History is bigger than any flag

What follows comes from my own experiences, my reading and my limitations. The opinions are mine. The facts stay facts, however inconvenient they are, and disagreeing with an interpretation doesn't give anyone the right to rewrite what happened.

It was 2008, and I was in Russia. I was young, engaged to a beautiful Russian woman, and just a few months away from our wedding. A wedding that, like certain economic forecasts and campaign promises, never quite materialized.

That year, Dmitry Medvedev became president of the Russian Federation on May 7. The following day, Vladimir Putin, who had left the Kremlin after two consecutive terms, became prime minister. On paper, it was a perfectly legal reshuffling of offices. But even then, people were asking where the power had actually gone.

I was deeply interested in the country's history. History had always been my favorite subject. I loved dates, wars, revolutions, historical figures, the great turning points. Like so many students, I thought I knew World War II reasonably well. On that trip I learned that knowing what happened and understanding how another people remember it are very different things.

The old man in Red Square #

We were walking through Red Square when I noticed an elderly man reciting something. My beginner's Russian wasn't good enough to make out exactly what he was saying. Truth be told, I could barely tell where one sentence ended and the next began. So I asked my fiancée.

She explained that he was talking about the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

That caught me off guard. I knew the Soviet Union had fought and that the Allies had defeated Hitler together, but the version of history I'd absorbed in Brazil (from school, books, films and popular culture) put the United States at the center of the victory. In my mind, the Americans had a much bigger part in that story. Standing there, listening to that old man, I realized that Moscow remembered the war from a very different center of gravity.

What surprised me was that the same war could live in people's memories in such different ways, even when the underlying facts were the same.

Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Eastern Front was the largest and deadliest theater of the war in Europe. Soviet forces stopped the German advance, launched counteroffensives, and took Berlin in 1945. None of this erases D-Day, the American and British contribution, or the efforts of the other Allies. It means we can't turn a collective victory into the heroic story of one country.

Nor does any of that make Soviet history innocent. In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland after the German invasion and took part in partitioning the country under the secret protocol of the German-Soviet pact. The Soviet state could be an aggressor at one stage of the war and decisive in defeating Nazism at another.

That walk was the first time I thought seriously about the word 'narrative': someone always decides what to emphasize, what to leave out and where a story begins. That doesn't mean everyone gets to invent their own truth. School textbooks deserve that scrutiny too. A study published in 2021 looked at how Brazilian high-school history textbooks presented World War II. It says nothing about what I studied decades earlier, but it shows that historians treat the selection and arrangement of events as a research subject.

Hannah Arendt made a distinction between facts and opinions that might have saved me a few years of confusion. In her 1967 essay 'Truth and Politics,' she wrote about how vulnerable factual truth becomes when people fighting for power try to reduce it to one more convenient version of events. Interpretations can be debated, but whether something happened isn't decided by a vote.

The prediction I thought was an exaggeration #

During that same walk, my fiancée said something I have never forgotten: 'You know, Pablo, Putin is going to be prime minister now, but he'll never really give up power. He wants the USSR back.'

At the time, I thought she was exaggerating. I was a foreigner fascinated by that history; she had grown up much closer to its consequences, and no amount of reading erases that difference.

A private conversation from 2008 proves nothing about Putin's intentions, and I don't think today's Russia is the Soviet Union brought back to life. But the years that followed gave her concern more weight: the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008; the occupation and internationally unrecognized annexation of Crimea in 2014; and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022.

When a state decides that its memories, its security, or its past greatness entitle it to another people's territory, it turns the nation into a justification for subjugating people, and their freedom into an administrative detail.

I considered calling the present war a new Holodomor. I understand the emotional impulse, but historically it would be imprecise. The Holodomor was the famine caused by the Stalinist regime's policies in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, which killed millions of people. Today's invasion is a different tragedy, with other circumstances and other people responsible. We don't need to confuse the two to see what they share: in both, entire populations are treated as instruments of power and lives as disposable.

Freedom belongs to no political party #

Don't ask me to choose between communism and capitalism as though I were choosing a religion, or to treat right and left as automatic certificates of virtue. Economic systems, public policies and ideas can all be debated. The problem begins when a set of ideas becomes so sacred that reality stops mattering and people can be sacrificed in its name.

In his 1689 'Letter Concerning Toleration,' John Locke argued against using the coercive power of the state to impose religious beliefs. His thinking had its historical limits, but his central question still holds: what gives anyone the right to turn personal convictions into a license to persecute a neighbor?

John Stuart Mill went further in 'On Liberty' (1859): interfering in someone's life by force needs a justification, and that justification is preventing harm to others. Mill also feared the tyranny of public opinion, the kind of oppression that comes from the neighborhood, the family or the crowd that has decided how everyone else should live.

In 1958, Isaiah Berlin separated two meanings of freedom: freedom from interference, and freedom to shape your own life. I don't call it freedom when I can praise my country's greatness but can't exist outside the role it chose for me.

Another conversation in the same city #

While we were still in Moscow, my fiancée told me about the situation gay people faced. I remember how cautiously she brought it up, almost as though she wasn't sure how I'd react. She spoke of prejudice and violence, and of the sense that someone could be beaten in the street while everyone around them looked the other way.

It disturbed me, and it wasn't only her impression: in 2006 and 2007, Human Rights Watch documented attacks on LGBT demonstrators in Moscow and serious failures by police to protect them. Years later, Russia's 2013 law against the so-called 'propaganda' of nontraditional relationships made the exercise of basic rights more difficult still.

That doesn't make 'the Russians' a single, uniform creature. There were Russians protesting, getting attacked, standing up for their neighbors and challenging the authorities. Reducing a whole people to one trait would repeat, on a smaller scale, the same intellectual violence I say I oppose.

You don't have to approve of someone's way of life, understand whom they love, share their religion or agree with their convictions to accept that they have as much right as I do to live in safety. Disagreement doesn't give anyone permission to humiliate or beat someone, and no tradition or culture excuses the cowardice of watching an assault and not caring.

Not everything is a matter of perspective #

In a moment of impatience I might say it myself, that everything is a matter of perspective, and I'd be wrong. People see the same facts differently, interests compete and memories are selective, but a person being assaulted is not a point of view and an invasion is not an opinion. A life lost is no less lost because someone told a convincing story about it.

In 1945, Karl Popper formulated the paradox of tolerance: a society that extends unlimited tolerance to those determined to destroy tolerance itself risks losing it. His argument leaves plenty of room for rational disagreement and doesn't ask anyone to silence every opponent. The limit comes when intolerance replaces discussion with persecution and violence.

Being tolerant means recognizing a dignity in others that doesn't depend on my approval, and resisting violence without becoming what I'm fighting against. It doesn't require agreeing with everybody, much less pretending to be neutral between the person throwing punches and the person taking them.

Arendt's distinction between power and violence, from her 1970 work, helps here too: acting together, persuading others and building a public life are different from forcing people to submit. Violence can destroy political relationships, and it can't replace legitimacy.

This is probably what exhausts me most about political arguments today. The slightest political conviction can be enough to make us hate one another, and the strongest ones sometimes leave us disillusioned. Somewhere along the way we start treating the person who disagrees with us as an avatar of the enemy camp and forget they're still a person.

Not every ideology has committed the same crimes, political choices don't all have the same consequences, and oppressors and the oppressed don't share equal blame; saying otherwise would be false equivalence. But any conviction can stop being thought and turn into fanaticism the moment someone decides that being on the right side means no longer having to question their own actions.

I'm writing this at 1:51 in the morning, tired and with no intention of settling centuries of political philosophy in a single essay. If there's a conclusion, it's that defending freedom means recognizing the humanity of others, even when they're nothing like us.

And if the best thing you can say about yourself is that you're on the right or the left, I've got some bad news: you can still be nothing more than an asshole waving a flag.

Look out for your fellow human being, and work on becoming a better person without demanding that the entire world turn into a copy of you.

That walk across Red Square left me a little more suspicious of certainties that fit so neatly into a slogan.