Abstract
Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter
Traditional Russian dolls with pictures of Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Lenin and Donald Trump are sold at a fair in Red Square, Moscow
CREDIT: Danil Shamkin/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Enter the flashy property tycoon Donald Trump and the USA has joined the not so savoury club of the non-democrats. In February, the newly minted US president tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” Many shivered in disbelief: A verbal déjà vu of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who dubbed the Jews the “sworn enemy of the German people”.
In May Trump’s campaign committee produced a television ad lauding his first 100 days in office as an unprecedented “success” and labeling major television networks – CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS – and their correspondents as “fake news” for not reporting his “winning”.
Once a Soviet citizen, I’ve been checking my surroundings. Am I living in cosmopolitan New York? Am I back in a homogeneous Moscow reading the Pravda headlines about the drummed-up victories of the communist state and the denunciations of the enemies who plot to take it down? In fact, when I was growing up in the 1970s, not even Pravda used such ominous language for Kremlin critics.
In the first half of the last century, the term vragi naroda – enemies of the people – applied to those who disagreed with the Bolshevik government on the issues ranging from the planned economy to atheism. They took their cue from the French revolutionaries of the 1790s whose Reign of Terror led to thousands being executed for “betraying” the newly founded First Republic.
Under Joseph Stalin being labelled an “enemy of the people” became even more dangerous because it resulted in immediate death or imprisonment in a labour camp. But after Nikita Khrushchev, my great-grandfather, denounced Stalin and his system of gulag camps in his 1956 speech to the Soviet Communist Party, the vragi formula fell out of use.
Trump, appearing less democratic than the Soviet autocrat Khrushchev, has found himself using the “enemies of the people” line, and joining the current pantheon of world rulers who share his anti-free-speech podium: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping.
A demonstration in support of free press outside the offices of The New York Times
CREDIT: Florent Lamoureux/Flickr
Of course, in the USA journalists, including MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who Trump so blatantly labelled as “fake” in a recent commercial, can freely provide the real facts on the president’s megalomaniacal narrative. Their lives are not in danger compared to those reporting from other places. And yet when Trump tweets or his ads attack the news, even if not as brutally as the Kremlin’s Pravda once did, and with less deadly consequences, it can still amount to an attempt at state censorship. Political fear, after all, is not only about personal experience or individual threats, it is a condition of society. Threats shouted from the top, even without physical harm, restrict public debate and public policy. They reinforce social and political inequalities and create an atmosphere of mistrust and animosity between political parties and social groups.
In democratic societies, the free press guarantees that the state’s menacing language should never turn into menacing actions against its people, as happened with Stalin’s gulags. With Trump, who has more in common with Putin and Xi than with Canada’s Justin Trudeau or Germany’s Angela Merkel, we can no longer be so certain.
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