On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

We imagined a disaster thousands of miles away, in a country that none of my students had visited, and that to them at first was all but unknown. The application of what we were discussing, though, was clear enough. If Russian invaders believed that Ukrainians were less than human, then raping women and executing men was no crime: Ukrainian bodies were objects to begin with. In acting this way, of course, the Russians opened the logical possibility that they, too, were simply objects: to be sent somewhere to die pointlessly on the basis of lies. If we do not recognize one another through the Leib, we not only cause suffering to others but bring unfreedom to ourselves. What if I think that my body is something more than a Körper, but no one else agrees? Then (my students pointed out) others can attach and detach meanings to me as they will, and my own values will never make their way out into the world. I can be enslaved, tortured, segregated. If I do not exist as a Leib because the existence of my group is denied, I can be subjected to genocide.