Stand with Ukraine in the Fight against Evil | Garry Kasparov | TED

Five years ago,

I was on this stage

to talk about the relationships between humans and machines.

Today, I'm here to talk only about the relationships between humans.

I regularly say

in my lectures on artificial intelligence

that humans will always have a monopoly on evil.

It's not a threat,

just a reminder that people choose.

We are not algorithms.

We are not bound by code or commandments or laws or treaties.

We have them.

But we choose.

So let us talk now about the choices we make.

About things in black and white.

About Russia's war on Ukraine.

And about good and evil.

My life experience prepared me to identify evil at an early age.

Not my life as the chess player.

Not even as the youngest world champion in history.

No.

My relevant experience is where I was born and raised,

in what Ronald Reagan accurately called the “evil empire,”

the USSR.

As a young star in the chess-crazed Soviet Union in the ’70s and ’80s,

I had many privileges my compatriots did not.

I could travel to the West outside of the Iron Curtain,

where it was obvious to me very quickly

that they were the free world and we were not,

despite what communist propaganda told us.

I eventually got into trouble for sharing these views.

What late American civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis

would have called “good trouble.”

My criticism of the Soviet system

and my praise for America was bad enough.

But it was even worse because where it was published.

[“Playboy” Interview: Garry Kasparov]

(Laughter)

My comments were almost as [much of] a scandal

as Soviet movie star Natalya Negoda’s nude photos in “Playboy” in the same year.

I felt I had to speak out

to use my fame to push the envelope of free speech

in Gorbachev's collapsing empire.

The next year, in October 1990,

in my world championship match against Anatoly Karpov in New York City,

I refused to play under Soviet hammer and sickle

and demanded to play under Russian flag.

The USSR staggered on for another year

until it disintegrated on Christmas Day, 1991.

Oh, what a great moment in world history.

How we celebrated,

the evil empire had fallen, the future looked bright.

And yet, eight years later, on December 31, 1999,

a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB became the president of Russia.

His name was Vladimir Putin.

How this happened

is a long, painful story.

And in fact, I wrote a book about it in 2015 called "Winter is Coming."

Not an original title, I have to admit.

(Laughter)

But I'm a fan of "Game of Thrones."

(Laughter)

And also I felt it was appropriate because it was a warning.

The subtitle was more important:

"Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped."

The publisher, by the way, didn't like it.

"Enemies."

It's too harsh.

Sounded like Cold War.

"Absolutely," I said.

"Cold War because winter is coming."

(Laughter)

Well, here we are, 17 years later.

And if I wrote a sequel,

it would be called “Winter Is Here.”

And the subtitle would be "I Bleeping Told You So."

(Laughter)

Actually, my first article of warning

was published in “The Wall Street Journal”

on January 4, 2001.

I saw evil because I heard evil.

Putin was telling us what he was.

All we had to do was listen.

When Putin said that there was no such thing as a former KGB agent,

I knew Russia's fragile democracy was in danger.

When Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union

was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,

I knew Russia’s newly independent neighbors were at risk.

And when Putin talked at the Munich Security Conference in 2007

about a return to spheres of influence,

I knew he was ready to launch his plan.

It was the language from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939.

The language Hitler and Stalin used to divide Europe.

And a year later, in 2008,

Putin invaded the Republic of Georgia.

2014, Ukraine.

It's a paradox, isn't it?

Dictators lie about everything they have done,

but often they tell us exactly what they're going to do.

Just listen.

Anyone who is surprised at Putin's war crimes in Ukraine

must not be aware about his long record,

beginning with the Second Chechen War in Grozny more than two decades ago.

Vladimir Putin has been a war criminal from the start.

So in 2005, still being ranked number one,

I retired from professional chess

to form a pro-democracy, anti-Putin movement in Russia.

As you could see, it didn't go so well.

But it was not about winning or losing.

I knew it was my moral duty

in keeping with the slogan of Soviet dissidents:

"Do what you must and so be it."

Ah, my friends and critics both kept telling me,

"Gary, you are a chess player, you're not a politician.

This is not chess.

You see everything in black and white.

Politics are gray.

You have to compromise."

Really?

Those who peacefully marched with me for free Russia

are either in exile, like me.

Or in jail, like Alexei Navalny.

Or even murdered like Boris Nemtsov.

Compromise?

Not black and white?

Are you sure?

Compromise with this?

You cannot look at the images from Ukraine in recent weeks

and say there is no pure evil.

Mariupol destroyed, Bucha slaughtered,

Kramatorsk train station massacred.

And worse is yet to come.

And these horrors are not from Poland in 1945.

Not from Rwanda in 1994.

Not Aleppo 2016.

This is Europe this week.

How could this happen?

How did we forget what evil can do?

We have lost the generation that saw World War II firsthand.

Otherwise we reserve absolute evil for fiction.

In fables, they believe in true evil.

Good is harder to define.

There is no pure good.

If anyone says they know what pure good is,

it's probably evil.

(Laughter)

In fantasy tales of hobbits and elves and dwarves,

there was an idea that good comes in different forms and shapes,

often in conflict.

But they had to be united when facing absolute evil.

Good will disagree.

Evil says, "No more disagreements ever."

That was life in real Mordor, the Soviet Union.

That's what Putin wants for Russia and the world.

We celebrated the end of the Cold War, but for too long,

we forgot that evil doesn’t die.

It can be buried for a while under the rubble of the Berlin Wall,

but it grows back through the cracks of our apathy.

We called it diplomacy

when Putin was embraced by the leaders of the free world

as equal despite his crimes.

We called it engagement

when we bought trillions of dollars in Russian oil and gas,

money that built Putin's police state and his war machine.

Let us call these things what they are:

it was appeasement, it was collaboration.

These days, we prefer to focus on domestic issues.

We argue about the past,

we fantasize about the future

while ignoring the present.

Once the move is made

you cannot change it.

Acknowledge the wrongdoings of the past,

but do not pretend it can be fixed.

It's the present that must be fixed.

The heroes of the past were far from perfect.

But the world we live in is better because of them.

We too cannot be perfect.

But we must always try to be better.

As a chess player,

I know that strategy is the future impact of present decisions.

However grand our plans are for two, five, even ten moves ahead,

it's the move that we make now that determines that future.

Ukraine is now on the front line of the war,

global war of freedom against tyranny.

The war the free world didn't want to admit existed.

It cannot be ignored any longer.

Brave Ukrainians

are fighting like hell and dying right now

to remind us not to take liberty for granted.

Putin,

like every dictator before him,

underestimated the free will of free people.

They deserve every weapon,

every resource

to win this war.

Because they're fighting for us.

Not only for the whole and free Ukraine.

Everyone who told me a decade ago I was wrong,

now is telling I'm right.

Unfortunately.

But we're still repeating the same mistakes

of thinking that we can muddle through

without taking risks, without taking a stand.

The price of stopping a dictator always goes up with every delay,

every hesitation.

Meeting evil halfway,

it's still a victory for evil.

Evil tempts us with our weakness,

with our desire for comfort, being comfortable,

cautious, rational, civilized.

What kind of civilization [are we] fighting for,

if we allow war crimes and genocide again?

What kind of world are we leaving for our children and grandchildren

if we only talk of the past and the future

while ignoring murder and misery in the present?

This is not chess.

This is not a battle between opposite colors,

but of opposite values.

Freedom, life and love

versus tyranny, death and hatred.

This is not chess.

But sometimes things are black and white.

Sometimes you have to fight for what you believe.

Or you lose it.

This is not chess.

There are no draws, no compromises in our battle with true evil.

It's win or lose.

And so we must fight.

And so we must win.

(Ukrainian) Slava Ukraini!

Glory to Ukraine.

Glory to freedom.

Thank you.

(Applause)