Weekly Mind Dump: "Do Not Obey in Advance"

Threats by Trump and his minions to go after journalists must be taken seriously.

Week of 11/10-11/16, 2024:

I confess to being shaken by an article in The Guardian by British journalist Carole Cadwalladr yesterday. Titled “How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world,” she says,

Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.

Trump’s purported candidate to be FBI director Kash Patel said, “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you.” They come no more unhinged in MAGAland than Patel, a man in the image of Goebbels, Streicher and other past bullhorns for tyrants.

Add to this, increasingly pumped up Elon Musk threatening, “The Hammer of Justice is coming” after Trump critics.

So, why am I shaken? Because the reality is sinking in that even I, a mere gadfly, could come into MAGA’s crosshairs. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever conceive that America could actually succumb to autocracy. Land of the free, home of the brave and all of that. I spent much of my diplomatic career defending others’ rights and freedoms. Must I now fear for my myself and colleagues who have always taken for granted freedom of expression for ourselves?

Friends are asking me if I do not fear retribution for all the critical political commentary I publish once Trump is back in power. Wouldn’t it be wiser to cut back, tone things down a bit? I respond with Yale professor Timothy Snyder’s counsel, “Do not obey in advance” — as did the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

I will confess this: my wife and I, in tandem with another couple, are scouting apartments in nearby Ontario, Canada — not as a refuge from MAGA tyranny (yet), but as a getaway to periodically escape the craziness here at home.

I also take to heart Winston Churchill’s purported compliment: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

Throughout history, writers have been notorious for getting themselves into trouble for their ideas. Socrates was forced to kill himself by drinking poison for the crime of “impiety.” My namesake, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake for having the temerity to state, among other things, that the earth revolved around the sun. The British Crown convicted the great English-American firebrand, Tom Paine, of “seditious libel” in absentia for advocating in popular pamphlets a progressive tax and social welfare programs to alleviate poverty. Hannah Arendt, author of The Banality of Evil, managed to escape Nazi Germany by the skin of her teeth and resettle in the United States. The Soviet Union expelled Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the country in 1974 for exposing the vast gulag forced labor camp system. Today, PEN International monitors the cases of 122 writers who suffer persecution in countries across the globe.

I have been denounced in the past by dictatorial regimes. Cuban official media labeled me a “Yankee spy” and declared, “James Bruno confirmed in [my book] Havana Queen that which Cuba has denounced repeatedly, that the United States uses its diplomatic mission in Havana as a headquarters for human and technological spying, while it selects, trains and finances counterrevolutionary elements to carry out subversive acts against the Cuban government.” But that was a foreign government who couldn’t lay a hand on me. And their denunciation helped me sell more books!

I dealt with dissident writers in various countries in the course of my more than two decades as a Foreign Service officer. I helped resettle several dissident Cuban writers in the U.S. My favorite Vietnamese dissident was the writer Duong Thu Huong. At our first get-together over lunch in Hanoi, I asked this spirited woman how she planned to deal with communist officials who were harassing her. With a twinkle in her eye, she said without hesitating, “I spit in their face!”

Artyom Borovik was a groundbreaking Russian investigative journalist who was critical of Vladimir Putin. I’d occasionally meet him to discuss his reporting on Moscow’s role in Afghanistan. His “Top Secret” TV program exposed the corruption of Russia’s political and economic elite, earning him many enemies. Borovik quoted Putin in an article in 2000 as saying, “There are three ways to influence people: blackmail, vodka, and the threat to kill.” Days later, he died in a still-unsolved Moscow plane accident — one of what was to be many Putin critics who have turned up dead. He was 39.

It was a privilege to know these very courageous writers who stood up to tyranny and authoritarianism and who paid a heavy price in terms of denied employment, harassment, imprisonment and, in one’s case, the loss of his life. Such people deserve our unmitigated admiration and respect, not to mention support.

It is therefore incumbent on us to follow their example and to obey neither in advance nor when oppression comes, if it does.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.