December 23, 2024

>> Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour and Company.

Here's what's coming up.

When you get out of a dungeon after eight years, you don't just return to a normal life.

The longest held American prisoner in Iran, Siamak Namazi, tells me about his traumatic eight-year ordeal in an exclusive interview, his first since being released this time last year.

Then, with the U.N. General Assembly starting in New York, I speak to one of America's closest allies, the Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris.

Also ahead, Walter Isaacson interviews historian Timothy Snyder about his new book, "On Freedom."

And company is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Attwood and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, the Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poyta Programming Endowment to Fight Antisemitism, the Family Foundation of Leila and Mickey Strauss, Mark J. Blechner, the Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, the Peter G. Peterson and Joan Gantz Cooney Fund, Charles Rosenblum, Kou and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour outside the U.N. in New York.

As world leaders, a meeting at the annual General Assembly against a grim backdrop of global conflict and deepening geopolitical divisions.

In the Middle East, war is escalating.

Lebanon says at least 274 people have been killed in the deadliest day since 2006, that war after Israel conducted extensive airstrikes on Hezbollah targets across the country.

Talks aimed at ending the war in Gaza are at a standstill.

But sometimes diplomacy can yield important results.

This time last year, Siamak Namazi was released from Iran's notorious Evin prison in a hostage prisoner swap with the United States.

He was the longest held American in Iran, a horrifying eight-year ordeal.

Now, six months before his release, Namazi had bravely called into this program from inside Evin to make an emotional plea to President Biden.

Take a listen.

The other hostages and I desperately need President Biden to finally hear us out, to finally hear our cry for help and bring us home.

Eventually, he and four other Iranian-Americans were released, and a year later, he is ready to talk for the first time in this exclusive interview right here in New York City.

Siamak, welcome back to the program.

Thank you very much.

The last time you talked to us was from Evin jail in March of 2023.

And it took another several months for you to be free.

A year ago, you came back to the United States, almost exactly a year ago.

What's this year been like?

Do you feel free?

Well, Christiane, first of all, it is such a joy to be talking to you and not worrying about someone dragging me to a solitary cell somewhere because of it.

So, thank you for that.

Do I feel free?

I think the first -- the most dominant feeling that I have is gratitude.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to many people, particularly President Biden, who made a very difficult choice and struck the deal.

I'm sure it was a very difficult deal for him to strike that brought us home.

It took many more years than I hoped that it would.

I was there eight years.

The longest held?

The longest held.

But the truth is when you get out of a dungeon after eight years, you don't just return to a normal life.

It's overly optimistic.

You don't just kind of shake it off.

It's an eight-year earthquake that hits your life and it leaves a lot of destruction.

But I would say I do feel very free in the U.S. and I try to live the freest life I could even when I was in Evin.

What were the basics?

I mean, you had to learn to live outside those confines again.

Right.

Human beings are very interesting.

We adapt to where we are, so I would say it takes a long time to learn to adapt to prison and then it takes a long time to learn to adapt to come out.

It's a very difficult process.

I remember having to set an alarm to remind myself to leave the apartment.

I remember once I hadn't left for three days and I realized why.

I just wasn't used to doing that.

So there's a lot to learn again.

Carrying keys, carrying a wallet, cars.

Eight years is a long, long, long time.

Society changes.

I felt for my oxygenarian parents, I didn't know how to do simple things.

A friend would say, grab an Uber and come over and I would have to explain I have absolutely no idea how to do that.

You come out with no IDs, accounts frozen and it takes a while.

Did the U.S. government, did they give you sort of building blocks, the stepping stones to come out or what?

No.

I think that's something that needs to be worked on because you can imagine that even when hardened criminals get out of prison here, there'd be a dozen church programs and state programs and federal programs to reintegrate.

For us, it's a goodbye, good luck.

There are some wonderful NGOs that former hostages and their families usually volunteer in and there's some wonderful, wonderful people who reach out to you.

And I think it's their goodness that helps us maneuver through it.

But no, there really isn't.

And what about debriefing?

You know, you had spent all these years in captivity by one of America's biggest adversaries.

They want to know, surely, about the Revolutionary Guard, about how you were treated, about what things might have been said or done.

Did you -- There has been no debriefing.

But just to be clear, the U.S. government did not come and plumb you for your experience, your information, your knowledge about this regime?

No, and oddly, because, you know, eight years, I would say, probably in this country, I have the most -- I've clocked the most hours negotiating with the Revolutionary Guards.

But no, there has been no debriefings.

I asked the other hostages.

The ones that I have asked have all said that there are no debriefings.

So, yes, I was pretty surprised by that as well.

Can we go back to the beginning a little bit?

You were a businessman.

You had family in Iran.

You were visiting regularly.

And then once you went, you tried to come out, and they grabbed you at the airport as you were leaving.

Correct.

2015.

Yes.

Around the time of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal.

Correct.

I went to Iran for a funeral.

And as you said, at that point, it was the peak of Iran-U.S. relations when we had former Secretary Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif walking around Vienna.

And on the way back, they first barred me from leaving the country.

I was approached by a man in a plain suit who said, you know, come with me.

After that, I was interrogated off-site illegally for three months.

And then I was finally arrested.

I was charged formally with cooperating with a hostile state, referring to the United States of America.

And you are American.

I am a dual citizen of the -- I'm born in Iran, and I'm American.

But the key thing they said, the key statement was that when we arrested him, for three decades, he had been building a network within Iran to infiltrate and topple the Islamic Republic with the cooperation of the hostile U.S. state.

Now, I was arrested at 44.

So these guys are pretty much claiming that when I was learning to skateboard with my buddy Dave in White Plains, New York, I was actually subverting the Islamic Republic.

When you were like 12 years old?

Fourteen, yes.

Fourteen.

Yes.

And there's no doubt in your mind that they took you purely, as you told me when you called out of prison, for your blue passport, because you're an American, because you're a valuable pawn.

They made it extremely clear, repeatedly to me, that you will not be released without a deal with the U.S. You said that for the first couple of years, you were in solitary confinement, for the most part.

You were in the Revolutionary Guards portion of the prison.

27 months.

27 months, which was really hard.

Yes.

You said they basically fed you like a dog under the door, that you were beaten up.

Can you tell us more now, that you couldn't tell us back then, of how they treated you for those two years?

I refer to it, I think, as unutterable indignities.

Look, when I was first taken in and thrown in a solitary cell, and anyone who has not experienced that won't understand what I'm saying, I'm talking about something the size of a closet.

Three paces, and I'm not a big guy, three of my paces in that great unwalled off.

It's a very difficult thing.

By Iranian law, that alone, by Iranian law, that is defined as torture, to throw someone in there.

I was thrown in.

My interrogators told me that day, that, look, unless you cooperate, the word cooperate, I'm definitely adversely allergic to that, which means unless you do whatever we ask you to, you are going to be here until your teeth and your hair are the same color, and our methodology of how we're talking is going to change.

They were clear about that.

I didn't believe that.

It was a threat, a violence.

Yes.

In the solitary cell, I started assessing my situation, and I started developing strategy, and I developed some idea of where I am.

I looked at the scratches that the prisoners leave on the wall.

The least that I saw was about three.

The most that I saw was 32.

The cluster, the mode kind of, that's a geeky MBA side of me, was around two weeks.

So I figured, okay, I'm probably going to be in this situation for two weeks, most a month, and then they're going to take me to a less horrible room.

I was in that room for two months, and then overall about eight months of solitary confinement.

So you thought two weeks, but you were eight months all in all?

Of solitary confinement, yes.

I assumed that because I'm a hostage and I have value, they will not harm me.

Unfortunately, that assumption was proven wrong.

What did they do?

I got to tell you that the physical part of what they do isn't ...

It's not like they're pulling your nail, but you're blindfolded.

Unfortunately, the thugs are as bad as their job as everyone else in that Rotman system.

I believe they don't mean to harm you as much as they do, but they don't understand simple things like when you toss a person who is blindfolded, I don't know that's a wall in front of me, and I'm going to go face first into it, or I don't know there's a staircase, and I'm going to go rolling down.

Did that happen?

I did, yes.

Both of those things happened.

That part still, you could endure, but not day after day after day nonstop.

There was a lot of humiliation.

That I'm not comfortable talking about.

I mean unadmirable because it had a profound effect on me.

I still haven't even gotten to talking about it fully in therapy.

It's just they humiliate you.

They always do this while you're blindfolded.

They're that cowardly.

You saw your mom, a visit, after a period of solitary when you first or second got to see her, and they told you what to tell her or not to tell her.

I saw my mom the first time after six weeks of solitary.

This was right before they started beating me.

The poor woman, the first time she saw me, she didn't recognize me.

I looked like Saddam when they pulled him out of the hole.

I had a long beard.

At the distance we're standing, I remember her eyes wondering, looking for me.

Then she realized it's me, and I remember her sobbing.

I remember trying to make her laugh by telling her why I look like Saddam.

They had actually given her a visit to told her that they're about to execute me.

This is going to be the last meeting unless she gets me to agree to do a confession.

The second time, then they started a period of several weeks that the beating started.

Again, I want to emphasize it.

The beatings are nothing you can't handle if it's a one-off thing, if they do it repeatedly and with a humiliating factor in those circumstances.

It's much scarier than I could tell you, especially when I know people like Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi died that way.

Eventually, I think it was a few months down the road, they called me out and said, "Okay, you have a visit.

It's seven minutes."

They spent about 15 minutes threatening me about what would happen if I say anything but, "Mom, I'm okay.

The food is great.

Everything's fantastic.

People should holiday here."

So flanked by my interrogators, I entered the room even before sitting.

I say, "Hi, mom.

These guys have been torturing me.

I need you to go public on this.

I need you to..." Um I put her through a lot.

It was a very difficult decision because I was telling her that they're going to start threatening you and they started yelling at me.

"You can't say that."

I said, "Actually, you can't do that."

I told her, "Look at me.

I'm not in an insane asylum.

I know what I'm doing.

Print a letter to the Supreme Leader, open letter.

Say I saw my son and repeat, 'My son claimed, my son claimed.'

Never say anything but, 'My son claimed.'"

That you were being tortured.

"My son claimed that he's being tortured."

You informed your mother.

Clearly, she informed others.

People knew that you were being wrongfully treated, including, I assume, in the United States.

I assume the government and the others, they knew.

They did.

You were left behind by the Obama administration after the negotiations that got the nuclear deal, Jason Rezaian.

Everyone else.

Every confirmed.

I use the word "confirmed" because we didn't know the status of Bob Levinson at that time.

Everyone else except me.

That happened again under the Trump administration?

Correct.

Trump left me behind twice.

Trump had two negotiations with Iran to get others out.

Correct.

You were left behind.

Yes.

Why?

I think this is a question, really, that we should be asking American officials.

I personally think it was...

I more than think.

What I understand is that this is a tactic that the Iranians use.

I've seen the same tactic used by the Russians when it came to Paul Whelan.

When they have what I would refer to as a star hostage, which is a hostage that has a lot of support by a big lobby in the U.S., whether it's the media or it's a famous player.

Iran understood that the U.S. wanted Jason out.

Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post.

Correct.

And so they said, "If you want to talk about CIMAC, this is going to take weeks more."

I think the U.S. wanted the hostages released at the same time as the JCPOA was being implemented.

And Secretary Kerry believed then Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.

Allegedly, Zarif had said that, "I'll get CIMAC out within a few weeks."

And Secretary Kerry chose to take Mr. Zarif's word.

So they left me behind.

As far as Iran is concerned, they want to create a perpetuity in their hostage-taking, right?

And to be clear, they knew you were being tortured?

Yes.

I have a letter.

After I was left behind, my parents wrote the Secretary of State basically saying, "What the hell?"

Much nicer than that.

And he reiterated that he has been trying for my release, working hard for my release, and he'll continue to do so.

And that there was an expression of upset and sympathy for...

I don't remember the words, but saying, "I feel bad," or, "I'm sorry to hear that your son is being mistreated."

My understanding is that the Trump administration was faced with a different choice, that the Iranians said, "I want that guy, and I'm willing to give this guy for him."

And that happened twice.

And they chose to make that decision.

Can I ask you at this point, Trump himself, after you were released and the deal involved unfreezing Iranian money that South Korea had given them for a reason.

It was Iranian money, not American dollars.

Anyway, he's like, "Oh, this is appeasement."

Others were saying, "This is appeasement."

As you know, people have said, "Oh, you should never deal with the regime in any way, form or fashion."

What is your answer to that?

Christiane, I will answer that as a former hostage and tell you, we have a duty to get out our people from foreign dungeons when they have done nothing.

And the only reason they're in there is because they carry a blue passport.

And their only way out is through a deal.

Unfortunately, we have to make distasteful deals to get out our people.

But I'll tell you something, no one is as angry, no one is as disgusted at the fact that the Islamic Republic, that this horrible regime, profited from blighting my life than me and the other hostages in our families.

They took my father.

They have done things that I'm not able to tell my therapist yet.

And I can't even speak about it.

I am upset that they profited from this.

But what other choice is there?

Are you just going to let an American rot?

But we have two obligations.

Get our people out, even if it means holding our nose and doing these distasteful deals.

The second part is we have to deter hostage taking to begin with.

And I think as grateful as I am, and I would really love to shake President Biden's hand one day, I really would.

As grateful as I am for this, I have a polarity of emotions going on.

We have to do something to stop this.

And we don't.

There is zero.

There is absolutely zero deterrence for hostage taking.

If you and I were advisors to one of these rogue states, we'd say this is a great business.

What is the deterrent?

Because they're going to say, don't pay them, it'll stop.

No.

As I said, you can do two things at once.

This is a business.

What do they want?

They want one or two things.

Either their money's locked up somewhere that they want released, or they want one of their thugs out, someone who was tried in a proper court because of their wrongdoing.

They want to exchange it.

This is a mafia business.

Hostage diplomacy is a game of rugby.

We should stop treating it like chess.

You were getting more and more desperate because nothing seemed to work to get you out.

But you were displaying quite a lot of what we might call chutzpah.

You had written to the New York Times an open letter, right?

You had done a hunger strike.

And then you decided to do an interview with us.

That was very, very risky.

And you were basically trying to beg the Biden administration through a big media platform to take the case seriously.

You and the others who were in there.

Where did you get that risk-taking?

Where did you get that chutzpah from?

Desperation.

Eight years.

When I spoke to you, it was seven and a half years.

As you pointed out, I was left behind three times at that point.

I had a program.

I'd get up.

It was organized.

Think about how to be a pain in the ass.

Literally, it was built in.

You were resisting.

I was resisting.

I thought that that's... You have two choices as a hostage.

And both of them make immense sense.

One is to turn around and say, "I have to survive this, and my people outside will eventually free me."

It makes sense.

It's me.

They're an army.

Literally, the Revolutionary Guards have taken me.

It's not just an army.

It's an army with a full power of a state.

You have a judiciary, a prison system, the media, the television is blaring all sorts of false documentaries about you.

So it makes no sense to fight them.

I can understand that.

Your fight in that decision is with the day-to-day boredom and to keep sane and to keep healthy for when you get out.

Choice two is you turn around and say, "What can I do that if everyone acted the way I did, I would raise the cost where they couldn't do this so easily?"

And I think that you will understand how you were cut if you spend enough time in there.

And I think part of my reaction to the unutterable indignities was that I have to gain my own respect back for myself.

I had to fight them.

And you got to us at CNN.

I got through youth by, I mean, as you know very well, this was, I wish I could take credit for this.

It was a brainchild of one of my superheroes.

I have several, but he's definitely up there on the list.

Jared Gensler, my pro bono human rights lawyer here.

I understood that hostage deals, if they don't happen quickly, are likely to get derailed.

And if they wanted to, by now it would have finished.

It sent me a message.

The message was that I didn't think President Biden is committed to making the deal.

That was my assessment.

So I called Jared.

I told him that I think, I don't think there's that commitment.

I had done a hunger strike already.

I basically got no love back.

And so I said, "I need to be heard.

I need President Biden to hear my voice."

And Jared, a couple of years before that had suggested maybe I do an interview from prison.

I thought we're talking about something much smaller.

I told him I need to kick under the table so that if this deal doesn't happen, I need to know that I have done everything in my power, everything I could have done.

If I'm here two years from now, past my 10 years, I don't look back and think maybe there was something.

And he said, "Okay, give me 24 hours and call me back."

And then to my horror, he had escalated my idea to something which was to talk to you.

And I started hyperventilating, I think.

He said, "Take a deep breath.

I heard you.

You're right.

But if you want to kick under the table, if you want to be heard the way you want to be heard, it's only through talking on CNN to Amanpour.

It was a difficult decision.

But as I said, risks are when you say chutzpah, how would I have the guts not to do it at that point?

I looked at what happens.

Two scenarios.

And I'd learned to look at two worst case scenarios.

I do this interview, I don't get freed, and these guys come and essentially give me another beating that had happened and throw me back in solitary for a few months.

I knew I could live that.

Scenario two, I don't do this, there is no deal, and I'm wondering in three years what if I'd done this interview and I'd be out.

And so I made the decision to do the interview.

My family made the mistake that most of the families do.

When a hostage is first taken, a lot of people come around, tell them, "Be quiet.

Do not pull this into a Gordian knot.

Let's sort this quietly."

The State Department will tell you that, as would any other foreign ministry, whether you're Australian or Swedish or whoever, as would the analysts around it.

It is a mistake.

I can't emphasize that enough.

If you are taken as a hostage, you need to make noise.

It is politically costly for a president to make the decision to bring you out.

It is a terrible political decision to make unless they have a superstar hostage where they gain something because there's political value.

You took one more really brave and principled decision when you were then being freed finally because you were hurt and you told the Revolutionary Guards that you have red lines.

If they start playing around and demanding you do something extra for your freedom or say something for your freedom, you weren't going to do it.

Christiane, we were, when the deal finally happened, and again, I can't express enough gratitude that that decision was made and everyone involved to do it.

I knew that I had seen hostages who went to the brink of freedom all the way to the plane and came back.

No hostage deal is complete until you leave the airspace of that country.

It is just not done.

So I started telling them, "No, I'm the loose cannon here."

I started making demands and I told them that, "If you want to blow up this deal, do to me what you did to Nazanin Zaghari and ask for a signed confession by the plane.

I won't do it.

I won't get on.

I'm teaching you.

You want to blow up this deal, do that."

I would tell them, "I'm on the brink.

Don't push me.

I only have two years left on my sentence.

Maybe in the last minute I'll decide, you know what, I don't want to be sold."

I knew I didn't have another way out, but I also knew that these guys, I felt that they should feel not to push me.

It's a bad idea.

And they didn't.

They didn't make you sign the confession.

And finally, about two weeks after you were finally on American soil and back home here, October 7th happened.

Hamas waged war on Israel, Israel then counter, still going through a massive war in the Middle East.

Do you have any doubt in your mind that had this not been done before October 7th, you would be sitting here today?

I don't, but I think that this, the interview that I did with you was a straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

There are so many people, including in the Obama administration, including in the Trump administration and the Biden administration, and so many wonderful, wonderful people who pushed for this over years and years and years for this to finally happen.

But I look at it and I think with your help, we managed to expedite the decision making.

As you correctly pointed out, if that deal that brought me and the other hostages home was delayed by three weeks, I could not see any way for a U.S. president to agree to it.

So I guess thank you.

Thank God it happened when it happened.

Thank you for being with us.

Thank you.

And Siamak tells me that he endured not only the worst of humanity, but he encountered the best too, and that's also how he survived.

Now among world leaders here at the U.N., one of America's closest allies, Ireland, has taken a different approach to ending the war in Gaza by officially recognizing a Palestinian state and criticizing Israel's conduct of the war.

Ireland's Prime Minister, the Taoiseach Simon Harris, is joining me live right now.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you so much.

Can I just ask you, because today the story is really bad about Israel and Hezbollah.

We've already seen that more than 270 have been killed in today alone, and more than a thousand injured.

You have hundreds of peacekeepers in that very, very tense area along the border between Israel and Lebanon.

Is there anything that you're hearing that can de-escalate this, or is this now all-out war?

I think what we've seen today is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

We have seen effectively the opening of a potentially catastrophic second front in terms of the war in the Middle East.

We're also seeing civilians being targeted again.

We're not seeing a targeted response to terrorism here.

What we're actually seeing is amongst those dead so far, at least 21 children now confirmed dead as well, at least a thousand people injured.

So the pattern, ultimately, of flouting international law and disregard for rules of engagement in terms of protecting civilians is yet again being completely and utterly disregarded.

It's a really, really dangerous situation.

I'm pleased to say that our peacekeepers are safe and are secure, but it's the civilians who don't have the ability to defend themselves, don't have the ability to protect themselves that I'm really, really concerned of.

We should be here at the United Nations this week talking about de-escalation, and instead we're going to be meeting at a UN General Assembly against the backdrop of escalation.

And do you think, some have suggested, including American officials, that actually this General Assembly could inflame the situation there rather than de-escalate, depending on various, I guess, leaders' speeches?

Well, I certainly hope not.

I think we have to remind ourselves of the very purpose of the United Nations.

I mean, the United Nations was founded to resolve conflicts peacefully and politically.

And I do think the world now and world leaders as we gather here need to ask ourselves about the consistent application of the rule of law and of international law.

We cannot have a situation where international law must be applied to some but can be disregarded by others.

Israel, of course, has a right to live in security and safety.

Of course, Israel has a right to defend itself.

Of course, Israel has a right to address any terrorist attack that it experiences.

But that is not what we're seeing now.

What we're actually seeing is a blatant disregard for international law, no consideration in terms of protection of civilians, and yet again children finding themselves caught up in the midst of conflict.

This is the Lebanon front that you're talking about.

Now let's talk about the Gaza front, which almost has fallen off the front pages now, and people in Gaza are actually very worried about that.

You, Ireland, took a very different approach months ago.

You specifically recognized, along with Norway and Spain, a Palestinian state.

You had a huge amount of pushback from Israel.

How would you describe it?

Cold relations?

Do you have any influence anymore, let's say, around trying to get a ceasefire in Gaza or at least humanitarian intervention into Gaza?

So I think it's really important that when you have a foreign policy that you're consistent in terms of its application.

Ireland doesn't define itself as pro or anti any one country.

Ireland defines itself as pro-international law, pro-human rights, and pro-peace.

And that is the approach we took.

You've got to remember, in our history, we know what it's like to want the world to see you.

We know what it's like to struggle for statehood.

And therefore, we felt it was very important, at a time when others were trying to quash any glimmer of a two-state solution, to actually say to the people of Palestine, we see you.

We see you.

We hear you.

We will not forget you.

And we can differentiate very clearly between Hamas, a brutal, horrific terrorist organization that offers no hope of a future to the people of Palestine, and the people of Palestine who aspire for the basic things we all aspire for, so statehood, for freedom, for democracy.

And we want to see two states, Israel and Palestine, living peacefully side by side.

That's why we did it.

We're not a military power.

But we do have an ability, I believe, on the international stage to actually say, no, hang on a second.

If you believe in a two-state solution, the recognition of the existence of two states is an important place to start.

Before that, obviously, has to be an end to the war between Israel and Palestine.

Is there any hint that you're getting that these stalled ceasefire negotiations over Gaza with Hamas can in any way be unlocked?

And will that kind of fall off the agenda as a whole new front is being massively opened?

Being very honest, the world is not doing enough.

We've got to be really truthful about this.

I don't in any way doubt the bona fides, the effort, the tireless work of many to help bring about a ceasefire.

I really believe that.

I know so many people are working so hard to bring about a ceasefire.

But we've got to be honest.

You can try your best, and it can still be ineffective.

The reality of the situation at the moment is Netanyahu, for whatever reason, has calculated that he can continue in terms of the violence, in terms of the brutality, in terms of the loss of civilian life.

We as a world have to do something to change that calculation.

And that's why I've consistently said at an EU level it involves the EU reviewing the association agreement between the EU and Israel, because that has human rights clauses in it.

In my mind, human rights clauses aren't put in international agreements to pad them out or to read nicely.

They have to mean something.

So I do think as we gather here at the UN, we do need to dig deep to say what levers are at the disposal of the world to change that calculation so that Benjamin Netanyahu realises and to pass that a ceasefire must actually be brought about.

And I don't think we've done enough in that space, to be very honest.

Ukraine.

We ran into each other early September in Ukraine.

You were on an official mission there.

And I wonder what you've come back with, because now the president of Ukraine is here.

He will be unveiling his so-called victory plan to President Biden, Congress, other leaders.

They're both presidential candidates.

One of the things he wants is for not just more weapons, but for restrictions on those weapons to be released.

What do you think is going to unfold from your visit there in Ukraine?

So I'm very conscious of Ireland being militarily neutral, but not politically neutral.

We know the difference between right and wrong.

We stand fully behind Ukraine.

And I wanted to be there to pledge more humanitarian assistance, more humanitarian aid, and also to see first-hand.

You've got to actually see what's happening here, because I think the longer this goes on, I think the risk is the world begins to normalise it.

I found a people that were resilient.

I found a country that was managing to somewhat keep the show on the road despite the horrific bombardment.

But I also saw people who'd lost their homes in the bombings.

I also saw children who had had to flee temporarily occupied territories and the trauma of that.

I also saw energy and power plants that had been knocked out.

So from my perspective, I want us to continue in the here and now to see what we can do on the humanitarian side.

More broadly, I think we've got to get back to a further peace summit.

We have to get more people around the table.

I do believe, not to link our previous conversation, but the failure to consistently apply international law is making it harder to get some other players to the table in terms of the global south.

I think that is a real issue.

But I think now it is for President Zelensky to outline to the world how he believes we can next take the peace summit forward.

We need to grow the number of people around that table.

But the situation in Ukraine cannot be forgotten just because it's going on for a long time.

It is a horrific, brutal situation being experienced by people there.

Taoiseach Simon Harris, thank you so much indeed for being with us.

And next, in his new book On Freedom, historian Timothy Snyder explores what it is, how it's been misunderstood, and why it's our only chance for survival.

He now joins Walter Isaacson.

This conversation is part of our ongoing initiative that reports on threats to democracy, the impact of changes to voting laws, and what citizens need to know.

It's called Preserving Democracy.

Thank you, Christiane and Timothy Snyder.

Welcome back to the show.

Very glad I can talk to you.

Your new book On Freedom is sort of a follow to your 2017 bestseller On Tyranny.

And back in the book On Tyranny, you talked about America's turn to authoritarianism and the need we have to defend our institutions.

Tell me, how has that evolved since you first wrote that?

Well, on the national level, obviously, there's been an attempted coup d'état, an attempted changing regime in the United States, which is something that I predicted in On Tyranny.

The point about institutions, of course, is that we can admire them, but if we admire them from afar, they're going to fail us.

They're only as good as we are.

From my point of view, in those years since I wrote On Tyranny, I've had to answer the question of if we're defending something, which is what On Tyranny is about, what exactly is that?

What would a good United States look like?

And what does freedom mean?

And so that's what moved me personally onto the next book.

And when you talk about On Freedom, you go back yourself to, I think, 1976, bicentennial.

I loved reading about you and ringing of the bells.

But since then, you start thinking about what does that word freedom mean?

And based on your career, your understandings and your misunderstandings, how have you come to a sense of what we should really mean when we say freedom?

Thanks for that question.

And thanks for the word misunderstanding, because I worry both like in the genre of memoir and in the study of freedom, we start from the position that, hey, the author is right about everything, I'm right about everything.

Whereas I think freedom involves recognizing that you're wrong.

I think a person who can't recognize that he is wrong can't be a free person because he's inside somebody else's story.

So what I'm trying to show with that image is how I believed at the time, when I was a kid, that the bell I was ringing on that farm, which is part of where I grew up, was connected to other bells, the Liberty Bell, that bicentennial pop made me think of 1776.

But what I didn't know at the time was how to ask what it meant to be free.

And I didn't know other people in the US who had other kinds of experiences.

So the book is a kind of attempt to consider the US story, not because it's all wrong, but because if we take history seriously, we learn where we can do things better.

My sense of freedom is that it has to be positive.

It can't be about worshipping the past.

It can't be about believing somebody else to take care of freedom for you.

It has to be about combining the things that you believe are good.

And what happens is that as individuals, we realize to do that, we need help from others.

And so freedom is an individual thing.

I believe it's the value of values.

But we can only get there if we together create the condition so that we can grow up to be free people, like I was lucky enough to do.

You talk about freedom has to be positive.

And in your book, you make this distinction between positive and negative freedom.

Explain that to us.

So negative freedom, I think, is something which is pretty close to American common sense.

Negative freedom is the idea that we're free if we just push everything away.

If the government is pushed away, if oppression is pushed away, if government is small, if we eliminate government.

And I think that is at best half the story or just the beginning of the answer.

This was brought home to me, actually, in parts of Ukraine that were deoccupied, where it was clear that, sure, removing the torture facilities was really important.

Stopping the deportation of children was really important.

But it was only the beginning of something else.

People who arrived at concentration camps after the Second War had a similar experience.

People said liberated, but then once they contemplated the concentration camps, they said, "Wait a minute.

These people aren't free just because the Germans are gone.

They need health care.

They need medical attention."

And those extreme cases bring us back to a basic reality.

We need other things besides the absence of government to be free.

We need cooperation so that our kids can have education, so that we're not afraid when we need medical attention, so that we can look forward to old age and retirement pensions.

These basic things that create security around us actually make us more free, because they make us less anxious, less fearful, and more capable of thinking about what we individually think is good, and more capable of realizing in the world.

And that's the positive vision.

That freedom is about believing things are good, combining those good things in our own way, and leading a life of moral character.

I think one of the positive versions of freedom you mentioned in the book that's core to what America's about is social mobility and the ability to get into the middle class.

Tell me how that has eroded a bit and endangered this concept of freedom.

The guts of the book are the five forms of freedom, the five chapters.

There's an introduction where I define freedom, a conclusion where I make proposals for government.

What links them are these five ideas, which I call forms of freedom.

And mobility is right in the middle.

Because of course, if we're going to be free, we have to be able to rebel.

But the ironic thing is, we need institutions in order to rebel against institutions.

If you want to leave Ohio like I did, somebody has to have built the road.

If you want to get an education, somebody has to fund the university.

In order for us to rebel, in order for us to do new things, to go places, both literally and metaphorically, other people have to do the work for us.

So the American dream was possible in a certain way in the 20th century, thanks to a combination of the market and the welfare state.

Since 1945, social mobility has slowed down.

And this has meant that both in reality and in people's minds, access to middle class has become much, much harder.

So part of being free or part of creating a land of the free is creating the conditions, whatever that might mean, from the ground up, so that young people can move, so that they can be free, so that they can rebel, so they can realize their own ideas that are different than ours or against ours.

In both On Tyranny and Now and On Freedom, you talk about the populist backlash, the authoritarian sort of sentiments, the ability to tolerate authoritarian type leaders.

Is part of that because we failed in the sense of giving people these positive freedoms like social mobility into the middle class?

Is this an understandable backlash?

I think part of it is that part of the failure is that we pushed freedom away from ourselves.

Freedom always has to be about an individual pushing against the world on the basis of things that individual really believes in.

And for the last 30, 35 years, there's been too much talk, at least in the US, about how freedom is brought inevitably by capitalism, which it isn't, or inevitably by the founding fathers, which it isn't.

One has to take hold of the economy or take hold of history.

One has to take hold of things to be free.

And when we preach that we're better or that capitalism will save us, we're actually making ourselves unfree because we're habituating ourselves to the idea that somebody or something from outside is going to save us.

So I think that's part of it.

But then the other part of it is I completely agree.

If we talk about freedom, but make it impossible, we're creating this condition which is psychologically very demanding.

If we say this is the land of the free, there's an American dream, and then we don't make that American dream accessible, then people are going to look for easy answers.

They're going to look for people to blame.

So the connection you're making, I think, is absolutely valid.

You set up the book by talking about a trip you took to Ukraine, and what you learned about the word "freedom" just by being in Ukraine.

So I wrote this book, and then I tested it.

I took it into prison and taught it there as a test.

And I took it to Ukraine three times and talked about it with colleagues and revised it as I moved around Ukraine.

And that was really, really helpful, partly because, as you know very well, Ukrainians are the people right now who talk about freedom the most.

And so I wanted to listen.

And in what they were saying, there were a couple of important lessons.

One was that freedom is about the future, which is really, really important.

Very often, the authoritarians who you mentioned earlier, or the people you call a populace, are trying to bring us into some kind of nostalgic past.

But you can't go back to the past.

You can go to various kinds of futures, but they're only there if you can imagine them, if you can realize them.

And the way the Ukrainians talk about freedom is not negative.

It's not, "We just have to get the Russians out," something like, "The Russians got in the way of these futures which we really believed we had."

And the second thing, as I mentioned before, was the positive-negative distinction, that when you're in the rubble, you realize, "Well, it's good that the Russians are gone, but someone's going to have to clear this rubble.

Someone's going to have to restore this sidewalk.

Someone's going to have to rebuild this road.

Someone's going to have to restore the bus line."

And then the third thing is character, right?

So, if freedom is just negative, it's just the absence of barriers, that means it means doing whatever I feel like at a given moment.

But is that really freedom?

I mean, what I think is that freedom is about having positive values and asserting them and realizing them and trying to live consistently with them.

And as you do that over time, you become a personality or you build something like character.

And when that happens, there are moments that you can only do one thing precisely because you are free.

And it was Zelensky staying in Kiev and millions of other Ukrainians staying at a time when we thought that they would flee or maybe we would have fled.

That got me thinking about that, that an unfree person can always try to run, but sometimes a free person has to do the right thing precisely because he or she is a free person.

One of the less free places I can think of is a maximum security prison.

And you taught your seminar on freedom in a prison like that.

Tell me what you learned from them about the concept of freedom.

Well, I'm going to just say about something really simple first, which is that we have a lot of talented people in our prisons and these were some pretty smart students and they really did the work.

And I took the book manuscript to prison to test my own American experience because in many, my American experience has been, I mean, there's been some bumps along the way, but it's been a good one.

And it's one that you could generally make line up with the story of an American dream.

But that's not the only story.

There are other people's stories, there are African American stories.

And most of the men I was teaching were African Americans.

And those stories are, must do and must involve the history of slavery, the history of Jim Crow, the history of voter suppression, and now the history of mass incarceration.

And so since I was basing my book around my own life, my own experiences, I needed to get a sense of their experiences and how they were different.

I needed to know, I needed to have more of an intuitive personal sense of other American stories because you can't base a story about freedom on your own life if you can't listen to other people.

If you don't have a sense of their experiences, their bodily experiences, their human experiences.

The other thing about these guys was that they were very deep readers of philosophy.

And this is basically a philosophy book.

And what we were doing was we were reading philosophers together.

And they helped me see how I could use the philosophers that I liked and apply them to America and to questions of race.

I did that much better thanks to them.

Kamala Harris has really grabbed onto this banner of freedom, just as you were coming out with the book.

And in her first advertisement, I'll read something she says, "We choose freedom, the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead.

Freedom to be safe from gun violence, freedom to make decisions about your own body, a future when no child lives in poverty, and we can all afford health care and no one's above the law."

How does that definition of freedom and the grabbing of the banner of freedom by Kamala Harris, how do you assess that?

Well, philosophically, I think the vice president is correct in that freedom, I think, comes before democracy.

If you believe in democracy, you have to believe in a people that can rule.

And a people that can rule has to be a free people, which raises the question of how do you create a free people?

It takes work.

It takes institutions.

It takes cooperation.

It takes, as she says, you have to choose freedom.

But on the other hand, you also have to build the institutions which allow children to grow up free.

So I mean, I'm watching this from afar, right?

Like, it's, from my point of view, it's a coincidence.

But it is interesting to watch her move from a language, trying, first she's trying to take the language of negative freedom from the Republicans.

She's talking about, she's saying we're the party that's going to keep government off their back.

But then there's a kind of glide towards positive freedom, as she and others in the campaign start talking about freedom, not just from government oppression, but the freedom to do things, which I think is the right move, philosophically anyway, and hopefully politically as well.

Because as we were saying, like, freedom from is important, but only because it's necessary for freedom to.

We want to have a country where we can all grow up to be diverse, beautiful, different, flourishing individuals.

That's what positive freedom is about.

But to do that, we can't, we have to decide to create these institutions together that make it possible.

One of the things I enjoyed about the book, with the tales of your childhood in Ohio, I didn't quite realize you grew up in such a sort of idyllic in ways childhood there.

What are you thinking when you see what's happening to the Haitian immigrants in Springfield and the type of rhetoric now being used?

Man, that just, it makes me, it just makes me so upset, right?

Springfield is about 20 miles from where I grew up.

And, you know, the idea that like people who are just trying to live their normal lives, people who are just trying to live their normal lives have to be pulled into this spectacle of hatred.

I think it's infuriating, right?

Like this whole rhetoric of us and them, it makes, it makes freedom impossible.

Like freedom has to be about all individuals.

We're going to kind of create some conditions together, whether we agree with each other's ideas or not.

We're going to create some conditions together, call them rights, call it welfare state.

We use a reasonable way that we can all live decent, dignified lives.

As soon as it goes to us and them, we don't like the Haitians.

We're going to make up stories about them.

As soon as it does that and people's minds change, we flip over to fear and anxiety and who we are suddenly depends upon who somebody else is not.

And that's just completely inconsistent with freedom.

So it upsets me, right?

Because Springfield is a normal place where like the Haitian immigrants are making a significant contribution to normal life, like they do in other medium-sized cities and towns in Ohio, by the way, it's completely normal.

And they're not being allowed to live this normal life because of this us and them stuff.

This us and them stuff, which is the threats of violence and disruption, brings this unreality into their lives.

It really upsets me.

I found On Tyranny to be a very cautionary book.

And now this book, On Freedom, is actually seems a pretty hopeful book.

It's forward-looking.

Tell me, what is it about this book that you feel is optimistic and hopeful about what we should be rather than what we should just guard against?

I'm glad you think so, because that was certainly the intention.

And it goes back to your first, very first question.

I mean, if there's something to defend, what is it, right?

It's not just enough to be against tyranny.

What is freedom?

It's not just enough to be against bad government.

What is good government?

And how can we link freedom to good government?

And the reason I'm optimistic is that I think we can.

I think that we do have the right word at the center of our national conversation.

That word is freedom.

I think it's possible, and this is the intellectual work I tried to do in the book.

I think it's possible to get freedom right.

I think if we think it through, we come to an idea which is positive in the sense that we're talking about.

And then when we think about positive freedom, not negative freedom, not just pushing things away, but positive freedom, it gives us prescriptions for good policy, which we don't have to think about in terms of being, you know, it's controversial in any way because it's government helping freedom, right?

The thing that justifies government, in my view, is freedom itself.

Freedom itself is the thing that justifies government.

So I think if we can come to that conclusion, if we can bring together conservative folks and left-wing folks and people with various kinds of ideas, people who think that the world is about values and are more conservative, yeah, you're right.

People who think that the world is more about institutions, about creating conditions for people, yeah, you're right.

And the reason that everyone is right is because of freedom itself.

So I'm hopeful because I think the right ideas can lead to the right kind of politics.

And I'm also hopeful because although the history of our kind of institution is beset with tragedy and failure, there are also moments where things unexpectedly go better than we think.

And also because, you know, I'm insisting on thinking about the future here.

We have a problem in our politics, which is we're having trouble thinking about futures.

I think that in the range of futures that we have as a country, there are more good ones than we realize.

We're caught up in the bad ones, and it's completely understandable.

But there are also many, many good things down the road, which we don't yet see and which we could get to.

Timothy Snyder, thank you for joining us.

I really appreciate the conversation.

Thank you.

And that's where we end tonight.

Thank you for watching.

Goodbye from New York and the United Nations.

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