Tag Archives: Freedom of Speech

Anti-Fascist Podcasts to Help You Through Dangerous Times



If you’re feeling hopeless and frightened about what’s to come under Donald Trump, I recommend two excellent fact-based podcasts with riveting stories about just how bad things have gotten in the past in the U.S., what we learned from those times, and how we moved forward. To find them, log into your favorite podcast provider and listen to Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra (seasons one and two), and Oona Chaplin’s Hollywood Exiles podcast. 

In the 20th century, many anti-constitutional fascists held powerful positions in the U.S. government, both overtly and covertly. They used their power to badger, intimidate, blackmail, and destroy the lives of thousands of law-abiding people of all races and levels of power, fame, and influence. Federal government branches and agencies largely moved beyond using fascist tactics as a matter of course—for a while. But people in power are using them again, and things are likely to get extremely ugly over the next four years. Understanding how long and hard we fought against fascism within our government in decades past, and how its power waxes and wanes over time and around the world, are essential. Learning this painful but necessary history reminds us what we have overcome before, and how important fighting against the encroachment of authoritarianism and fascism are to the health and strength of this—or any—nation.

The Constitution’s power will be tested again in the coming years. Our social safety net, national security, the immigrants within our borders, and our alliances with other nations will all come under fire. Safeguards against increasingly dangerous climate change will be impacted as we again step away from the Paris Agreement, and we’ll lose the respect and support of allies we’ve relied on for decades, even centuries. Will we make it through this time as a democracy? I don’t know. But I find it helps me to understand how the pendulum has swung back toward freedom and away from fascism throughout the history of the U.S. It can do so again—but only if we are vigilant and brave enough to fight against the encroachment of authoritarianism.

You may be familiar with Rachel Maddow. She’s been a broadcast journalist on radio and TV for decades, and is the most popular and respected news analyst on the cable news channel MSNBC. After her years studying at Stanford University, she was a Rhodes Scholar, and then she went on to become a successful writer, progressive radio personality, and television news journalist. She’s written several best-selling, well-received, carefully researched books on the oil and gas industry, American military power, the grift and scandals surrounding the vice presidency of Spiro Agnew, and the history of fascism in America. She’s been on MSNBC only one night a week for a couple of years now as she works on her podcasts and works with Steven Spielberg’s movie version of Maddow’s podcast Ultra. However, she’ll be back on MSNBC at 9 p.m. Monday through Friday for the first 100 days of the Trump Administration. She’s excellent at setting news into historical context, and explaining how events differ from those in the nation’s past, and how our leaders compare to those of other times and other nations.

Maddow’s Ultra is about the rise of fascism in America, particularly from the 1920s to the 1950s. The podcast details the stories of senators and congressmen, religious leaders, supposed patriots like aviator Charles Lindbergh, and even FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover—the most powerful lawman in the country—and his henchmen blackmailed people, spread damaging lies about people’s politics and actions, infiltrated legal gatherings, and hounded people—sometimes to death—with innuendo, subterfuge, threats, thugs, even physical violence. Hoover even had the FBI send Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an anonymous letter encouraging him to kill himself. I’ve read a great deal about the ugly underside of this period of U.S. history over time, but I still learned much from Maddow about just how extensively our government was infiltrated by fascists and even literal Nazis during the 1940s.

Oona Chaplin is a young (born in 1986) actress who comes from a storied family. Her mother’s father was actor, director, producer, and early film production innovator Charlie Chaplin, the most popular actor of the early 20thcentury, and perhaps the most famous man in the world in the 1920s. Her mother’s grandfather was the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prize awards for drama. She was named for her grandmother, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s fourth wife. Oona and Charlie Chaplin had a long and happy marriage despite Charlie having spent most of their life together being hounded by J. Edgar Hoover and anti-communist agitators in or related to the movie business.

Hoover’s FBI threatened Charlie Chaplin with deportation while the actor was traveling outside of the U.S. Despite Chaplin having spent four decades living and working in the U.S., building up its film industry, paying millions in taxes and raising millions more in World War II war bonds, and never being part of or affiliated with the Communist Party, Chaplin was under constant surveillance and threat by the FBI. While on a trip outside the U.S. in the early 1950s, Chaplin was warned that he was not welcome to return to his home in the U.S. He did not set foot on U.S. soil again for two decades, and he never lived here again.

Oona Chaplin’s deep investigation into communism in the film industry is fascinating and well told. Parts of her story are personal, including interviews with her mother, actress Geraldine Chaplin, who moved abroad with her parents Charlie and Oona when her father was blacklisted while she was a child. But Oona Chaplin also dives at length into the stories of other film industry notables whose work and personal lives were ruined by the Hollywood blacklist. Her interview with the daughter of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, the most famous member of “The Hollywood Ten,” is riveting. The Hollywood Ten were ten movie screenwriters, producers, and directors who refused to answer questions about supposed or real (and completely legal) communist affiliations when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare. They were imprisoned for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names of others who were communists or who had attended communist meetings (which were, again, legal), and were blacklisted by Hollywood for over a decade.

Dalton Trumbo wrote Academy Award-winning screenplays (including the classic Audrey Hepburn film Roman Holiday) under pseudonyms during his years on the Hollywood blacklist. Oona Chaplin’s interview with his daughter Mitzi Trumbo is powerful. So is her interview with actress and professor of acting Ellen Geer, the daughter of blacklisted actor Will Geer, whose career was destroyed until the early 1970s, when he had a late-life resurgence when he played Grandpa Walton on the TV show The Waltons in the years just before he died.

Chaplin provides keen insights into her own fascinating family’s experiences during the days of Hollywood’s and the FBI’s anticommunist witch hunts. But she also sets them in the context of their time, making their stories and those of other victims of Hollywood blacklists understandable and accessible to listeners unacquainted with this sad part of American history, while providing new details for those of us who have followed this saga for decades.

While the stories Maddow and Chaplin tell are often dark and frankly horrifying, they’re important to resurface and re-examine if we want to learn from the nation’s past mistakes, and to fight the encroachment of fascist tendencies into our government and our personal lives today.

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Charlie Chaplin as The Little Tramp and Jackie Coogan as The Kid in Chaplin’s 1921 silent movie The Kid

Nous Sommes Tous Charlie

French chanteuse Edith Piaf singing the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, which is a call to arms against oppression

Let us honor those who fight and sometimes die for the causes of free speech and a free press.

Much of what French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo publishes has been offensive to nearly everyone at one time or another; the quality or appeal or substance of their satire is not the point. The point is that an open marketplace of ideas is necessary for a free society. That includes the right of individuals to share ugly or objectionable ideas, the responsibility of governments to safeguard that right, and the responsibility of citizens to stand up for it.

In an open society, bad ideas get countered, challenged and, over time, often discarded, not despite but because of their publication. It is only when they are shared that enough people can speak for or against them and the general public can make informed decisions. When this right to free speech is attacked anywhere in the world, we are all diminished.

I do not seek to smear or harm those who happen to share the same faith as the terrorists who engaged in the brutal slaughter at Charlie Hebdo—that would be as nonsensical as the evil acts of the assassins. Remember that one of the two policemen killed by the assassins when they rushed to the site of the attack was Muslim police officer Ahmed Merabet, who was murdered while protecting the right of Charlie Hebdo to caricature and mock his own religion. No, this was a brutal act committed by a small group of sick-minded individuals, not by a religion.

The rallying cry around the world and among popular commentators like The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart in the immediate aftermath of the attack has been Je suis Charlie: I am Charlie. In his essay in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch responds to this by writing, “But the truth is—for better and for worse—that, no, most of us, even in the most free of Western societies, are not Charlie. For better, because so many of us have the luxury of often feeling secure enough in our freedom to take it for granted. For worse, because in taking our freedom for granted, we are too often ready to trade it for a greater sense of security. We are not Charlie, in other words, because we risk so little for what we claim to value so much. We are not Charlie, too, because most of us are relatively inoffensive, whereas Charlie, like so many liberating pioneers of free expression—think not only of Lenny Bruce and Mad magazine but also of Gandhi and Martin Luther King—were always glad to give offense to what offended them. And we are not Charlie, today, because we are alive.”

It is true that we in the United States have many luxuries of expression that others around the world are denied, and that we regularly take them for granted. We forget that what we consider to be inherent and inalienable rights are seen as privileges at best in many places around the world. So it is incumbent upon us to show gratitude and recognition for our freedom, and to stand up for the right of others around the world to be offensive, outspoken, embarrassing or upsetting in what they say or publish, as long as they do not present a clear and present immediate physical danger to others while they do so (as would be the case if a speaker instigated a riot, or example). I do not seek to upset others and generally do my best to avoid offending with my writing, but I stand behind those who exercise their right to upset, disgust or enrage others (myself included) when they speak their minds, even in cases when I detest what they have to say. Let us remember those who face danger in their fight for the right to a free press. Let us prove with nonviolent but outspoken solidarity that, truly, nous sommes tous Charlie: we are all Charlie.

banksy

Above: London-based graphic designer Lucille Clerc’s response to the Charlie Hebdo murders, widely misattributed to Banksy