Summary
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israel. He is a famous historian, an author, and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His bestsellers are Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). He appeared in TED talks sometimes when people were worried about our world because he had precise ideas that we wanted to ask. For example, when the US president was changed, when technology was rapidly growing, when the coronavirus started spreading, we were troubled, then he gave his comments to us.
The moment is probably starting the war between Ukraine and Russia.
Yuval said that the key issue of the war is that President Putin has a fantasy that Ukraine must return to Russia, for Putin, it’s not related to whether Ukraine is an independent nation or not. It's a strong feeling of denial of Ukraine’s right to exist. Ukraine doesn’t want to return and the Russian people and Ukraine don't want to start a war. Ukraine doesn’t have weapons to win and Ukraine’s President said that in the past, Ukraine had made a mistake abandoning the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Countries that don’t have nuclear weapons are not better and are always attacked or threatened. Is it strange because they must be great countries that hope for world peace? Many countries give weapons to Ukraine now to help Ukraine.
And then Yuval explains that we’ve built based on collaboration, in our future, it depends on being able to cooperate and understand, otherwise, we will become extinct as a species, and the war in Ukraine could change everything, because of the shock waves destabilizing the whole world and someone's technology leads to another regional conflict. It means that people have smartphones, and actively participate in the war, though, information isn't true. We should think that we don't know everything that is happening. In the end, I listened to the shocking words that as a historian, people should be liberated from the past... Even in Israel where Yuval lives, where people study their own history hard, people also suffer from too much history. Germany who is now the leader of Europe is also afraid of the Nazis' history.
Everyone should kind of free themselves from the memories of the Second World War. The Russian people don't want this war and they are not rich but poor. They couldn't eat enough.
When Japan lost WW2, the Japanese Emperor asked McCarthy to help all Japanese people without the Emperor and to give them food.
Putin and China which might connect this conflict, and where Yuval is not an expert on, listen to your own country's citizens' voices. They don’t want this war and in your countries, there are many people who couldn’t eat enough.
It’s difficult to be liberated from the past, it’s not the same as not learning or studying.
