Tag Archives: Nobel Prize

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.

At top:

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

Recognizing the Humanity in Our Enemies

Aw, look at the cheerful, playful, lighthearted colleagues laughing together! They’re just taking a few minutes off from their jobs—they oversaw prisoners at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi death camp, in 1944. Yes, the happy folk in the uniforms are literal Nazis, members of the Schutzstaffel (aka the SS) taking a break from classifying, torturing, perhaps even killing the sick and terrified people whose lives they oversaw. Because even fascists and their apologists can be happy and have fun sometimes.

These smiling staff members were human, so they were naturally multifaceted, and even had some good qualities. Hey, even Hitler loved his dogs. The noted aviator and aeronautical designer Charles Lindbergh was brave and inspiring—but also a fascist sympathizer and appeaser. Coco Chanel was a groundbreaking fashion designer and style maker—who knowingly romanced, lived with, and spied for a powerful German diplomat during World War II. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an activist and the namesake of his civil rights champion father, started his career as a respected environmentalist. But now he takes money from (and spews anti-scientific anti-vax rhetoric supported by) far-right American millionaires who also bankroll Trump. Former game show host Donald Trump himself makes many people laugh, shout, and feel excited about America—and regularly praises and says he wants to emulate dictators who imprison, torture, and murder their own people.

But it’s important to remember that people who do such things are still human. If we fully demonize and refuse to engage with those whose goal is to oppress and kill us, and show no respect to those who love them, we can’t get through to the millions of independent voters who are on the fence. If you demonize and dehumanize them, you fail to show them how people of good will can see and honor the humanity in those who disagree. You risk making yourself look like an ugly, irrational opponent. And you make compromise with dignity harder.

If you paint your opposition as less than human, you give strength and a rallying point to your enemies. Nobel Prize-winning diplomats like Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu made this clear, many times. Their ability to help long-term foes find common ground and face each other as human beings deserving of respect allowed them to broker peace and reconciliation deals that had long been inconceivable beforehand.

That doesn’t mean we should ever let down our guard, trust would-be oppressors or their apologists to have our best interests at heart, or fail to fight their dangerous, dehumanizing rhetoric and efforts to gain power. We must use every tool against their actions that the law allows.

And we can’t refuse to fight or take sides against our internal enemies just because their opposing candidates aren’t perfect. Lofty ideals sound lovely, but when a would-be dictator is at the door pointing an AK-47 at you and telling you how he looks forward to dismantling your democracy with his fascist friends, you don’t wait for Superman and Wonder Woman to show up. You push back, you support the candidates who are least objectionable, and you fight like hell to keep the fascists out of power.

Pragmatism is called for in such circumstances. Being “pure” and refusing to vote for a less inspiring (or even mediocre) candidate is no virtue when the alternative is a vote for a candidate who is an active danger to democracy. Nor does refusing to vote keep you clean in such a political environment. Refusing to vote is still a choice, and that choice has consequences, up to and including allowing the election of a dangerous person by an active minority of people. Don’t let fatigue, boredom with the news, or a temptation to be passive let you give away your ability to keep fascists out of power.

It’s such a delicate balance, remembering the humanity of the opposition and understanding their appeal while not underestimating their strength, letting down our guard, or failing to stand strong against lies and fascists. But we MUST do these things. Because eternal vigilance really IS the price of liberty. 

Dylan: The Man Who Knows Which Way the Wind Blows

“Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows”

—From “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

The Nobel Committee’s decision to honor folksinging musical legend Bob Dylan with a Nobel Prize in Literature is inspired.

One of history’s most influential songwriters and lyricists,  Bob Dylan has meandered through the musical disciplines of folk and protest songs, blues, pop and rock and come out the other end with his own amalgam of raw, bleating authenticity, intimacy, cynicism and wordplay. It’s hard to think of a voice that has threaded its way into the world’s consciousness more powerfully over the past half century.

The Nobel Committee has long sought out fresh voices that speak to the human condition in original and insightful ways. In past years the committee has honored writers who have explored enduring topics including folk tales, race and feminism, violence, poverty, segregation and myth through prose, poetry, reportage and social criticism. This year marks the first time a Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to a musician for his lyrical output. Since the prize was established in 1901, the Nobel Committee has sought to celebrate voices that express eternal conflicts, awaken minds and deepen compassion, and the work of Bob Dylan encompasses all of these themes.

Dylan’s voice was the urgent social conscience of the 1960s. The stripped-down simplicity of his musical messages was disarming, yet he convinced the world to recognize folk as a sophisticated medium and a driving social force. With his storytelling, Dylan altered the way we think and hear, and in so doing he changed the world.