules in pursuit of their agenda. Policies like DACA and the Iran Deal, or the many violations of omission and commission before and during the Iraq War, for example.

But the Trump admin and its Congressional defenders have declared war on the rule of law and truth itself, seeking unchecked power for its own sake. RDI is not a political organization, so we are focused on projects that emphasize defending integrity in public office, civics education, and for the law to apply to everyone. This impeachment is a vital element in all of those causes. I’m happy to say that RDI is expanding rapidly and will be a serious force in promoting moderation, sanity, and the notion that citizens and government in a democracy must operate in good faith with one another.

Many of my 2019 op-eds were dedicated to using my background living in dictatorships and failing democracies to educate the Western public. I hasten to add that these are warnings, not predictions! I always say that I want people to stop telling me I was right and instead, to start proving me wrong. When I recently wrote for CNN that Trumpists were leading America into the post-truth world, reminiscent of the USSR of my past, my hope was that the process can still be reversed.

With so much going on, I’ve slid further into my amateur status as a chessplayer.

But the Grand Chess Tour continues to grow and succeed, with big plans for 2020 as well.

I learned a lot this year from my continuing collaborations with Avast Security and the Foundation for Responsible Robotics. Much of the global conversation about artificial intelligence has moved away from the technology—which is still relatively primitive—to the impacts and implications of increasingly complicated and autonomous algorithms on our lives. Especially the boom in conversations about “ethical AI,” which is often, if not always, a red herring. Machines cannot be more ethical than their creators. They are mirrors, and, like mirrors, can reveal our flaws, but they cannot fix them. We need to be vigilant, to keep a close eye on all the new threats to our privacy and safety before handing over too much power to these mighty algorithms. I remain an optimist about the promise of AI, what I call “augmented intelligence,” to enhance our minds the way a telescope extends our vision. But for this to happen we must keep it pointed at the stars and be ambitious.

That was my message for the Internet 50 event at UCLA on October 29. My friend Leonard Kleinrock was the man who 50 years ago sent the first message over what would eventually become the globe-spanning internet, and he invited me to give the closing speech to an audience of tech luminaries. I reminded them that another 50th anniversary had just happened, but these days we are more likely to celebrate the iPhone 11, not a new Apollo 11. We used to have great dreams without the tech to realize them. Now we have incredible tech, but our dreams have become small. What, I asked, will the next generations celebrate from 2019 fifty years from now?

I wish I knew, and that I would be there in 2069 to find out! But we can do everything we can to give them something great to look back on, and a world that is safe, free and prosperous in which to do it.

Best wishes and Happy New Year!

“Garry Kasparov: I lived in the post-truth Soviet world and I hear its echoes in Trump’s America” | CNN Op-Ed| Dec 5th, 2019

Thanks for all the kind feedback on my appearance tonight. If we can call lies lies, and nonsense nonsense, the truth has a fighting chance! https://t.co/PkYvK160gX

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) December 6, 2019

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT CNN.COM

(CNN) The totalitarian Soviet Union where I grew up tried to dominate the truth, to distort it and control it. Reality was whatever the Party put out on the nightly news, or in the official newspapers, Pravda, which means “Truth” and Izvestia, which means “News.” It was increasingly obvious back then, even to communist true believers, that what we were being told didn’t match the world we saw around us. As the joke went, “there is no news in the truth and no truth in the news.” Eventually the disparity between truth and lies became too great; life wasn’t improving and more and more information was making it through the Iron Curtain. Denying reality became too grave an insult to our dignity, an underestimated ingredient in the spirit of revolution.

I have lived through several world-changing upheavals. I’m a post-Soviet citizen; the country of my birth ceased to exist in 1991. We enjoyed less than a decade of tenuous freedom in Russia before Vladimir Putin launched its post-democratic phase. My ongoing attempts to fight that tragedy led to my exile in the United States. Now my new home finds itself locked in its own perilous battle — a battle to avoid becoming the latest member of the post-truth world.

President Donald Trump and his Republican defenders in Congress have followed his lead in declaring war on observed reality. Critical reports are “fake news,” journalists reporting the facts are “enemies of the people,” a phrase of Vladimir Lenin’s, debunked conspiracy theories are repeated, and public servants testifying under oath about documented events are dismissed as Never Trumpers.

Unable to change the facts, Trump and his supporters instead try to shift the debate into an alternate universe where the truth is whatever they say it is today. Trump repeats the same lies over and over, and it’s hard to say which is more troubling — that his followers don’t realize that they are lies or that they don’t care. Globalization and the internet may have made the world smaller, but now we’re experiencing a counterattack, the regionalization of truth.

The internet was supposed to shine the light of truth into every corner of the world, breaking the authoritarians’ monopoly on information. But it has also become a light-speed delivery system of lies and propaganda. The web has been chopped into pieces. Like a shattered mirror, each fragment reflects a different distorted image instead of a single reality.

Protests in Iran are difficult to follow when the regime can shut down internet access across the country. It’s easier to find out about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests in just about any country other than China thanks to their draconian censorship. Russia jails bloggers and shuts down nongovernmental organizations while flooding the country, and the world, with disinformation.

It’s alarming to see America taking its own Trumpian path down this dark road. In the USSR, we didn’t have a choice of which news channel to watch. Americans have limitless options, but many voluntarily confine themselves to a few like-minded sources. For Trump’s followers in particular, denying reality is a badge of honor, a symbol of belonging to a defiant cult.

If you watched the impeachment hearings only on Fox News you would have thought things were going great for the President. Any phrase that might sound like it exonerated him — and there weren’t many — was repeated over and over like a mantra. The copious and damning evidence provided may as well not have existed.

This partisan split along the lines of reality is in keeping with Trump’s larger war on integrity, the rule of law, and traditional American values and allies. It’s the model of regional powers and regional facts and regional values long touted by Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. There is no good or evil, just business as usual with no place for moral arguments over Chinese concentration camps or Russia bombing hospitals in Syria.


American companies are also falling in line, with Apple recently changing its maps app inside Russia to show the illegally annexed Ukrainian territory of Crimea as Russian. (Google has done so for years.)

American tech giants are happy to help Putin create a false reality inside the borders of Russia. Apparently Apple and Google will stand up to the FBI, but not the FSB, aka the KGB. Software is soft power, and US companies betray the values of the nation that enabled their success by doing the bidding of dictators. Tech firms defending themselves by saying it’s just business, not politics, sound a lot like the Hollywood studios that edited their movies and fired Jewish staff under Nazi pressure in the 1930s.

What’s the truth? In the era of regionalized facts, it depends on where you stand, what channel you’re watching, and what party you belong to. But there cannot be a red state reality and a blue state reality any more than there should be one world map inside of Russia and a different one outside. Trump is finally facing the music, and that must begin with everyone facing the facts.

 

Garry Kasparov @ UP with David Gura | MSNBC | Nov 23rd, 2019

On Nov 23rd, 2019 Garry Kasparov joined David Gura, Sally Kohn, Joel Payne and Jeremy Peters to discuss Russian disinformation and its role in the impeachment hearings.

Chess Legend Garry Kasparov Wants Us to Embrace Technology (And Bitcoin) | Nov 22, 2019

by Julian Thomas

READ ORIGINAL INTERVIEW AT BEINGCRYPTO.COM 

Garry Kasparov, famous for taking on technology in a straight one-for-one battle when he defeated Deep Blue in 1996, is no longer wanting us to fight technology. Instead, he wants us to embrace it.

Kasparov made headlines when he defeated IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, but he also changed the world’s sentiment towards technology when the computer beat him in 1997. Suddenly, humanity realized technology was far more powerful than we thought.

For Kasparov, things started to change in relation to how we view technology from that moment. At first, he saw the defeat as a curse. How, he sees it as a blessing because people are starting to be aware of what new technology — such as artificial intelligence and blockchain — can do for the advancement of humanity.

However, he is also well aware that humanity has lost its spirit of adventure and when a disruptive technology like Bitcoin starts challenging the status quo, it is often met with suspicion and fear. Yet, there is nothing to fear with Bitcoin — predicted only on mathematics. We should instead be fearing governmental chaos.

Embracing the Power of Technology

Garry Kasparov, in an interview with BeInCrypto, explained how people’s relationship with technology has ebbed and flowed while discussing how, in 1969, with very primitive technology (relative to today), we looked to the moon.

Today, where the free chess app on your phone is more powerful than Deep Blue, “we are too incremental.” Fifty years later and instead of celebrating a new Apollo 11 — which inspired the world and a generation — we are, instead, celebrating the iPhone 11, which he says “inspires nothing.”

Kasparov is of the opinion that, when he lost to Deep Blue, it was the end of an era — but one that we should be embracing far more than we currently are:

The fact, back then, was that the machine could win one game against the sitting World Champion under what we call normal time controls, it was a clear demonstration that the rest would come soon… It was a very important step forward, a big milestone, and people recognized the power of computers. So, 22 years later, I no longer think about it as a curse; it is more like a blessing. I quickly realized that the era of human vs. machine would be over soon, and it would come down to human plus machine.

In Math We Trust

Unsurprising, Kasparov is quite active in the world of AI and deeply interested in how humans and machines interact. He is also a big believer in Bitcoin because he is a believer in math. The certainty of Bitcoin and its transparent nature in relation to governmental financial policies is what the former Chess Grandmaster feels we should embrace.

What made me attracted to Bitcoin is I know the magic number is 21 million, and I know that Math is protecting me … With government, they can print another trillion dollars, and that is the biggest challenge. I know we can lead to chaos if we deny government rights to control the financial side of things, but we are already sliding into chaos because the governments are irresponsible. They create all this money, and 85 percent of it ends up in the stock market, it does not find its way to the real economy, we are basically just propping up the stock market. It is another big bubble. With Bitcoin, you have an ordinary man or woman in the street having a knowledge of the process.

Garry Kasparov: Reach for the Moon (Again)

The dichotomy of today’s sentiment towards technology is brilliantly outlined by Kasparov when he makes his iPhone 11 and Apollo 11 comparison. We have untapped potential with the technology we see today, yet we are not adventurous enough to embrace it.

Today, anything new, anything that upsets the status quo, is treated with suspicion at best or fear at worst. I sense this at conferences I talk at — a combination of anxiousness and fear, sometimes curiosity, because people recognize we are gradually moving into a new era were human-machine collaboration will become a dominant factor and they don’t know how to handle it.

For the grandmaster, he would rather have us dreaming big — like the 50s and 60s — and embracing wild ideas that can be achieved with technology, rather than trying to quash and fight against the machines.

Watch BeInCrypto’s full interview with chess legend Garry Kasparov here!

Images/videos courtesy of YouTube, Shutterstock.

Did you know you can trade sign-up to trade Bitcoin and many leading altcoins with a multiplier of up to 100x on a safe and secure exchange with the lowest fees — with only an email address? Well, now you do! Click here to get started on StormGain!

Julian Thomas

Julian has had a long interest in financial technology, especially cryptocurrency and blockchain. He studied to be a journalist and then decided to marry his passion for fintech with his skill in writing to report on this ever-changing and rapidly moving space.

“Donald Trump’s behavior is disgustingly corrupt and impeachable” | NY Daily News | Nov 17th, 2019

by Garry Kasparov



READ FULL ARTICLE AT THE DAILY NEWS 

It was foolish to hope that Donald Trump would be cowed into better behavior by the start of impeachment hearings last Wednesday. His type never admits wrongdoing, never apologizes, never changes for the better. Instead, they smear their accusers, attack the witnesses, and cause as much chaos as possible to distract from the growing pile of evidence against them.

Along the way, they drag their supporters down to their level, obliging them to twist the truth and contort their morals to defend the indefensible.

Thanks to the live feed of the hearings from the Longworth House Office Building, those with strong stomachs can watch this performative debasement in real-time. Just listen to the Republican congressmen during the hearings as they reel off denials, fabrications and distractions while never attempting to refute the core of the allegations against their master.

And how could they, since Trump’s lawyers, officials and Trump himself have already admitted to it all?

There is no limit to the possible number of lies and only one truth, so it’s easy for the facts to be lost in the rising tide of falsehoods. Instead of falling into the trap of refuting every conspiracy theory and slander, the best remedy is to keep repeating the truth, as often as necessary, like taking a medicine.

So, once more for the record: Trump withheld U.S. aid to Ukraine in order to extort Ukraine’s president into helping smear Joe Biden, Trump’s political rival. That’s it. Game over. Everything else — how it served Vladimir Putin’s interests in undermining Ukraine and deflecting Russian guilt for hacking the 2016 U.S. election — no matter how damning it may be, is just treasonous icing on the impeachable cake.

The U.S. eventually released the aid, which the White House had no authority to delay, only after the whistleblower blew the whistle. This is not a defense. There’s no such thing as “attempted extortion.” The threat is the crime, regardless of whether it was successful. This wasn’t diplomatic hardball, or anything between nations. It was Trump abusing the authority of the United States to help his reelection.

This may still sound like small potatoes, even if it’s a greater offense than, say, what President Nixon did leading to his resignation over Watergate. Is it really worth impeaching a president over shaking down a country most Americans can’t find on a map?

As for using reelection as proof of innocence, Mason blew that out of the water by pointing out that this would only encourage a president to “repeat his guilt,” by abusing his powers further to guarantee his reelection.

Faced with this, Trump and his allies in Congress have declared war on the system itself, essentially saying that Trump can do whatever he likes, the law be damned. What is at stake here is also far more important than Watergate because the threat is to the rule of law, to either hold the highest office in the land accountable or to treat the president as an infallible Sun King.

Doubt everything, the Republicans are saying, except for the word of Trump. What he says is always true, even if he contradicts himself tomorrow, as he so often does. This isn’t the position of a political party, but that of a cult of fanatics bowing down to a false idol.

GOP claims that the various witnesses don’t have first-hand knowledge of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors are a bizarre joke when the White House is blocking key figures from testifying. If I have to choose, I’ll take the word of people speaking in public under oath over those shooting from ambush, cowering and tweeting.

The GOP techniques on display are quite familiar to me, having spent so much of my life inside the propaganda bubbles of the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia. It was therefore ironic to see the GOP accusing the Democrats of “Soviet-style” hearings when it’s the Republicans who are taking cues from the KGB playbook.

Obscuring the truth is one objective, but the larger goal is to create so much doubt and hostility that people become exhausted and stick to one or two news sources that make them feel comfortable.

In America, that means directing Trump’s followers to Fox News, which has become bad enough to evoke memories of the Soviet Pravda (“Truth”) newspaper and nightly news where the Communist Party could do no wrong.

As the joke went, there were three TV channels in the USSR. Channel 1 was Brezhnev, Channel 2 was Brezhnev, and Channel 3 was a KGB guy warning you to stop changing channels. That’s what the Republicans are doing now in a desperate attempt to keep voters from hearing the truth. Don’t look with your eyes or listen with your ears, comrades, just turn back to Channel 1!

But even if you can fool some of the people all of the time, the relentless moving of the goalposts has to be wearing thin.

First Trump didn’t do it. Then, even if he did it, nobody can prove it. Well, you can prove it, but it’s not so bad. Okay, it’s bad, but the proof is second-hand. The goalposts shift by the hour, a moving target that cannot be hit.

Now there’s plenty of first-hand evidence even with the White House trying to stop key figures from testifying. All the Republicans have left is blind loyalty and slandering the messengers of so much bad news for the Dear Leader.

Unfortunately for Trump and the GOP, “the best defense is a good offense” applies better to chess than it does to the law. Just ask Trump’s campaign chief, Paul Manafort, or Trump’s adviser, Roger Stone, who is also off to a prison cell after being convicted on all counts on Friday.

That nearly everyone around Trump turns out to be a criminal is a coincidence nearly on the scale of how many of their crimes come back to Russian connections. It’s good to know that when you follow a false prophet, Jesus’s dictum “the truth will set you free” does not apply. Instead, the truth gets you sent to jail.

Trump’s ability to drag people down to his level of the swamp is mirrored on the international front. He attacks traditional allies while befriending thugs and autocrats. He spreads corruption, keen to make other leaders as complicit as he is in order to gain leverage over them. These are the practices Putin uses to spin his web in the free world and it’s a sad day when these same habits are preferred by the president of the United States.

The day the hearings began, Trump hosted Turkish leader Recep Erdogan at the White House, honoring the autocrat who recently began slaughtering the U.S.-allied Kurds in Northern Syria after Trump abandoned them.

“I’m a big fan of the president,” Trump said, without explanation. Two days earlier, Trump made the even more bizarre statement that Erdogan “has a great relationship with the Kurds,” which is like saying an alligator has a great relationship with baby ducks.

Just hours after several Republican senators met with Erdogan, Trump’s staunch defender Lindsey Graham blocked a Senate resolution condemning the Armenian genocide, a measure that recently passed the House by a vote of 405-11. Perhaps Graham considers it politically incorrect to condemn a past genocide when Turkey is now keen to commit another with tacit U.S. approval.

Such immoral lunacy is why impeachment is not only valid, but urgent. This is not a partisan matter, which is why the Renew Democracy Initiative recently moved to support the impeachment inquiry. The American people deserve the opportunity to pick a side between corruption and the rule of law, between democracy and autocracy, between the truth and deception. We already know which side Trump has taken in each case. Now his Republican defenders should be forced to do the same, to pick a side in full view of the voting public.

“Facts are stubborn things,” wrote John Adams. And we must be no less stubborn in defending those facts. If Trump is so infallible, he and his defenders should have no qualms about having him deliver the truth not on Twitter, not at a rally, but under oath.

Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and of the NY-based Human Rights Foundation.

Garry Kasparov Talks Chess, Tech, Trump and Putin | PBS | Amanpour & Co | Nov 12th, 2019

PRESS TO PLAY VIDEO 

Garry Kasparov became the youngest world chess champion in history at the age of 22, while his famous matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue brought chess and artificial intelligence into the mainstream. Now, he’s focusing on the quiet war Russia is waging against U.S. democracy. Kasparov sits down with Miles O’Brien to discuss everything from troll farms to election interference.

Garry Kasparov: Chess, Deep Blue, AI, and Putin

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or support it on Patreon. Here’s the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode):

00:00 – Introduction

01:33 – Love of winning and hatred of losing

04:54 – Psychological elements

09:03 – Favorite games

16:48 – Magnus Carlsen

23:06 – IBM Deep Blue

37:39 – Morality

38:59 – Autonomous vehicles

42:03 – Fall of the Soviet Union

45:50 – Putin

52:25 – Life

Garry Kasparov still believes we can ‘checkmate tyranny’ | Dallas News | Nov 3, 2019

By Michael Judge

3:00 AM on Nov 3, 2019

Chess grandmaster and pro-democracy activist Garry Kasparov says President Donald Trump is a symptom of a sick system, and in 2017 he and other centrists on the right and left founded the Renew Democracy Initiative  to address the sickness.

“You don’t have to pick a side between two extremes,” Kasparov said in an exclusive interview with The Dallas Morning News. “There is a place for ideas, for differences, for civil debate and progress via compromise, but you have to fight for that space as hard as the extremists fight for polarization.”

Ranked the No. 1 player in the world for 20 consecutive years when he retired from professional chess in 2005, Kasparov has been chairman of the New York-based  Human Rights Foundation  since 2012.

We’ve known each other for quite some time. I think the first time I had the honor of editing one of your articles was in March 2005, when you announced in The Wall Street Journal that you were retiring from professional chess. In that piece you said, despite the rise of the Putin dictatorship in your home country, you believed that “For the first time in history, we are in a position to checkmate tyranny. Momentum is largely on the side of democracy.” A great deal has changed since then. Do you still believe we can “checkmate tyranny”?

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 15 years since that fateful day. My evaluation was accurate, but unfortunately there was no will in the free world to prosecute the advantage. Instead, it has been frittered away and any momentum in the geopolitical position today is with the dark side of demagogues and dictators. I’m an optimist still, and eventually we will figure it out and push back, but apparently we had to hit bottom first, to see with our own eyes what happens when engagement with evil and moral relativism replace the principles of democracy and the courage to defend them. Some of us knew already, and tried to sound a warning, but now it’s obvious to all.

How important is U.S. leadership to the forward “momentum” of democracy globally and the defense and promotion of human liberty?

Hugely important, now more than ever. America squandered that leadership after the Cold War ended, first through apathy, then by blundering around in the Middle East, and then by a full-out retreat from the world. And now, well, the U.S. is at its best when it’s leading by example and these days it’s in sorry shape at home when it comes to human rights and democratic principles. But no other nation has the influence, power and capability to lead this fight, so we urgently must get America back on its feet and back into the ring.

How has the balance of power between Putin’s Russia and today’s America shifted since 2005, and why?

I prefer poker to chess when describing Putin’s success. He’s no master strategist. He’s an opportunist who is good at reading people, which makes him good at bluffing. In poker, you can win with a bad hand if your opponents are weak-minded and keep folding their cards.

Putin pushes a little, looks for openings, and moves forward when it’s safe. If anyone challenges him he makes a big noise, lots of threats — a bluff. If his bluff is called, he retreats, like any schoolyard bully. A dictator cannot afford a real loss, to look weak, so he plays it safe. But three political generations of Western leaders have kept folding their cards despite having overwhelming advantages economically and militarily. After 15 years of this, Putin has accrued a lot of influence because he looks like a winner. He’s stepping into a vacuum left by the U.S.

You once said that chess allows one to better see the whole board, so to speak, geopolitically. Do you see any similarities between what the Trump administration is doing with its allies in Europe, say in Ukraine, and what it’s doing in Afghanistan, and more recently northern Syria?

The Trump administration, like the president, is so confused and chaotic that it’s impossible to discern any hint of strategy. The only consistent thread in his foreign policy decisions, from Ukraine to Syria, is that they all seem to suit Putin very well. Trump is leaving, as Obama did before him, and Russia is moving in, saying thank you very much. Trump’s bizarre loyalty to Putin is worrying, of course, but this policy of retreat was well established by Obama. The difference is that Obama said all the right things and his motivations were ideological. Trump says all the wrong things and his motives are likely corrupt as hell, but the results are depressingly similar. The influence of the U.S. and the free world is waning, conceding space and influence to the dictators, ayatollahs and mass-murderers. People somehow keep forgetting what happens when you allow such forces to gain strength and confidence. You can’t just walk away and be safe.

How do you think history will see what the Trump administration has done to its erstwhile Kurdish allies in northern Syria?

That depends on when the history books are written, and by whom. We all know that winners write history, so if the followers of Trump, Putin and Assad write those books, it will be hailed as a brilliant move, an essential step for peace, etc. Of course it is a hideous betrayal that will cost many lives and wound America’s credibility as an ally for at least a generation.

What message does this send other U.S. allies in Europe and in Asia, specifically our NATO allies, as well as Japan and South Korea, who currently rely on U.S. security alliances?

As I said in 2013 when Obama declined to strike Assad for using chemical weapons, the world is watching. A nation wants to be trusted by its allies and feared by its enemies, and right now that’s far from the case. The U.S. even voted with Russia on the U.N. Security Council to veto the condemnation of Turkey’s attack on American allies. And don’t forget, Turkey is a NATO country!

This is Putin’s dream, to drive a wedge into NATO and also the EU, as he’s done with Ukraine, to weaken the global system of alliances that arose to maintain stability during the Cold War. Putin wants a return of the great power, regional power system that existed before WWII, and WWI. That’s the way things are moving, with China also expanding its ambition, and a move back to that era should scare the hell out of everyone. Everybody likes to complain about the U.S. being a global policeman, but no one likes to live in a neighborhood without a cop on the beat.

Tell me a little about the Renew Democracy Initiative, which you chair. I know you had an event in New York City last week addressing the “political polarization and extremism that have come to define this moment in American life” as well as the decline in civics education and involvement that has contributed to the polarization. What is RDI doing to turn things around?

We have short-term and long-term missions. We don’t want RDI to be yet another think tank cranking out boring papers on democracy. Most of us are intellectuals, I suppose, but we feel the urgency of this moment. Our most recent development is to support the impeachment process.

We are a non-partisan group, this isn’t a political move, but we decided that if we support integrity and the rule of law, supporting impeachment is a must. The U.S. was a shining city on a hill not just because of prosperity, but because everyone, even the president, was subject to the law. If that is no longer the case, it’s a huge loss for democracy everywhere.

In the bigger picture, Trump and Trumpism are symptoms of a sick system. RDI wants to help heal that system with civics education projects and also by inspiring people to take pride in democracy and not to take their rights and freedoms for granted. To function well, democracy needs active citizenship, not just protesters and people yelling on Twitter. As someone who grew up in the totalitarian USSR, and who saw Russia’s young democracy die under Putin, I want to communicate that urgency to Americans. You don’t have to pick a side between two extremes. There is a place for ideas, for differences, for civil debate and progress via compromise, but you have to fight for that space as hard as the extremists fight for polarization.

In my Columbia Journalism Review interview with you in March 2017, just two months after Trump was inaugurated, you said that Americans had “taken their democracy and their affluence for granted for so long that they were vulnerable to someone like Trump.” Do you still feel that way?

Yes, I do, but there is no doubt Trump has been a wake-up call to exactly this problem. Americans had the luxury, or thought they did, of ignoring politics. There have been abuses and power grabs in every administration, but it took a Trump to show everyone how much of their government is run on the honor system. Traditions and norms aren’t laws, and even laws aren’t worth much if they cannot be enforced. The hundred million people who decided not to vote in 2016 had better wake up or it’s only going to get worse. Not just Trump, but he will have imitators, competitors, happy to exploit the radicalization of the debate.

In his resignation letter late last year, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the U.S. “must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values,” and that “we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.” Has Trump, specifically in regard to NATO and more recently in northern Syria, damaged those alliances?

Absolutely. To those that still doubt Trump is under Putin’s direct influence in some way, I ask them to say what Trump would do differently if he were! A major strategic strength of the democratic world is institutional continuity. Dictators can act quickly, tactically, with no need to worry about budget allocations or congressional approval or opinion polls. But they can’t plan long term because they have to worry about how to stay in power every day.

Democracies have alliances and institutions based on shared interests and values, even as administrations change over the years and decades. Trump has shattered that by insulting and ignoring U.S. allies. Putin loves it. If NATO is frayed over Syria and Turkey, and if Trump is still in the White House in 2021, the Baltics will be under tremendous pressure.

Does it surprise you that the impeachment proceedings in Washington center on allegations that the Trump administration withheld military aid to Ukraine, a U.S. ally, intended to protect it from Russia, which invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014 and is still waging war against Ukraine through proxies?

First, let’s get it straight. This is a Russian war on Ukraine. There are Russian troops, Russian weapons, and Russian commanders in Ukraine, all directed from Moscow. This isn’t up for debate at all. Their Ukrainian proxies and the so-called separatists would vanish as instantly as they appeared if Putin made one phone call.

And no, I’m not really surprised that it comes back to Russia. As I said once, Trump has more Russian connections than Aeroflot. It always seems to come back to Russia because that’s where the money is. And Ukraine is also where Putin’s attention is. Remember the first change Trump’s people made to the GOP platform before the Republican convention in 2016? No lethal aid to Ukraine! Putin’s interests always seem to overlap with Trump’s. I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in the KGB!

Do you ever regret leaving the high-pressure world of professional chess for the high-pressure world of geopolitics?

No, I’m not much for regrets because I like my life. I have a beautiful family and the ability to do interesting, meaningful work every day. If I had done something differently, my life today would be different, so it seems wrong to regret. It’s also pointless, since I do not possess a time machine. I have made mistakes, certainly, and it’s important to learn from them, but that’s different.

As for leaving professional chess, it was time. I had achieved everything I could in chess and wanted to continue to make a difference in the world with the years I have left. I still love the game and can play for fun.

As part of your Kasparov Chess Foundation, you meet brilliant young people around the world on a regular basis. You’ve been described as an eternal optimist. What do you see when you look at them and envision their futures?

Working with young people is wonderful because they force you to challenge your own knowledge and orthodoxy. It would be easy for me to come into the room and say, “Don’t you know who I am?” and just lecture while they sit there taking notes. Instead, if I encourage them to show their best, to challenge me with their ideas, it keeps me sharp. Even if the ideas aren’t good!

There is a tendency to believe that young people will only have to learn how to use machines well to thrive. But what I find is that the greatest successes come when they use the technology to enhance their own creativity. Relying on the machine like an infallible oracle just turns you into a machine yourself. But if you can outsource the drudge work to a machine, use it to hone and perfect your own ideas and creativity, they become the tools we need to reach for the stars.

What do you see as the greatest threat to liberal democracy for this and the next generation?

Apathy, which is why freedom has declined globally for the past dozen years in a row. We cannot put all the blame on bad actors like Putin when they can only flourish if we let them. Inaction is also a choice. Inaction cost lives. Apathy can destroy a democracy nearly as well as a totalitarian ruler; it just takes longer. When people stop caring about liberty and democracy abroad, it inevitably comes home. Either these values matter, or they do not. Either they are worth fighting for, or they are not. And if you don’t fight for them, make no mistake, you will lose them.

This Q&A was conducted via email, edited and condensed by Michael Judge, a former deputy editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal and a contributing editor at The Dallas Morning News.

Garry Kasparov: A Russian Chess Legend Warns of Putin’s Next Move | BY SPECTRUM NEWS NY1 | October 5th, 2019

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov became internationally famous in 1985 as the youngest world chess champion. He joined Errol to talk about his chess-playing days, as well as to weigh in on America’s relationship with Russia. The outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin explains why Putin is a threat to democracy and will do anything to keep President Trump in power, including interfering in the 2020 presidential election.

Share your thoughts with the hashtag #NY1YouDecide or give us a call at 212-379-3440 and leave a message.

MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

ABOUT THE SHOW

NY1’s Errol Louis has been interviewing powerful politicians and cultural icons for years, but it’s when the TV cameras are turned off that things really get interesting. From career highlights, to personal moments, to stories that have never been told, join Errol each week for intimate conversations with the people who are shaping the future of New York and beyond. Listen to “You Decide with Errol Louis” every Wednesday, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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