In 1974, I once spent an evening huddled around a shortwave radio set in Moscow with the grandson of Mihail Kalinin, former President of the USSR under Stalin, both of us straining to hear a Voice of America news broadcast through crude Soviet jamming interference
It was a moment forever etched in my mind as a metaphor for the Soviet Union’s failed efforts to degrade its citizens by censoring alternative sources of information. It was also an omen predicting the country’s downfall less than a generation later. Its own elite didn’t even buy the party line. For decades, tens of millions under the Iron Curtain were kept intellectually alive through its broadcasts. After the fall, tens of millions more still listened, still struggled, still fought -- as Aseyev knows better than most.
Even before Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, the VOA was born amid the despair and anger after Pearl Harbor in February 1942. Broadcasting in German, journalist William Harlan Hale opened it with the words: “we bring you voices from America." As Washington Post journalist Dana Milbank just noted, neither Hitler nor Stalin, neither the ayatollahs in Iran, nor every Chinese leader since Mao could silence it. Not even Putin could.
But this week, a thin-skinned, deranged, psychopathic Russian patsy in the White House ordered his wormtongues to shut its microphones and fire its entire staff. No more words —- in German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Chinese, Kurdish, Arabic, Farsi.
A date that will live in infamy, by our own hand this time.
Yes. People in occupied and war torn Europe huddled around shortwaves listening to American broadcasts - standard feature in movies about WW2 and the Cold War.
Now. First Musk cuts off Starlink in Ukraine. Now Trump has shut off information sharing with Ukraine.
But his prostitutes, lin, lifted their hips. Golden rain.
And his oligarchs, perhaps beginning with Dmitry Rybolovlev, lifted their checkbooks for the money laundering which rescued the fat orange oligarch-wannabe Trump.
Might the fat orange convicted criminal now admit, yes, he's been had by the mass murderer who kept him, the long-time friend of Jeffrey Epstein, waiting more than an hour for his newest kiss-up-to-dictators phone call with Putin?
Might his newest indignity cause even the fat, waddling pig-face to return to democracy, and finally oppose all the dictators who have long floated him?
In 1960s elementary school, my friends' grandmother came to speak to our classes on more than one occasion. She was a white-haired little elderly lady with a will of iron. She was Czech and smuggled Bibles across the Iron Curtain to Eastern Europe for decades. Bibles packed into tight places in VWs, she and another woman ran the border and delivered messages to those who were trapped in the East. I'm sure she was among many, many people who were involved in the resistance after WW2. For me and I'd like to include my other 8 - 10 year old classmates, Jill's grandmother embodied the spirit of what our parent's generation fought to protect our futures.
We are surely in a very dangerous zone. Thank you Mr. Aseyev and Professor Snyder for this essay. I have no doubt this regime will resort to the same debilitating tortures you endured. Should any of us face the same, I hope we have the same courage, fortitude and personal integrity you have.
The way we are all being threatened, and will soon suffer, is a form of 2+2=5. In that gap represented by the = sign lie all the 'tells' of utter cruelty and indifference to humanity written on the faces of men like Trump, Musk, Putin, Erdogan and others who ride roughshod over the peoples of their respective countries--those few we can name, and the others in the shadows whose faces are hidden. Dare we use an old-fashioned but still potent word such as 'evil' to describe them? Maybe it's high time we did.
Trump only wants to wield power. Nothing else interests him. Certainly not other people, not even his children or grandchildren, never mind the victims of an illegal war over in Europe. Even though there is a lot of evidence that this election was rigged incliuding Trump saying so directly and unambiguously, the Democrats have done nothing to challenge the outcome...
One man can COMMAND hurricanes and the stock market!
How many people actually CARE? Will it take realizing that wild eyed young men with sworn loyalty to Elon Musk and Donald Trump might ransack Social Security (easy pickings after seizing all the US Treasury payment records and stuffing them into a privately owned database)?
People are being arrested in their houses and workplaces thrown into cells half way across the continent. Planeloads of men, not convicted of any crime, are being sent to foreign held hellholes at taxpayer expense in direct contravention of clear court orders.
We have shambled into the murky unsteady terrain of a failed state with nuclear weapons and the capacity to surveil and target any one of us with mobs of frightened, angry, suspicious malcontents coping with generations of shame, guilt, fear, and rage. As long as they feel others are SUFFERING more than they, such people will continue to exalt the power of POWER because they imagine that someone else’s impunity is their salvation.
How intelligent people can be so utterly stupid is one of humankind's greatest conundrums. Perhaps it is because telling ourselves what we want to hear is what we do best. No! Shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best! No! Being our own worst enemy is what we do best!
Radio Free Radio! Another win for Putin, Xi, Kim, Ergogan, Iran, Afganistan, Saudi Arabia, strongman thugs who want to ultimately form a MOB of international proportions.
Just use the old Mafia Mob Boss structure of a Mob Boss over/with other Mob Bosses who control commerce, territory, crime activity, protection rackets, oppression/extermination/blackmail/promise of money/power for any who refuse to bow down to their power/rules.
It could work well for a bit. Eventually, some may plot to off other Mob Bosses to consolidate power. People are really very predictable. The only thing that is not clear is how Mob Bosses accomplish this destruction of what exists and how they reorganize and share powers.
Criminals are sociopaths, psychopaths and have some very bizarre, outside the 'box' behaviors that surprise, confound 'normal' societies and people. We have to be nimble, rapid, courageous, confident RESISTERS or be on our knees for generations.
Dear Professor Snyder, I am wondering whether it might be possible for individual citizens to fund Radio Liberty. I know that the number of western news broadcasters has decreased sharply as the internet has grown. Thus the remaining stations are all the more important.
Think about it: less than 50 cents per capita to fund this vital project. It is not about saving money, but rather destroying democracy. And the MAGAts are not content simply destroying it here.
The MAGAts base does not understand that its pockets are being fleeced by the MAGAts top and its values turned upside down. What is truly stunning to me is that the poison that is Fox was able to turn 40%++ Americans into lovers of Russia. Why?
Enemies want to re-write history, not friends. Eniemie’s erase the memory of the other, not friends or allies or heirs. Make no mistake. This regime is the enemy of everything most Americans have treasured about our country for almost 250 years. But we have the same problem Lincoln had before the Civil War: those who attack first are the aggressors, not the defenders and pro-democracy Americans must see ourselves unequivocally as the defenders of Liberty, the "Open Meadow” as Dr. Snyder described it recently.
As a little girl in suburban Southern California, I remember asking my mother what “Radio Free Europe” and “Iron Curtain “ meant, hearing those words frequently mentioned on TV. She told me the first was very good and the second very bad. That’s stuck with me for about 60 years and it’s still accurate.
In 1974, I once spent an evening huddled around a shortwave radio set in Moscow with the grandson of Mihail Kalinin, former President of the USSR under Stalin, both of us straining to hear a Voice of America news broadcast through crude Soviet jamming interference
It was a moment forever etched in my mind as a metaphor for the Soviet Union’s failed efforts to degrade its citizens by censoring alternative sources of information. It was also an omen predicting the country’s downfall less than a generation later. Its own elite didn’t even buy the party line. For decades, tens of millions under the Iron Curtain were kept intellectually alive through its broadcasts. After the fall, tens of millions more still listened, still struggled, still fought -- as Aseyev knows better than most.
Even before Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, the VOA was born amid the despair and anger after Pearl Harbor in February 1942. Broadcasting in German, journalist William Harlan Hale opened it with the words: “we bring you voices from America." As Washington Post journalist Dana Milbank just noted, neither Hitler nor Stalin, neither the ayatollahs in Iran, nor every Chinese leader since Mao could silence it. Not even Putin could.
But this week, a thin-skinned, deranged, psychopathic Russian patsy in the White House ordered his wormtongues to shut its microphones and fire its entire staff. No more words —- in German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Chinese, Kurdish, Arabic, Farsi.
A date that will live in infamy, by our own hand this time.
ThankYou for your observations and analysis!
Yes. People in occupied and war torn Europe huddled around shortwaves listening to American broadcasts - standard feature in movies about WW2 and the Cold War.
Now. First Musk cuts off Starlink in Ukraine. Now Trump has shut off information sharing with Ukraine.
Putin doesn't have to lift a hand.
But his prostitutes, lin, lifted their hips. Golden rain.
And his oligarchs, perhaps beginning with Dmitry Rybolovlev, lifted their checkbooks for the money laundering which rescued the fat orange oligarch-wannabe Trump.
Might the fat orange convicted criminal now admit, yes, he's been had by the mass murderer who kept him, the long-time friend of Jeffrey Epstein, waiting more than an hour for his newest kiss-up-to-dictators phone call with Putin?
Might his newest indignity cause even the fat, waddling pig-face to return to democracy, and finally oppose all the dictators who have long floated him?
In 1960s elementary school, my friends' grandmother came to speak to our classes on more than one occasion. She was a white-haired little elderly lady with a will of iron. She was Czech and smuggled Bibles across the Iron Curtain to Eastern Europe for decades. Bibles packed into tight places in VWs, she and another woman ran the border and delivered messages to those who were trapped in the East. I'm sure she was among many, many people who were involved in the resistance after WW2. For me and I'd like to include my other 8 - 10 year old classmates, Jill's grandmother embodied the spirit of what our parent's generation fought to protect our futures.
So well stated, damn good.
"... by our own hand this time."
Truly: American democracy is undressing in front of us all...
The person who tells you that you'll be '...more comfortable if you take your clothes off...'
is....not thinking about your future.
They're thinking about theirs.
The headline in The Onion the day after the election said it all:"AMERICA DEFEATS AMERICA"
Thank you so much for writing this.
We don’t need to go to Ukraine to fight Russians. They’re in Washington, D.C.
Wow! Very powerful and very true!
In the white house.
We are surely in a very dangerous zone. Thank you Mr. Aseyev and Professor Snyder for this essay. I have no doubt this regime will resort to the same debilitating tortures you endured. Should any of us face the same, I hope we have the same courage, fortitude and personal integrity you have.
"The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful,
and to despite, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the
great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
Adam Smith, quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The way we are all being threatened, and will soon suffer, is a form of 2+2=5. In that gap represented by the = sign lie all the 'tells' of utter cruelty and indifference to humanity written on the faces of men like Trump, Musk, Putin, Erdogan and others who ride roughshod over the peoples of their respective countries--those few we can name, and the others in the shadows whose faces are hidden. Dare we use an old-fashioned but still potent word such as 'evil' to describe them? Maybe it's high time we did.
Mr. Aseyez, brings honor to humanity.
Trump only wants to wield power. Nothing else interests him. Certainly not other people, not even his children or grandchildren, never mind the victims of an illegal war over in Europe. Even though there is a lot of evidence that this election was rigged incliuding Trump saying so directly and unambiguously, the Democrats have done nothing to challenge the outcome...
2+2=5?
BLACK is WHITE!
Fear is FREEDOM.
One man can COMMAND hurricanes and the stock market!
How many people actually CARE? Will it take realizing that wild eyed young men with sworn loyalty to Elon Musk and Donald Trump might ransack Social Security (easy pickings after seizing all the US Treasury payment records and stuffing them into a privately owned database)?
People are being arrested in their houses and workplaces thrown into cells half way across the continent. Planeloads of men, not convicted of any crime, are being sent to foreign held hellholes at taxpayer expense in direct contravention of clear court orders.
We have shambled into the murky unsteady terrain of a failed state with nuclear weapons and the capacity to surveil and target any one of us with mobs of frightened, angry, suspicious malcontents coping with generations of shame, guilt, fear, and rage. As long as they feel others are SUFFERING more than they, such people will continue to exalt the power of POWER because they imagine that someone else’s impunity is their salvation.
How intelligent people can be so utterly stupid is one of humankind's greatest conundrums. Perhaps it is because telling ourselves what we want to hear is what we do best. No! Shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best! No! Being our own worst enemy is what we do best!
Thank you, Jim.
No! Mistaking what intelligence means is what we do best.
Radio Free Radio! Another win for Putin, Xi, Kim, Ergogan, Iran, Afganistan, Saudi Arabia, strongman thugs who want to ultimately form a MOB of international proportions.
Just use the old Mafia Mob Boss structure of a Mob Boss over/with other Mob Bosses who control commerce, territory, crime activity, protection rackets, oppression/extermination/blackmail/promise of money/power for any who refuse to bow down to their power/rules.
It could work well for a bit. Eventually, some may plot to off other Mob Bosses to consolidate power. People are really very predictable. The only thing that is not clear is how Mob Bosses accomplish this destruction of what exists and how they reorganize and share powers.
Criminals are sociopaths, psychopaths and have some very bizarre, outside the 'box' behaviors that surprise, confound 'normal' societies and people. We have to be nimble, rapid, courageous, confident RESISTERS or be on our knees for generations.
Good Morning. As I start to read 2+2=5 I have to share this article by Shankar Narayan. It tells of the dawning of a new era. Based on actions being taken now by Europe, The U.K. and The Coalition of the Willing. We are fraught with conflict, but the idealist in me believes if we see this through we are heading into a new world order. Which can be better https://www.theconcis.com/p/europe-moves-from-lazy-idealism-to?r=fa5ey&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thank you. His reporting is illuminating, and brings another needed view of what we are losing.
I subscribed to Shankar Narayan. He does the wonderful reporting
Don't see a share.
https://www.theconcis.com/p/europe-moves-from-lazy-idealism-to?r=fa5ey&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
sorry about that. Busy house this morning, missed a beat I also added it into the original post. Cat and dog diplomacy here today
Ha!
Sen. Susan Collins' email contact system just rejected my message as a security risk because I pasted in part of this essay!
Apparently you’re a security risk to trump and putin’s lies. Keep it up!
Wow!
Dear Professor Snyder, I am wondering whether it might be possible for individual citizens to fund Radio Liberty. I know that the number of western news broadcasters has decreased sharply as the internet has grown. Thus the remaining stations are all the more important.
In answer to my own question the budget is $142 million, per https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/USAGM-RFERL-OneSheet-01-07-25.pdf. Probably too much for a go fund me.
Think about it: less than 50 cents per capita to fund this vital project. It is not about saving money, but rather destroying democracy. And the MAGAts are not content simply destroying it here.
The MAGAts base does not understand that its pockets are being fleeced by the MAGAts top and its values turned upside down. What is truly stunning to me is that the poison that is Fox was able to turn 40%++ Americans into lovers of Russia. Why?
Enemies want to re-write history, not friends. Eniemie’s erase the memory of the other, not friends or allies or heirs. Make no mistake. This regime is the enemy of everything most Americans have treasured about our country for almost 250 years. But we have the same problem Lincoln had before the Civil War: those who attack first are the aggressors, not the defenders and pro-democracy Americans must see ourselves unequivocally as the defenders of Liberty, the "Open Meadow” as Dr. Snyder described it recently.
As a little girl in suburban Southern California, I remember asking my mother what “Radio Free Europe” and “Iron Curtain “ meant, hearing those words frequently mentioned on TV. She told me the first was very good and the second very bad. That’s stuck with me for about 60 years and it’s still accurate.
I am looking forward to reading this brave man’s book.
I just ordered the book