The Via Rasella attack was a historic partisan bombing in Rome on March 23, 1944. Italian resistance fighters from the communist GAP targeted a marching column of German SS-police. The blast and gunfire killed 33 German soldiers and triggered a brutal Nazi reprisal at the Ardeatine Caves.

Richard Sorge was a master Soviet spy during World War II who operated in Tokyo under the cover of a German journalist. He changed the course of the war by informing the Soviet Union that Japan would not attack Siberia, allowing Stalin to move vital eastern troops to defend Moscow against Nazi Germany.

Jared Diamond — Pulitzer Prize winner, bestselling author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, and UCLA professor since 1966 — delivers a masterclass on why past civilizations collapsed and what we can learn from them today.

Diamond opens with an analogy: asking "what's the single main reason a society collapses" is like asking "what's the single main reason a marriage fails." There's rarely just one cause — it's usually a combination of factors, and getting even one badly wrong can be enough to bring down the whole system.

The talk covers:

🏝️ Ecological factors — deforestation on Easter Island, the collapse of Cahokia, drought and the Anasazi in the American Southwest, the fall of the Khmer Empire at Angkor, and how soil salinization cost the Fertile Crescent its millennia-long agricultural dominance.

⚔️ Collective societal mistakes — the Norse in Greenland, who refused to eat fish and failed to build relations with the Inuit, with a surprising modern parallel to Brexit.

👑 Individual leadership failures — Alcibiades and the disastrous Athenian expedition against Syracuse, Kaiser Wilhelm II ending the alliance with Russia, the 1973 coup in Chile, and Imperial Japan's decision to go to war with the United States.

🌍 New global threats — globalization, human-caused climate change, and nuclear risk, which mean the danger of collapse today is no longer local but potentially global.

🕊️ Reasons for hope — foreign aid, the shift to renewable energy, the mobilization of younger generations, and the historical power of peaceful protest, from the civil rights movement to Tiananmen Square.

The lecture closes with a Q&A touching on current events: political polarization in the US, the role of the Supreme Court, voter turnout, women in leadership, and a preview of Diamond's upcoming seventh book on the conditions under which leaders can actually make a difference.

📍 Recorded at UCLA