Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

Author Mike Rothschild says Trump may be fading, but the QAnon cult is spreading — and could bring “mass violence”

Riotsville, U.S.A. spotlights the surprising tactics that were used to help police forces militarize in the 1960s. | Magnolia Pictures

How the director of an astonishing new documentary used old government footage to shed light on the present.

In fuzzy, grainy footage, a crowd of protesters on Main Street clamors, shouting, signs in their hands. Toward them moves a group of police officers, armed and ready to put down an uprising. Men dressed in 1960s-style shirtsleeves and slacks run in and out of buildings with law enforcement in hot pursuit. It looks stilted and unreal, like they’re rehearsing a scene. Like something from a movie.

While it’s not a movie set, it’s not real life, either — or, well, not exactly. These are scenes from Riotsville, U.S.A., a new documentary made entirely from archival footage, much of it shot by the US government in the 1960s. It shows something extraordinary: As uprisings became more common across the country and the turbulent decade wore on, the government constructed “Riotsvilles” on two military bases. There, they staged protests and rebellions using soldiers from the US Army to play both protesters and police, then allowed police forces from across the country to learn from the military how to put them down.

Riotsvilles became rehearsal stages for swatting down dissenters whom law enforcement deemed out of hand — striking, because the more than 150 riots across the country in the summer of 1967 mostly were in response to police brutality.

As the staged combat at Riotsville plays out, audiences of fellow law enforcement and military looked on from the stands, observing their efforts and comparing notes. In the footage are tactics and weapons usually reserved for warfare, used against ordinary citizens on the streets. Riotsville, U.S.A. shows the same methods used to quash unrest that occurred, for instance, in the Miami neighborhood of Liberty City during the 1968 Republican National Convention. The film shows the birth of the militarization of police in America.

Magnolia Pictures
Soldiers play both sides at the Riotsville training demonstrations.

The Riotsvilles were built at about the time that the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, released a 1968 report that found that white racism, rather than Black anger or “outside protesters,” was behind instances of unrest in American cities. At 708 pages long, the commission’s report was a doorstopper, but that didn’t prevent it from becoming an instant bestseller. The report called for funneling money toward fostering equality between Black and white populations in cities. Yet LBJ backed away from the report, and its insights were ignored by the government — all except for one: increasing funding for police forces in major cities.

All of this sounds like an exaggeration, but as Riotsville, U.S.A. works poetically but damningly through the footage and the story, it makes its case keenly. Yet if this was a matter of such interest 60 years ago, why do so many of us not even know it happened?

I was eager to speak with director Sierra Pettengill about the film, making old footage alive to today’s viewer, our horrendous historical amnesia, and why she sees glimmers of hope in it all.

It would be tempting to say you are “exposing” something, but you really aren’t. The existence of Riotsville was well known. The government filmed its own footage. It was on TV.

That’s the point, to me. This is under-known, but not because it was covert or classified. If you put “Riotsville” into any historic newspaper database, you get coverage as if it’s a lark of some sort. I think the [New York] Times headline was “Army Defeats Hippies.” It was covered; a lot of the footage in the film comes from ABC and BBC. I find that much more pernicious.

What the film documents to me is a historical amnesia that feels much more telling. That the Kerner Commission report was bestselling is wild. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, particularly during the Trump administration — what it means to watch a narrative be re-formed or hidden in real time. The film, I think, is a documentation in some ways of that process.

So you got the footage of Riotsville, and you watched it, and it’s amazing. What’s the next step in turning it into a film that people in 2022 are going to watch?

[The existence of Riotsville] was on public record, but there weren’t really any secondary sources covering it, contextualizing it. So [the research process] took a really long time. Stuart Schrader, who came on as an adviser for the film, wrote a really incredible book in 2019 called Badges Without Borders, which was just really gratifying. He had done a lot of the same research, and much more. But when I started, there was very little. So I worked with a researcher, Jonathan Rapoport, and we started by screen-grabbing some of the slates and trying to track down people based on their names, the people who shot the footage. We went to the National Archives and pulled text records. I did a lot of phone interviews with anyone we could track down. We figured out which military police battalion was pictured in the footage, found their reunion group. A lot of minutia of research and tracking things down, Googling any person we found mentioned in any article.

And so that part of the research was figuring out the basics. Did this come out of the Kerner Commission? Where does this fit in to a historical context? I know very well that this is just one of an endless number of disturbing programs, covert or public, that the US government and military have carried out.

When you have a piece of footage like this, it’s like getting access to some sort of fantasy imagination of the government or the state, which feels rare. They made a moving picture and a cinematic image. We had to take that in its larger metaphorical and emotional possibilities. It felt like a big opportunity.

So the research really was two tracks, and hopefully what the film feels like: laying out a historical narrative and also trying to understand what this means in the larger sense, as citizens of a country. What to think of it, as the narrator asks a lot.

You steer away from footage of the “real” uprisings in the film, which seems extra significant since you were making it partly during a summer when those images were flooding our TV screens and social feeds.

There is one uprising in the film at the very end, in Miami. Originally, I had thought for years I didn’t want to show them at all — for many reasons, one being that we are oversaturated with those images.

One of my main goals in archival filmmaking is to show images that either feel new, or that are recontextualized, so you’re actually looking at them. When something feels familiar, you just store it in the part of your brain where the shorthand for that image lives. Images of rebellions have been used to justify police repression against Black communities, against protesters.

Magnolia Pictures
Invented riot posters held by “rioters” (played by soldiers) at one Riotsville.

We used the images in Miami for a lot of reasons. On the one hand, the story of [Miami’s] Liberty City protests and what happened around the 1968 Republican National Convention is a really under-known narrative, especially when compared with the Chicago DNC. There’s very little footage of Liberty City. I think the most famous chronicler of the ’68 RNC is Norman Mailer, and he writes, in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, just something like “Oh, whoops, there were some protests outside and I didn’t go.” So it’s a really under-told story.

Then also, once we started looking at that footage — which had to be pulled from a very local archive — you can really see what has been developing in the Riotsville re-creations play out. It was much more literal than I would have assumed earlier in the process.

Like Riotsville was a dress rehearsal.

Yeah, a dress rehearsal.

So we put Miami at the end. That reverses the typical [assumptions we have of] causality: that people are protesting in the streets, or at the airport, and the police and the military have to come in. That is utterly backwards. The Kerner Commission at the time even found that what they call “riots” are in response, usually, to police brutality. So by putting that footage at the end of the film, you see — I think in a correctly contextualized way — that what’s happening in Liberty City is a response to what you’ve seen develop over the course of the film up until that moment.

We put a lot of time into figuring out how and when and what images of unrest to show. That section of the film, I think, took as long to cut as a prior hour.

Did you find any hope in making the film?

Where I find the hope in the film, counterintuitively, is that the crises we’re in are not a failure of imagination. We’re watching the same conversation. Police abolition is on the lips of everybody in this film, in different words, but you’re seeing the same tone of people are already weary of explaining this over and over again … So it’s a political failure. We’re continuing to choose the wrong thing. The solutions are there, and they are well documented and well established. And I find some faith in that.

Riotsville, U.S.A. is playing in select theaters. See the film’s website for details.

The failure of the neoliberal order—which continues to ignore the needs and aspirations of the people—gives fuel to an ascendant far right that feeds on the despair and humiliation of the working class.

Giorgia Meloni, leader of Italian far-right party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), delivers a speech on September 23, 2022 at the Arenile di Bagnoli beachfront location in Naples, southern Italy, during a rally closing her party’s campaign for the September 25 general election. | Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

An expert explains recent (and maybe soon-to-be) far-right victories in Europe.

Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Fratelli d’Italia are expected to lead a far right victory in Italian elections this weekend. That win, if it happens, would come shortly after the far-right Sweden Democrats won the second-largest share of the vote, helping to oust the center-left from power and giving the far right a potential role in the next government.

These shifts are happening as Europe enters another precarious moment: a war on the continent that is increasingly unpredictable, and an inflation and energy crisis that will deepen as winter approaches.

The politics of Sweden, in northern Europe, and Italy, in the south, are very different, and the historical origins and reasons for the far right’s recent successes in each of those countries are unique. But, the far right shares certain trends across Europe — and, really, the globe. What is happening in Sweden, and Italy, is not all that different from what is happening in Brazil, or India, or the United States of America.

Pietro Castelli Gattinara, associate professor of political communication at Université Libre de Bruxelles and Marie Curie Fellow at Sciences Po, said that the far right is a global movement and a global ideology, even though one of the core tenets of these parties is a kind of nativism. That translates into a rejection of migration, but also of the social and cultural changes taking place within societies. The “woke” culture wars may look different in the US or Italy, but they are a feature of the modern far-right.

“New ideas coming from abroad are considered a danger to the nation-state,” Castelli Gattinara said. “We see that quite strongly when it comes to civil rights and, in particular, gender equality.”

Vox spoke with Castelli Gattinara about this iteration of the far right, how it has gained legitimacy in Europe and elsewhere, and what the specific developments in Italy and Sweden might mean for those countries — along with Europe, and the world.

The conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Jen Kirby

I want to start with a big question, which is: What is going on with the far right in Europe right now?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

The main point about the far right at the European level is that it’s not the story of a resurgence. The story of the far right in Europe is very much a story of continuity. What we have seen and what we are seeing in different countries are new variants of an old story of something we have been seeing for quite a few decades.

Political scientists tend to analyze the trajectory of the far right in waves. We are now in probably the fourth wave of far right politics in Europe, considering the first wave as the interwar period.

The subsequent waves were periods in which a number of far right parties and movements were emerging both in the south and in the north of Europe, but they remained quite marginal. They were fringe parties with very clear ideas and very clear-cut ideologies, but they remained at the margin of their political systems. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, those parties have generally gained access to representative institutions. And in the fourth wave, which is what we are seeing today, they have actually become completely mainstream. The distinction between what is the mainstream right and what is the far right is less and less clear. In that respect, I believe it’s also more difficult to set apart the European model from what we’re seeing in the US and in other parts of the world, where similarly, the distinction is becoming less and less clear.

Jen Kirby

This is a global phenomenon within democracies, not exclusively in Europe.

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

Absolutely. There are certainly some specificities about Europe, but it is not that different from what we have been seeing in the US with the radicalization of the Republican Party, what we are seeing in India with President [Narendra] Modi, what we have seen with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, just to make some examples. It is a much broader phenomenon of radicalization of mainstream right ideas, and mainstreaming of far-right ideas, especially with respect to some topics such as ethnic diversity, immigration, and gender issues. The positions of the far right have now been actually endorsed by mainstream right parties.

Jen Kirby

How did that mainstreaming happen?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

There’s no easy way to synthesize it. It’s a complex sociopolitical mechanism. But I would say, for the sake of simplicity, there are at least two main channels: one through the media and one through party and political competition.

With respect to party and political competition, there are at least two variants. One is mainstream right parties simply taking up the issues and the narratives of the far right. The best example is migration. The narrative of the far right on migration has been taken up by centrist and mainstream parties — and important to note, not necessarily right-wing ones. A number of Social Democratic parties, for example, in Denmark, or centrist parties — that’s the example of Italy — has taken up far-right narratives on migration, or have implemented far-right policies when it comes to migration. That’s the example of what happened in most of the European countries throughout the migration crisis.

Another party mechanism is coalition building or alliance building. That’s what we’re seeing in Sweden, where a moderate party that won the election will get the support of a radical right party to form of government. Or even more explicitly in the Italian case, whereby since at least 20 years, the mainstream right and the radical right, are in a coalition that is absolutely long-lasting and, up to today, quite solid.

The second is the media mechanism where especially commercial media are surfing on the issues and on the anxieties that far-right parties have brought into the political agenda. There again, the example of the US is very indicative — the politics of Fox News, in the past decades. We’ve seen a very similar scenario to the UK with the tabloid media, the whole mounting of the campaign on Brexit, for instance, has been brought about by a mix of far-right political actors and commercial media. And there are these moral panics, if you like the term, around security, around migration, around political Islam — and the media often participate to construct those problems.

Jen Kirby

You mentioned migration, and the wave of refugees in Europe in 2015 that the far right tried to capitalize on. I am wondering if migration is still very much a motivating electoral factor for these parties — or if they have morphed to embrace something different?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

I still think migration plays a crucial role. Perhaps migration is a bit limited as an issue. But what is really the core ideological tenet of those actors is nativism; is the idea that country states should be inhabited exclusively by so-called native people; is the idea that there are homogeneous communities and that any type of contamination from abroad would impoverish the sort of natural purity of the nation-state. And importantly, this applies to race or ethnic diversity. It equally applies to religion. It also applies to ideas.

In a certain sense, new ideas coming from abroad are considered a danger to the nation-state. We see that quite strongly when it comes to civil rights and, in particular, gender equality. A number of far right parties in Europe today are focused on so-called “woke” culture, on combating new anti-colonial movements, and so on and so forth.

For instance, in the case of Vox [the political party in Spain] — called the same way as your magazine, but I suppose, takes quite different political stances — and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy. If you could see the intervention by Giorgia Meloni at the national convention of Vox, she stressed the importance for her that she is Italian, she is Christian, she is a woman, but she stands in opposition to the idea of gender equality, of same-sex couples, and so on.

Jen Kirby

It sounds like the backlash to “woke” ideology is becoming a cross-border phenomenon then.

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

Absolutely. Again, the far right is a global movement and a global ideology. We have seen through the years a lot of interconnection and transnationalism in the way in which these ideas have diffused. If you look at India, some of the anti-Islamic narratives that have been developed by Modi built upon a long-lasting panic about Islam, that has been developed in the US and in Europe.

The Italian far right has been inspired by Trump, and by the far right in other countries, and translated those narratives and those campaigns within the Italian system, which of course, has a very different colonial past and a very different history of race relations. There is quite a lot of diffusion.

We can also see a process of mainstreaming. One of the main frames of the culture war is the idea that there would be a class of intellectuals, especially academic professors, that would have a progressive agenda, and that would indoctrinate new generations based on so-called gender theories or woke theories. That’s a narrative developed in the Anglo-Saxon world, but it arrived also in other European countries. But this has also been part of the agenda of the latest Macron government [in France] which cannot be considered as a far right government. It has spent quite a lot of its time and its agenda into combating so-called “Islamic leftism” that would be described as some sort of sociology that would be excessively sympathetic toward Islamic communities in France. So that is an adaptation of the same narrative by non-far right political parties.

Jen Kirby

Connected to some of the culture war stuff has been the rejection of the EU and the “bureaucrats in Brussels”-type thing. I’m wondering how far-right parties in Italy and within other European countries are approaching the EU right now?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

There are a number of far right parties in Europe that have been and are openly Euro-skeptic, meaning they reject the EU as a political project while idealizing a not very well-specified Europe of the peoples or Europe of the nations. In the south of Europe, and particularly in Italy, the opposition to the EU has always been mainly a campaign issue and not a concrete policy.

Today, there’s an acceleration of this process, because Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d’Italia, is quite confident that she will win the next elections, and therefore, she is mainly addressing international audiences to get legitimated among those arenas, including the European Commission. Her main goal is not to scare off the EU with excessively radical proposals and many things she has been saying against the EU — she was calling the EU an organization of bankers and a threat to the national sovereignty of Italy — we do not hear any of these [now].

Jen Kirby

I want to talk about Italy for a second. The prediction right now is that the far right will take power. What’s going on there?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

There’s certainly some aspects that are unique to the Italian context. The main aspect is that the alliance between the center right and the far right is a consolidated one, since 1994, when media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi emerged, he formed right-wing coalitions in which he accepted the participation of post-fascist parties, Alianza Nacional back then, Lega Nord, and so on. That alliance has been going for more than 20 years, so when I’m speaking about the blurring between the far right and the mainstream right that is perhaps the perfect example. That is unique about Italy.

The reason why the far right party like Fratelli d’Italia can now take the lead of the coalition has two main explanations. One is that Berlusconi is now aged and his party has lost most of its support, but also that Giorgia Meloni, as leader of Fratelli d’Italia, she has correctly understood that electorally it would pay off to stay in the opposition throughout the past few years. She founded her party in 2012, as a spin-off or as a rebirth of the National Alliance Party [Alianza Nacional], but ever since she has consistently refused to be part of any coalition government, unlike all the other parties in the Italian political system. Since the 2018 elections, we have had very different coalition governments, sometimes with the populist Five Star Movement, with the Social Democratic Party, with Lega Nord, with Berlusconi’s party. The only party that never accepted any compromise is Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. She’s the only leader the Italian electorate does not perceive to have already tested. She is the only one that has not yet deceived the Italian electorate. That’s her biggest ace to play at the next election.

Jen Kirby

She’s the change candidate, essentially.

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

She has correctly understood that what the Italians challenge now is the idea of the establishment.

Meloni manages to present herself as opposed to the political establishment, but at the same time, as a credible politician because she has been in politics for a very long time.

Jen Kirby

What would it mean if she does become the leader of Italy — for Italy, and for Europe?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

Symbolically, it would be a very serious change. [Meloni] will be the first female prime minister in the history [of Italy]. Secondly, it will be the first prime minister with a past in a post-fascist political party. The symbol of Fratelli d’Italia is the three-color flame, which used to be the symbol of the Italian Social Movement, the post-fascist party founded in the 1940s. The symbolic link with the fascist past is extremely strong and extremely important.

At the same time, the likely government will be just a reconfiguration of the same coalition that we have been seeing for the past 20 years. Fratelli d’Italia has retrieved up a considerable amount of the old personnel of Berlusconi’s parties, of the old ministers of Berlusconi’s governments. I have the impression that, in the end, it will be a reboot of the Berlusconi years — which is not necessarily good news — but with a much stronger attention to some of the issues that are at the core of our far-right ideologies, I think, in particular, in terms of gender equality, in terms of civil rights, abortion rights, in terms of migration, in terms of religion. But then when it comes to our economic policy, for example, it will be basically the old wine that we have already seen for 20 years with the Berlusconi governments.

Jen Kirby

So it may not be as radical a change, even if the symbolism is jarring. And that makes me wonder a bit about Sweden. The moderate right is in power, but will need the far-right Sweden Democrats to govern. What does it mean for governance when we have these types of alliances?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

The Scandinavian context is different from the south of Europe. But what we have seen is that, generally, this is a consequence of an ideological and discursive transition that has already taken place. My colleague, Anders Jupskås at the Center for Research on Extremism, has been pointing at how the moderate party in Sweden had already endorsed the issues and the narratives of the Sweden Democrats, when it came to political Islam, asylum, and migration. There has been, let’s say, a convergence on those issues prior to the elections.

Now, as they come to perhaps share responsibilities within a government, then we can see some of those policies actually materialize. What we have seen in other counties is this will in no way contain the growth of the Sweden Democrats. It will actually hollow out the support for the moderates. Between the original and the copy, voters will always go for the original, and not for the copy. We don’t have a crystal ball, but if anything, one would expect that Sweden Democrats will confirm their electoral scores in the years to come by becoming even more legitimate and central to the Swedish political system.

Jen Kirby

These elections are happening as Europe is in the middle of crisis — the war in Ukraine, inflation, and the looming energy crisis. How do you think some of these electoral successes for the far-right might influence this moment?

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

The EU has been in a crisis since its very foundation. There’s always a new crisis affecting European Union politics. There’s a migration crisis, there is a terrorism crisis, there is war at its borders, there is Brexit. The politics of Europe are always a politics of crisis.

Now, this time, we’re seeing something that may be partly different, on one hand, because of the energy crisis and inflation, which might trigger important transformations in public opinion. On the other hand, because of the war on Ukraine, it has become more difficult for foreign parties to take direct inspiration from the figure of Vladimir Putin.

We’ve seen in Italy, Lega Nord, where Matteo Salvini has been a very outspoken admirer of Putin — he publicly said that, in his opinion, he’s the best politician currently alive a few years ago. He rapidly change this position as the war in Ukraine started. There was this very famous video of him at the border between Ukraine and Poland with a Polish mayor humiliating him by showing him the T-shirt with the face of bullying that Salvini had worn some years before, while [Salvini] went to Poland to express solidarity to Ukrainian refugees. So there has been switching of positions with respect to Russia, in particular.

Fratelli d’Italia had more consistent US and pro-NATO positions, but there is an in-between that is the relationship with the countries on the eastern border of the EU, and not only Hungary and Poland. Fratelli d’Italia is a strong supporter of both governments in Poland and Hungary because Meloni admires the way those governments have dealt with issues concerning family and abortion and gender rights. But the executives in those countries have very different positions with respect to Russia. So this issue might create a differentiation within different far right parties across countries in Europe.

In the 1930s, six right-wing oligarchs used the US’s and UK’s largest newspapers to spout sensationalist xenophobia, and at times even boost fascist propaganda. Today, Fox News and other right-wing mass media outlets are using the very same blueprint.

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Adolf Hitler receives Lord Harold Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail newspaper, at his mountain retreat in Bavaria. (Getty Images)

In the 1930s, the owners of the most widely read newspapers in the United States and Britain married far-right, xenophobic politics with sensationalism. These press lords, as historian Kathryn Olmsted puts it in The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, “trafficked in populist slogans but lived like kings.” Some identified with fascism, while others advocated neutrality toward Adolf Hitler, focusing instead on imperial ambitions in other parts of the world.

Sasha Lilley recently interviewed Olmsted for Against the Grain, a California-based progressive radio show, about her new book. In their conversation, Olmsted explains why these wealthy press moguls sympathized with — and at times even collaborated with — fascist movements, paving the way for right-wing mass media today.

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Sasha Lilley

In your book, you argue that far-right media today has its roots in the nationalist, xenophobic newspapers of the twentieth century. Who were these six newspaper barons, and what was the reach of their papers in the 1930s?

Kathryn Olmsted

Collectively, they reached more than 50 million readers in the United States and the United Kingdom. In their respective countries, they were the biggest newspaper publishers, and their papers were the most popular.

First, in Britain, there was Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, who owned the Daily Mail, which by the 1930s was the most popular, best-selling newspaper in the world. He was an extremely conservative newspaper publisher and even pro-fascist; he was quite enthusiastic about Hitler. There was also Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, the owner of the London Daily Express, which by the mid-1930s had overtaken the Mail as the most popular newspaper in the world.

A party at the home of Lord Rothermere, chairman of Associated Newspapers, to celebrate the 83rd birthday of Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, St James’, London, 25th May 1962. From left to right (on sofa) Winston Churchill, Beaverbrook and Harold Macmillan; (standing behind) Michael Berry (Daily Telegraph), Lord Iliffe (Birmingham Post and Mail), Alick Jeans (Liverpool Daily Post), Vere Harmsworth, Geoffrey Harmsworth (Harmsworth Press), Cecil King (chairman of Daily Mirror newspapers), George Drew (High Commissioner for Canada), Beaverbrook’s son Max, Lord Camrose (Daily Telegraph), Roy Thomson (Thomson Organisation), Lord Drogheda (Financial Times), Lord Rosebery and Lord Rothermere. (Getty Images)

In the United States, I look at William Randolph Hearst, who was arguably the most influential media figure of all time. He owned twenty-eight different newspapers at his peak, as well as a movie theater, a movie studio, a newsreel company, and many magazines. He reached 30 million readers every day.

Then there were three cousins. Robert McCormick and his cousin Joe Patterson owned the Chicago Tribune and the tabloid the New York Daily News, respectively — two of the most popular newspapers in the United States. Patterson’s sister, Cissy Patterson, owned the Washington Times-Herald, which was the most popular newspaper in Washington, DC.

They were all determined to keep their governments from intervening in Europe and stop them from standing up to Hitler’s aggression. There was a spectrum of reasons for this.

In Rothermere’s case, he was actually pro-fascist. He supported the British Union of Fascists for a time, and he wrote very admiring stories about Hitler and the Nazis. Beaverbrook was not pro-fascist, but was an imperialist and called himself an isolationist — he believed that Britain should have nothing to do with what happened on the continent of Europe.

In the United States, Hearst for a time was accused of being fascist, and published articles by Hitler in his newspapers. By the mid-’30s, he was not overtly fascist, but he was certainly determined to be an isolationist. And the Patterson-McCormicks also used their newspapers to harangue President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to tell him that he should not do anything that could embroil the United States in European affairs.

The British press lords that I study were extremely pro-empire, and were very much in favor of the use of British military power to maintain and expand the British Empire. Likewise, the American press barons were perfectly fine with US military power being extended into Latin America, and even sometimes into Asia. They just did not want the United States to intervene against fascists in Europe.

Sasha Lilley

Can you tell us about the term “isolationism”? In some sense, these press barons could be branded as isolationists in that they opposed military intervention in this set of circumstances. And yet, as you note in the book, the term has become fraught, because obviously there are people across the political spectrum who might oppose military intervention. In the 1930s, there was also a strong pacifist movement on the Left.

Kathryn Olmsted

Because the term “isolationist” is so fraught, there are many historians who do not like to use it anymore. They prefer “anti-interventionist” or “neutralist” to capture the broad spectrum of opposition to intervention in World War II.

But perhaps historians have overcompensated here, because most of these press lords were proud isolationists. They used the term themselves. They understood it to mean that they wanted to be isolated from Europe, not that they believed the United States should be isolated from the rest of the world.

Sasha Lilley

How did anti-communism inform the perspectives of media owners like Hearst and Beaverbrook?

Kathryn Olmsted

Again, there’s a spectrum of anti-communism among the press lords.

Anti-communism is essential to understanding Rothermere’s embrace of fascism. He was terrified that a red tide would wash over Europe and eventually get to Britain, so he saw Hitler as a bulwark against Soviet communism. His anti-communism led him to fascism. Hearst was also intensely anti-communist, and very worried about what he saw as the communist threat in the United States. He had some sympathy for the fascists because they were standing up to communism.

For the other press lords, anti-communism was not as essential to their worldviews. But certainly they understood the conflict in Europe as a conflict between communists and anti-communists, which made them more sympathetic to the fascist worldview.

Owner of the Chicago Tribune Robert McCormick, photographed in 1925. (Wikimedia Commons)

Part of the reason these newspapers were so popular was that their owners figured out that nationalism sold.

Hearst figured this out in the 1890s with the Spanish-American War. Rothermere’s brother, Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, figured this out in the 1890s with the Boer War in South Africa.

Because nationalism sold copies, these newspapers used increasingly strident terms to describe foreigners, and to describe the necessity of Britain or America extending its power over the world.

They defined the United States and Great Britain as Anglo-Saxon countries (although that was not true, even at the time), and they were afraid that if their Anglo-Saxon countries went to war with another Anglo-Saxon country (like, in their eyes, Germany), this would lead to the destruction of the white race. Of the newspapers, the New York Daily News was the most explicit about this fear, and that meanwhile, these so-called “yellow” races would take over the world. This was one of the reasons the Daily News argued over and over that the United States should not go to war with the Nazis.

Sasha Lilley

How did these press barons relate to US domestic politics? It seems like there was a range, especially within the trio of the three cousins, in their views of Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Kathryn Olmsted

Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune was extremely conservative. He was a traditional conservative, in that he was very up-front about his belief that hierarchies of race, class, and gender were what made America great. He did not want to disturb those hierarchies. Though he initially did not attack the New Deal — and by initially, I mean for a few weeks — he soon turned against Roosevelt and was an inveterate Roosevelt-hater from mid-1933 onward.

The Daily News started predicting that Roosevelt was going to rig elections, get himself appointed dictator, and then never hold any elections again.

Joe Patterson was a rare newspaper owner for those days in that he actually supported at least some aspects of the New Deal through the 1930s; he even reluctantly endorsed Roosevelt for a third term in the 1940 election. But he broke with Roosevelt over foreign policy. He believed that Roosevelt was much too anti-fascist, much too pro-intervention. Patterson began to believe, like his cousin, that Roosevelt was advocating these foreign policies not because he was a sincere anti-fascist or because he believed that the United States was in danger from German expansion, but because he wanted a war so he could become dictator. The Daily News started predicting that Roosevelt was going to rig elections, get himself appointed dictator, and then never hold any elections again. It even predicted that once he made himself dictator during the war, he was going to appoint one of his sons as his successor. By the time of the United States’ entrance into the war, the McCormick-Patterson papers certainly could not have been more opposed to Roosevelt, in both his domestic and foreign policies.

Sasha Lilley

And what about Hearst? What do we know about his relationship to the Right and fascism in the 1930s?

Kathryn Olmsted

There is still a lot we don’t know about Hearst’s dealings with the Nazis, but he did definitely have a deal with the Nazi state-owned film-production company in the 1930s. Hearst’s newsreel company swapped film footage with the Nazi film company — they would show Hearst newsreels in Germany, and Hearst would show Nazi footage in his newsreels in the United States. As a result, during some of the biggest events of the 1930s, including Hitler’s invasions of other countries, people who were watching Hearst newsreels in the United States saw footage that had been shot by the Nazis.

During some of the biggest events of the 1930s, including Hitler’s invasions of other countries, people who were watching Hearst newsreels saw footage that had been shot by the Nazis.

As far as Hearst’s attitudes towards Roosevelt, he started out as a big fan. The Hearst production company made the movie Gabriel Over the White House, which debuted in March 1933. It valorized a Roosevelt-type president and suggested the president needed to assume dictatorial powers to take the United States out of the Great Depression.

By 1934, Hearst started turning against Roosevelt, because he thought Roosevelt was too pro-union. He was especially disgusted with Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, which legally protected the right to join a union. Hearst began to believe that Roosevelt was influenced by communists, and used all the power at his disposal to attack Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies from that point on.

Sasha Lilley

Robert McCormick, who you noted was particularly reactionary, was involved in a kind of revisionist history of Pearl Harbor, which claimed that the Roosevelt administration turned a blind eye to the coming attack. What was the theory McCormick proffered?

Kathryn Olmsted

The Chicago Tribune published the first Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories by a reporter named John T. Flynn, who was extremely anti-Roosevelt and active in the isolationist America First Committee. Flynn had come to believe, along with other isolationists during World War II, that the United States had been tricked into the war and that there had been some sort of deception at Pearl Harbor — that, in fact, Roosevelt had either orchestrated the attack or had known it was coming and deliberately withheld this information. They believed he wanted to use this attack to get the United States into a war with Japan and eventually Germany.

Flynn published the first article suggesting this theory during the war. And then, immediately after the Japanese surrender, in September 1945, the Chicago Tribune ran a big story by Flynn, alleging that Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the attack at Pearl Harbor. The story inspired a congressional investigation into the alleged intelligence failure — or the alleged conspiracy — that had led to the attack.

Sasha Lilley

Did these six media moguls face any consequences for their fascist sympathies or their America First, Britain First imperialist politics? Was there any fallout for them from the general public during or after World War II?

Kathryn Olmsted

That’s an interesting question; the consequences varied from individual to individual.

Rothermere, who was the most pro-fascist, was very concerned that he might even be interned in Britain. He was able, with the help of his friend Beaverbrook, to get out of the country in 1940 and go on a mission to the United States and Canada. He died in 1940, so he never really had to face criticism for his years as a fascist.

Joe Patterson of the Daily News, which remained popular even during the war. (Wikimedia Commons)

Beaverbrook was an appeaser for years, even through the first year of World War II. But when Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he made Beaverbrook his minister of aircraft production. Beaverbrook threw all of his energy into that area and became a national war hero.

In the United States, Hearst’s newspapers initially suffered some circulation decline because of boycotts and the perception that he was a fascist. He had to declare partial bankruptcy in 1937 and reorganize his affairs, though he did recover.

The most interesting and perhaps frightening case in the United States is that of Joe Patterson, who did not suffer any financial consequences. The Daily News only grew in size and circulation during World War II. As it turned out, his angry populism resonated with a lot of readers, even in wartime.

Sasha Lilley

These media owners also promoted the lifestyles of the rich and famous, which happened to include themselves.

Kathryn Olmsted

Yes — this was especially true for Hearst. He famously owned Hearst Castle, a 115-room mansion on the California coast, to which he would bring Hollywood stars for big parties every weekend. He had the biggest apartment in New York City. He had a castle in Wales. He had a spread on the beach in Santa Monica. He bought European art. He bought the Dutch masters. He bought Italian fountains. He bought a Spanish monastery and broke it into ten thousand pieces and brought it back to the United States.

Hearst would then have his newspapers cover his rich and famous lifestyle. He was not only selling his newspapers; he was selling himself as an exceptionally successful American businessman. The readers could aspire to have a lifestyle like that of William Randolph Hearst.

Sasha Lilley

How much continuity and discontinuity do you see between these mass-circulation publications in the 1930s and some of the offerings in the media system now?

Kathryn Olmsted

I see a lot of continuity. I think that this book tells an origin story about the right-wing media that we live with today. We can see that the right-wing media’s embrace of authoritarian dictators has deep roots in the past. In this period, we can see the primordial Fox News — the roots of the right-wing media obsession with individualism and consumption, but also authoritarian politics and populist nationalism.

By the 1930s, it was basically impossible to start a new newspaper unless you were one of the richest people in the country.

In that era, it took a lot of capital to start a newspaper. By the 1930s, it was basically impossible to start a new newspaper unless you were one of the richest people in the country. And of course, most of these people had right-wing politics.

The frightening thing is that these newspapers were not only entertainment for people. They were also how ordinary Americans got their news: from these very wealthy individuals, who used their media outlets to spread their conservative, reactionary, or sometimes even pro-fascist views.

Sasha Lilley

Sometimes people argue that the reason we have celebrity-fueled journalism is because it’s what the public wants: to attract a mass readership, you need to give the public what it wants. Is this a fair argument about media in the 1930s or now? Are these far-right publications just giving people what they want to read?

Kathryn Olmsted

I’m not sure that the mass public in the 1930s wanted to read nice stories about Hitler and the Nazis, or that they wanted to read that the Nazis did not pose a threat to the rest of the Europe. I think that was pushed on them by the owners of the newspapers, even as audiences read those newspapers for other reasons. The right-wing propaganda was slipped in with the sports and the comics and the columnists that people liked to read.

And so I don’t think that right-wing propaganda was necessarily the politics that people wanted. Perhaps they did want nationalism. But you can have a kind of civic nationalism that is not racist and imperialist and oppressive.

Unfortunately, in the vision of the media barons of the 1930s, nationalism was always a racial nationalism. It was a nationalism about the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and the dangers of other races. And this somehow made the United States Hitler’s natural ally, as opposed to Hitler’s opponent.

That kind of ideology was tremendously dangerous to not only the United States and Great Britain but the whole world.

Going forward, it would obviously be great if students in high school or college could learn about media literacy and how to verify sources and information. But because of the way that very wealthy individuals tend to push right-wing politics through their media outlets, what we might need is more publicly funded media.

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If you’ve been educated in North America or Western Europe, you might be forgiven for…

Talk of civil war in the United States stretches the imagination, but only so far. After all, the United States already had a Civil War in the 19th century and the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and for civil rights showed a very polarized and violent country. How far were our imaginations stretched in More

The post What If: Is a New American Civil War the Only Possible Future Insurrection? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

One of this new coalition’s first tasks, and as difficult as it appears to be, is to find a way to end, or at least weaken, the tribalism that has left our country so divided.

I believe that for all the reasons I cite below, and more, we will likely lose what little is left of our democracy and find ourselves, as early as 2024, living in an Orwellian autocracy, or worse. And while this prospect is much discussed and written about, I see no evidence that, as of now, pro-democracy forces in America are preparing to organize a new coalition of forces that is sufficiently broad enough and powerful enough to prevent this slide into the political abyss. I firmly believe that unless we begin the process of creating such a coalition, a coalition for American democracy, it will be too late to turn the political tide in a new direction.

Before addressing how the kind of mass-movement oriented pro-democracy coalition that I think is essential could be organized and operate if we are to save what is left of our democracy, let me first cite some of the evidence for my dire prediction. But note: I will not in this piece, in any detail, address the decisive role that our capitalist system plays in creating the reasons for my alarm.

First, the recent Axios-Ipsos Two Americas Index public opinion poll of September 1-2, found that 

• 33% of Americans would prefer a strong, unelected leader to a weak elected one; 

• 35% believe Presidents should be able to remove judges whose decisions go against the “national interest”; 

• 38% believe the government should side with the majority over ethnic/religious minority rights; and, 

• roughly 33% believe the federal government should be able to prosecute members of the media who make offensive or unpatriotic statements. 

And the numbers vary little between registered Democrats and registered Republicans. A September 16^th NPR/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing,” yet an Article in September’s The Atlantic, cites a recent study that shows that less than 4% of voters will turn against a candidate whose policies they prefer, or who takes undemocratic actions, or makes undemocratic speeches.

Then there is the evidence provided by the growing nativism, and the tribalism it has spawned. The American people are more divided today than they’ve been since the Civil War. Red states are at political war with blue states. And isn’t it interesting, and depressing, that the same racism that played a central role in our Civil War is doing the same with respect to today’s ugly divide?

Nationalism and tribalism in the United States have advanced to such a degree that political and societal differences once settled in peaceful disputes, or at the ballot box, are now the excuse for violent confrontations. It’s a tribalism between those who understand and welcome the demographic changes flowing from the effects of globalization, and those who see these demographic changes as an existential assault on their so-called “traditional way of life.” Hence, the “replacement theory’s” emergence in the public debate; the fact that millions have been drawn to the ignorant insanity of “Q” with its warnings of Democratic Party pedophilia and Jewish aliens; the steady and well-organized growth of the already huge Christian nationalist, “ReAwaken America” movement, of which Gen. Flynn is a major proponent and star; the majority of Republican Party voters who still believe Trump, not Biden, was elected president again in 2020; and the millions of those who are supportive of the January 6^th insurrection who now believe it is appropriate to use violence to preserve their “traditional way of life” in America. 

All of this, and more represents the coming together of an extremely large and well-funded radical right movement with complete disdain for any form of governance that allows the on-going immigration of non-white, non-Christians into America, or lets laws be passed that challenge its belief in the subservient place of women in society, or that benefit the rights of the poor and people of color, most particularly their voting rights.

Yes, Christian white privilege, racism and sexism, the fear of immigrants of color and Jews and Muslims, have created a tribalism, a political and cultural division in America, that has reached levels not seen since the days of our Civil War. As a result, many historians and political thinkers are warning that we may soon find ourselves in a new civil war, such is the depth of out and out hatred between the sides in this tribal war. As Max Fisher states in the article, “Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungry and Turkey” (New York Times, September 12, 2022), “The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding. First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust.” And he adds, “very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.”

Already the world ranking of democracies finds that of the United States sinking lower, now rating us only 26^th in the list of world’s democracies; and, listing us as only a “partial democracy.” This should not surprise us, given that we were not born as a truly democratic nation in the first place, and given how the impact of big money in elections, gerrymandering, the reduction of days to vote and places to vote, new voting ID requirements, and the influence of giant media companies, have combined to now make America an ever more limited democracy.

Further, ever since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision throwing out significant portions of the Voting Rights Act, election laws in a goodly number of states have quite openly set the stage for a stolen 2024 presidential election. They are aided by a number of Supreme Court rulings that show support for a bizarre new right-wing legal theory, the “independent State legislature theory.” This theory argues that state legislatures have unfettered authority over federal elections! And the new right-wing advocacy organization, Marble Freedom Trust, has just received $1.6 billion to advance this and other anti-democratic theories. Already Supreme Court Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and to a lesser extent Roberts, have evidenced support for this irrational “states’ rights” theory.

Make no mistake: our already limited democracy is hanging on by a thread. For I fully believe that given the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Voting Rights Act case, given the number of states that have already passed undemocratic election laws, and elected Trumpian candidates to the state offices controlling elections and the certification of presidential electors, we now face the very real likelihood that no matter which presidential candidate actually wins the popular vote in the 2024 presidential election, it is the Republican Party candidate that will be declared the winner, thus marking the official end of our flawed democracy.

If the many historians and political thinkers are right in their dire warnings, and I do believe they are, then, as always, the obvious question is the age-old one, “what is to be done?” I have given my answer to that question in the very first paragraph of this article: nothing short of the formation of a broad-based, pro-democracy, mass-action coalition, uniting our various existing progressive coalitions/movements, can save the day. And “yes,” I am fully aware of just hard it will be to put such a coalition together and shape it so as to employ the right strategies and tactics. But in considering the matter of the difficulty in putting such a coalition together, I would urge the leaders and members of current progressive coalitions to contemplate how poorly their causes will fare if America becomes governed by anti-progressive authoritarianism.

Surely, we have no time to lose. I urge the leaders of today’s various progressive movements to start the process of coming together now; coming together in unity because this is the only way we can organize a pro-democracy movement coalition powerful enough to defeat the authoritarian forces on the ascendancy in America; the only hope we have of saving our democracy, limited as it is.

One of this new coalition’s first tasks, and as difficult as it appears to be, is to find a way to end, or at least weaken, the tribalism that has left our country so divided. We’ve got to stop thinking of everyone who sharply disagrees with us as stupid, or immoral racists, and as the “enemy.” For truth be told, in some rather critical ways the “other side” is, like us, simply the victims of an economic system that has left so many of us in America struggling to get all of our human needs met. They are people who have been purposely mis-educated, mis-led and frightened into adopting an ugly nationalism, and who are now scared to death about their place in modern America.

To end this tribalism, we’ve got to talk to those on the other side of this tribal war. Reach out to them, listen to them, sympathize with those of their fears that are legitimate, while pointing out that what is really threatening their living standards is not the “other,” but the economic system we live under; a system that only works when there are winners and losers. In short, to help them understand that it is in the nature of the corporate capitalists and billionaires running this country to profit from keeping the people divided and distrustful of the immigrant or person of color who just moved in down the block; to explain that the only “other” they need to fear is the corporate oligarchy that now rules America. And why it is in their true interests to join us as we fight to save democracy.

Yes, first we’ve got to listen to each other…and then having listened, talk through our differences. For if we would do this, I am convinced that we would find there is more common ground between ourselves than we currently suspect. If we will do this, I believe we will find that “the other side” has some grievances and worries that are justified, even if they are blaming the wrong reasons and the wrong people for those grievances. Even if we can do no more than marginally reduce today’s tribalism in this way, it will be a boon to our pro-democracy movement.

And here are a few other things we should do. Our new coalition must promote the idea of doing what the right-wing has done for decades now and get involved in local school boards so as to have an impact on what America’s children are learning and reading in school. Today, America’s public schools are failing to adequately teach an honest history of America, or why democracy is essential to a free people, and how it should operate. Last year, at least 50 different right-wing groups pushed campaigns to ban certain books in schools, according to a report released by PEN America on September 19^th. PEN said that across the country, restrictions occurred in 138 school districts, which included 5,000 individual schools and enrolled nearly 4 million students. 

Only if progressives get far more involved in the curriculum of public education, by securing their place on local school boards, can we hope to have a school system that honestly and fully produces adults who understand what good government is, who understand the changing nature of America, who understand today’s problems have nothing to do with the race, nationality or religious beliefs of their brother and sister Americans. For as Amartya Sen has argued, good primary schools contribute as much to democracy as strong political parties do.

Other measures should be promoted and fought for as well, such as getting more and more states to adopt ranked-choice-voting and non-partisan primary elections. In the few places where this has been instituted, the results have produced far fewer extreme winners of elections. And city and county and state elections should be taken more seriously than they are currently, since so much of what is decided by such governing entities impact us greatly. Yes, the fight for abortion rights, against racism, for fair union organizing laws, for economic justice, and an end to America’s imperial militarism, must be understood as a fight to save our democracy at all levels of government. In these battles this new coalition must be as dogged and determined as are our neo-fascist foes. (Of course, in many cases the only way to win these rights will require the election of non-capitalist third parties, or by leaving the Democratic Party no choice but to vote the enlightened way. How to build such a party, such an electoral coalition, I must leave for another day.)

It is for these and other reasons, that I am urging the creation of a popular, broad-based coalition to undertake the kinds of actions I’ve suggested in this talk, and a hell-of-a-lot more. A pro-democracy movement coalition that is broad enough and powerful enough to regularly take to the streets in protest with our demands. A movement coalition so powerful that it cannot, if we stick to it until our demands are met, be defeated. A movement coalition like that of the labor, civil rights, anti-war and women’s rights movement coalitions of the past. It must be prepared to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets on behalf of the coalition’s demands, or whenever an unfair and undemocratic effort is underway to further disenfranchise millions of our sisters and brothers. Happily, the majority of America’s youth and millions of adults are with us, and in many separate ways are already leading the fight back effort.

Well, am I right? Is America already far, far down the road that ends in authoritarianism, or worse? And am I right about what I believe is the only way to prevent this journey into the abyss? I’m now old enough to freely admit that I have been wrong many times before in my life and might be wrong again. So, I would like to know what you, the readers think. Perhaps you agree with me about the danger of losing our already shrunken, skeletal, democracy, but disagree on how best to prevent such a loss. To let me know what you think, send your comments to the LA Progressive.

What is absolutely essential, as we undertake this historic imperative, is to remember this: that we’ve overcome great historic evils and divisions in our country in the past. The evil of slavery. The evil that tore apart America during the Civil War. The evil of children sent to work in factories. The rights of women. The anti-communist “witch hunts.” Earlier Jim Crow laws. The Vietnam War. All of our past victories over such evils demonstrate that history itself has been on our side when we’ve fought our battles with a strong people-powered movement. 

And so, remembering that so much of history is on our side, let us vow today to start now to build a united, mass-movement coalition of pro-democratic forces in America. If we do not do this, then we will have failed to answer this new call of history; a call of history facing our country and the entire world today; a call to fight like hell to stop America’s ever accelerating devolution into authoritarianism. For I truly believe that if we acknowledge just how dangerous this moment is, remember how we won great victories over long odds in the past, and get about the necessary business of organizing the only kind of movement that can bring us victory, our day will come!

After President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Russia was conscripting some 300,000 reservists and military veterans to reinforce its war effort in Ukraine, international flights out of Russian cities quickly sold out. This latest wave of Russia’s exodus included Anton Shalaev, a 38-year-old senior manager at an IT company, and 15 colleagues.

On less than a day’s notice, these men of military age all left their relatively comfortable lives in downtown Moscow to fly to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Because of Putin’s war, Shalaev tossed a book, an iPad, and a laptop in a backpack and got out of Dodge.

Shalaev and his co-workers are true tech geeks, producers of high-value computer games. They represent their country’s brightest and best, members of a tech elite that was the economic foundation of Russia’s new middle class. In a last selfie from Moscow, Shalaev brandished a coffee mug that bore the slogan Not today, Satan.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Anna Nemtsova: Why didn’t you want to be drafted to fight in Ukraine?

Anton Shalaev: On the day Putin declared the war, I knew I would never fight on behalf of this new Nazi Reich. They are my personal enemies: mercenaries who steal my country from me, occupy foreign territories, and kill innocent people. Putin’s army commanders have had plenty of time to turn down their contracts; instead, they are recruiting more cannon fodder now.

So I chose to help Ukrainians suffering from this horror—pay for shelters in Kyiv with crypto currency and write antiwar posts on social media. To encourage Russians at home, I said: “Guys, look, I am writing this from Moscow.”

Nemtsova: What was your escape like?

Shalaev: Unlike state-owned companies such as Yandex or the Mail.ru Group, which are making their employees stay, we were independent of government funding, so we made an immediate decision to relocate.

The atmosphere at passport control in the airport was quiet but tense; men waiting for the flight around me were exchanging alerted glances. I had bought my ticket right before the announcement—we were already hearing rumors of the mobilization—so it cost me only about $300. But my colleagues got their tickets the next day, and they cost more than $1,000.

The departure was super stressful. The border guards took each of my friends aside into a small room, interrogated them, asked if they had ever served in the military, and if not, why not. And you know that type of sly border official making their little jokes: “Aha, you are leaving on the day of conscription.” Of course, they checked whether our names were in the database for the mobilization.

Nemtsova: Did you do military service, in fact, when you turned 18?

Shalaev: No, I entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which had a military department, so that released me from the service obligation. I studied political science, and dreamed of becoming a Russian diplomat—Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was a graduate there. For a long time, I considered myself a Russian patriot, ready to serve.

When I enrolled in college, in 2001, there was some ideological diversity: We had a neo-Stalinist who taught us about how “Josef” ruled with an iron fist, but the next class would be with a professor telling us about liberal values. Today, the school recruits students for the secret services. And lately, I heard that the dean has urged students to call for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to surrender.

[Anne Applebaum: The Kremlin must be in crisis]

Nemtsova: What do you think of the Kremlin’s decision making?

Shalaev: A few old men and an army of zombies are leading us to hell. I say that because people around me in Russia behaved as if they had been bitten by a zombie, dragging my entire country into a dreadful war. All I saw was Russian loser husbands beating their wives, while the entire rotting house of the state system has turned my people into an army of the dead.

They are my enemies.

Nemtsova: What do you know of the situation in Ukraine?

Shalaev: I constantly follow the war news in Ukraine—and I seek out the best, most objective analysts. My main source on the atrocities are Ukrainian refugees from cities bombed by Russian forces.

I realize that I would rather go to prison than go to fight against the Ukrainian army. I openly embrace my antiwar position. I urge my social-media followers to donate to Ukrainians. This entire war is a crime against humanity.

Nemtsova: What do you think of the Russian state media?

Shalaev: Russian propaganda is a weapon, and the bastards working there are war criminals. The greatest guilt in this entire tragedy belongs to a small bunch of old men at the top: KGB officers.

Nemtsova: Do you yourself feel guilt?

Shalaev: I blame myself for our careless life, for our hedonism. We were completely relaxed, a bunch of computer geeks enjoying a happy and comfortable decade of Moscow life, creating and playing our games. We thought the entire country was like us; we did not know our country.

On February 24, when the invasion of Ukraine began, it became clear to me that the old man had nothing to lose. He is a psychopath and does not care what happens to us all, to our economy, to our future.

My only hope is that he has some instinct for self-protection that will stop him from nuking us all.