Orwell×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, George Orwell and James Baldwin. They take up US falls below Ukraine in press freedom as global autocracy takes hold.
2. 00:12
   George Orwellshare moment

   We've just had word from the production booth. The United States has fallen below Ukraine in press freedom rankings. Below Ukraine—a country at war. The organization that tracks these things says the global average has never been so low in twenty-five years of measurement.
3. 00:31
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Well.
4. 00:32
   George Orwellshare moment

   That's all?
5. 00:33
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I'm letting it sit for a moment. Because the shock people will feel at this news—white people, let's be clear—that shock is instructive. It tells you who thought they were safe.
6. 00:42
   George Orwellshare moment

   You're saying this isn't news to you.
7. 00:44
   James Baldwinshare moment

   George, I'm saying that if you've been Black in America, you've known for a very long time that the freedoms in the Constitution are... let's call them aspirational. Sometimes extended, often revoked. The surprise here is that white Americans are now encountering what my people have known since we arrived in chains.
8. 01:02
   George Orwellshare moment

   I take your point, but there's something new here nonetheless. When I wrote about the control of information, I was describing totalitarian states—Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany. I wasn't describing England or America, whatever their sins. There was a difference.
9. 01:21
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Was there? Or was the difference that the unfreedom was efficiently distributed by race and class, so that comfortable people never had to see it?
10. 01:30
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's not the same as the state controlling every printing press and shooting editors in the back of the head.
11. 01:37
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. It's subtler. Which is why it lasts longer.
12. 01:40
    George Orwellshare moment

    You think what's happening in America now is subtle?
13. 01:42
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I think it was subtle for a very long time, and now the mask is coming off. That's different. The machinery was always there—the concentrated ownership, the access journalism, the unspoken agreements about what could and couldn't be said. It just worked smoothly enough that people who benefited from it called it freedom.
14. 02:01
    George Orwellshare moment

    I wrote about that machinery. The voluntary censorship of the press, the gentleman's agreements. I called it the 'British Press Service' mentality—how the newspapers would suppress things without being told, because they knew what wasn't done.
15. 02:17
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Exactly. And when I wrote about America, I wrote about a country that couldn't afford to look at itself. Couldn't afford to let its citizens read or say or think certain things about what it had done and was doing. That's not freedom of the press. That's freedom for the press to lie.
16. 02:33
    George Orwellshare moment

    But here's what worries me about your formulation. If it was always this bad, then nothing has changed, and we needn't be alarmed. I don't believe that. I think something is changing, and rapidly.
17. 02:47
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Oh, I'm alarmed. Don't mistake me. I'm saying the change is that the system has stopped pretending. It's decided it doesn't need to pretend anymore. That's worse. That's much worse.
18. 02:57
    George Orwellshare moment

    Ukraine is at war. Actual war, bombs and occupation. And yet it has more press freedom than America. Think about what that means. It means the American press has either been captured or has surrendered. Probably both.
19. 03:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Or it means Ukraine, in its crisis, remembers what freedom costs and what its absence looks like. America has forgotten. Americans thought they had freedom the way they thought they had air—something that just existed, required no maintenance, no vigilance.
20. 03:32
    George Orwellshare moment

    The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I'm not sure I ever believed that when I was young. I thought freedom was the natural state and tyranny the aberration. I learned otherwise.
21. 03:46
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I never had the luxury of thinking that. But go on.
22. 03:49
    George Orwellshare moment

    Tyranny is the natural state. Freedom is the aberration, the brief exception that requires constant, exhausting effort. And when people grow tired, when they decide that comfort or safety or just the absence of conflict is more important than the effort of being free—then it slips away. Often before they notice it's gone.
23. 04:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You wrote that people will accept anything if you do it gradually. The slow boil.
24. 04:17
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes. And I think we're past the slow part now.
25. 04:20
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We are. And here's the bitter comedy of it: the autocracy that's taking hold, as your news report says, is happening while people still have the language of freedom in their mouths. They'll still say 'free press' even as they're dismantling it. They'll still say 'liberty' while building the cage.
26. 04:38
    George Orwellshare moment

    Newspeak.
27. 04:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    What?
28. 04:40
    George Orwellshare moment

    The destruction of language to make certain thoughts unthinkable. You don't need to ban criticism if you've eliminated the words that make criticism possible. Or if you've made those words mean their opposite.
29. 04:54
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We already do that. 'States' rights' meant slavery. 'Law and order' means keep the Black man down. 'Freedom' means my freedom to dominate you. The words have been sabotaged for as long as I've been alive.
30. 05:06
    George Orwellshare moment

    Then we're in the endgame.
31. 05:08
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. We're in the part where people have to decide if they're going to fight or if they're going to pretend they didn't see it happening. That's always the part where it's decided. Not in some dramatic moment. In the daily choice to name the thing or to let it pass.
32. 05:21
    George Orwellshare moment

    And do you think they'll name it?
33. 05:23
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Some will. Most won't. Most people don't. They'll adjust their expectations downward, tell themselves it's not so bad, find reasons why the person being silenced probably deserved it. That's how it always works. Until it's their turn.
34. 05:37
    George Orwellshare moment

    First they came for the journalists.
35. 05:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    First they came for the people nobody liked. Then the journalists. Most of whom, by the way, will keep showing up to work and filing copy and pretending it's still the same job.
36. 05:49
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's the part that turns my stomach. The willing collaboration. The little accommodations. 'Well, we can't publish this, but we can publish that.' 'We'll wait until after the election.' 'Let's not antagonize them.' Death by a thousand concessions.
37. 06:07
    James Baldwinshare moment

    People want to keep their jobs, George. They want to feed their children. You can't only blame them.
38. 06:12
    George Orwellshare moment

    I can blame them a little.
39. 06:14
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So can I. But blame doesn't stop it. Only refusal stops it. Refusal to lie, refusal to be silent, refusal to pretend you don't see what you see. And that refusal costs everything.
40. 06:26
    George Orwellshare moment

    Which is why so few do it.
41. 06:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Which is why we're listening to this news. America below Ukraine. The global average at its lowest point. And tomorrow, most people will go about their lives as if they hadn't heard it.
42. 06:39
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's the part I could never get anyone to believe when I wrote it. Not the dramatic horror—the camps, the executions. But the ordinary horror. People going to work under tyranny. Eating breakfast. Making small talk. As if it were normal.
43. 06:57
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It becomes normal. That's the point. That's what you were trying to say, and that's what I've been trying to say. It becomes normal so gradually that people forget it was ever otherwise.
44. 07:08
    George Orwellshare moment

    Do you think it can be stopped?
45. 07:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I think it can be resisted. I don't know if that's the same thing. But resistance is the only option that lets you keep your soul. So you resist, and you tell the truth, and you refuse to be the person who looked away. And maybe that's enough. It has to be.
46. 07:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    It's not very comforting.
47. 07:27
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. But you and I didn't get into this business to comfort people.