AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as
we continue our conversation with award-winning
author, journalist Masha Gessen, author of
The Future is History: How Totalitarianism
Reclaimed Russia.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I asked Gessen how she thinks
President Donald Trump is distorting language.
One example she cites in her piece is on NATO,
that Trump first said that NATO is obsolete,
and then later said it was no longer obsolete.
MASHA GESSEN: The way that he’s mangling
the English language is something that I think
is so dangerous.
And Americans are a little bit innocent to
that danger.
And this is where, oddly, you know, having
grown up in the Soviet Union and then having
lived in Russia as a journalist for so many
years, I’m externally sensitive to what
happens to language.
And I’ve talked to two Italian journalists
about this.
Italian journalists, I mention because they
lived through a much sort of milder form of
what I observed in Russia.
But they say that Berlusconi, over 20 years
of his reign, did so much damage to the language
that they’re still recovering their ability
to describe what they’re dealing with.
Right?
And so, Trump does two things.
He uses words to mean their opposite.
So when he does things like, you know, he
calls the Russia investigation a “witch
hunt,” it’s the opposite—he uses the
phrase “witch hunt” to mean its opposite
in several ways.
And the most important of them is to reverse
the relationship of power, right?
I mean, a witch hunt, by definition, used
to be something that people with power could
perpetrate upon people who didn’t have power,
right?
Here’s the most powerful man in the world
saying that he is the victim of a witch hunt.
But he also just uses words to mean nothing.
Like a thing cannot be first obsolete and
then no longer obsolete, right?
That reverses sort of our understanding of
time and words.
And both—these are distinct kinds of damage
to language, but they make our shared reality
mushy, right?
Because how do you use terms that no longer
mean anything or have come to mean their opposite,
which also is a way of meaning nothing, right?
And as a journalist, I have worked in a language
that has been violated in similar ways, first
by the Soviet regime using words to mean their
opposite, where, you know, literally, “freedom”
was—the word “freedom” was used to mean
“unfreedom,” and the word “democracy”
was used to mean “tyranny.”
And then, under Putin, I observed words being
used in very much the way that Trump uses
them, just to mean nothing, just to create
a kind of cacophony in which you never can
get a grasp of what’s going on.
And Trump is doing both.
And that’s going to make our recovery from
Trump, which inevitably will come, that much
more difficult.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Trump’s
attraction for Putin, why you think that is,
and if Putin has the same feelings about Trump.
MASHA GESSEN: So, I think Trump’s attraction
for Putin—again, people have tried to figure
out, you know, what does Putin have on Trump
that Trump keeps praising him?
But I think the Yale historian Timothy Snyder
put it best in an early piece for The New
York Review of Books, that Putin is the dictator
that Trump plays on TV.
Trump really wants to be Putin.
He thinks that that’s what power looks like.
He thinks that politics is about exercising
raw power.
He thinks that 86 percent popularity is a
sign of extreme popularity and extreme effectiveness.
What I think—
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Eight-six percent popularity,
that’s what Putin has.
MASHA GESSEN: Eight-six percent, that’s
what Putin has.That’s what Putin has, and
that is a totalitarian-level number, right?
That’s when you know you’re no longer
talking about public opinion, because there
is no public and there is no opinion.
You’re just taking the temperature, sort
of, of totalitarianism in the country, and
it’s pretty damn high.
And that’s what Trump sort of instinctively
aspires to.
It’s not—the feeling is not mutual.
Putin thinks that Trump is a clown.
He’s made that abundantly clear.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
MASHA GESSEN: Well, when—early on, remember
Trump used to tell us that Putin called him
“brilliant”?
And what Trump—what Putin actually said
was that Trump was “colorful.”
The word “colorful” in Russian can also
be translated to English as “bright.”
Right?
So someone must have translated it for Trump
as “bright.”
AMY GOODMAN: What’s the word?
MASHA GESSEN: The word is yarkii.
So it’s actually—the literal translation
would be “vivid.”
But you don’t call a person “vivid,”
right?
I either translate it as “colorful” or
as “bright.”
But the vernacular would actually be “colorful.”
It wouldn’t be “bright.”
So, someone must have translated it for Trump
as “bright.”
And then Trump inflated it, inflated “bright”
to “brilliant.”
So, Fareed Zakaria, who comes up for the second
time today, during an interview in Moscow
in September of 2016, asked Putin, you know,
“You called Trump brilliant.
Why did you do that?”
And Putin, you could just see how thrilled
he was, because, very much like Trump, he
loves it when journalists are wrong.
And so he says, “Well, I never said that.
Why do you believe things you hear?
If you go back to what I said, I called him
colorful.
He’s colorful, isn’t he?”
And that—you know, that just sums of his
attitude toward Trump.
Every comment he has made since and sort of
the way that Russian television has treated
Trump, it either portrays Trump as the man
who affirms Putin’s power, because, of course,
Russia is very happy with the narrative that
Russia elected the American president, or
they treat Trump as a bumbling idiot who can’t
get anything right, including his relationship
with Russia, which, you know, for all the
Russia conspiracy, the relationship between
the United States and Russia has never been
worse.
I mean, it hasn’t been worse since the end
of World War II.
We are deep into the territory of mutual diplomatic
expulsions.
At this point, the Russian—the American
Embassy in Moscow and the consulate in Saint
Petersburg have been forced to stop issuing
visas to Russian citizens, because they are
so poorly staffed that they actually can’t
process visas.
I mean, we are on the brink of actually losing
diplomatic relations altogether.
AMY GOODMAN: Masha, you are the author of
The Future is History: How Totalitarianism
Reclaimed Russia.
You’ve been fiercely critical of Russia.
You’re fiercely critical of the Trump administration.
But you’re also fiercely critical of the
story that has predominated now of Russia’s
interference with the U.S. election that ended
in the victory of Trump.
Why?
MASHA GESSEN: Well, because, you know, I just
need more things to be fiercely critical of,
obviously.
But I think—and this is a word that also
has almost lost its meaning, because we use
it so much—in a way, it’s a distraction.
Right?
And this is a very difficult point to try
to convey—right?—that I think that conspiracy
thinking is really dangerous to culture and
to political culture.
And it’s very hard to stay away from conspiracy
thinking when there may have been a conspiracy.
Right?
We don’t know if there was a conspiracy.
But even if there was, we should do our best
to try not to engage in conspiracy thinking,
for a couple of reasons.
One is that it lends itself to fantasy.
It lends itself to this idea that once we
discover that Trump colluded with the Russians,
that we’ll magically get rid of Trump.
That’s not going to happen, for two reasons.
One is that it’s extremely unlikely that
the investigation, when it’s over—and
it’s going to drag on for a long time—but
it’s extremely unlikely that it’s going
to produce the kind of solid evidence of collusion
that would—that could be used as a legal
basis for impeachment.
But even more important, there’s not going
to be any impeachment as long as Republicans
are in power in both houses of Congress.
Right?
So, there isn’t a straight, direct line
from any kind of conclusions from the Russia
investigation to getting rid of Trump.
But more important, it creates this fantasy
that we can find a reasonable explanation
for the election of Trump that will somehow
let us out of this national nightmare.
And the national nightmare is that Americans
elected Trump, and he’s president.
Russians didn’t elect Trump.
Even if there was collusion, even if every
hypothesis that has—that is at play in the
Russia investigation is proved, still, Americans
elected Trump, and he is president.
And he’s doing incredible damage to this
country, while so much of the media is obsessed
with proving the Russia stories—story.
And, you know, every American citizen has
limited bandwidth, even if the internet has
unlimited bandwidth.
And so, the more we engage with the Russia
story, the less we engage with our lived reality
of destruction of democracy in this country.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, in that sense, as you
say in your piece, in one of your pieces,
this whole investigation into Russia is actually
helping Trump, and the media’s obsession
with it.
Could you talk about the role of the intelligence
community in media reporting on Russia?
MASHA GESSEN: So, I think this is one of the
most disturbing things about especially the
early coverage of the Russia theory—right?—which
was that all of the early coverage was driven
by leaks from the intelligence community.
Now, the problem with leaks from the intelligence
community—the problems are obvious, right?
One is that they can’t be corroborated.
Two is that your sources control the timing
and sort of the dosage of the leaks.
So, basically, journalists become mouthpieces
for people in the intelligence community who
may or may not be pursuing their own goals
that have nothing to do with informing the
public.
Their job is not to inform the public, right?
That’s the media’s job.
But a close enough relationship gets the media
out of the business of informing the public
and into the business of being mouthpieces
for the intelligence community.
And, of course, we should be highly skeptical
of anything that comes from the intelligence
community, based on the experience that American
media have had recently, you know, during
the careers of many of the people who are
covering the leaks now, of leaks being used
to mislead the American public in fundamental
ways.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, you said earlier, Masha,
that one of the problems with this obsession
with the Russia investigation is that it prevents
us from thinking about why Americans elected
Trump.
Now, in one of your pieces, you talked about
the effects—I mean, the kind of looking
at the longer view—the effects of 9/11 and
the concentration of power in the executive
branch.
Can you say what you think some of the historical—although
not that long ago—reasons are that Trump
was elected?
MASHA GESSEN: So, that was a piece that I
wrote when I was asked to write about the
looming Reichstag fire, if you remember.
I think this trope has sort of faded a little
bit.
But early on in the Trump presidency, a lot
of people were saying, “Oh, he’s going
to use an event to consolidate power, to create
a state of exception, right?
And that event is going to be like a terrorist
attack.
And, of course, you know, the terrorist attack
is inevitable.
It’s just a question of how Trump is going
to use it.”
My argument is basically that our Reichstag
fire—and the Reichstag fire, as I’m sure
you know, is, in 1934, the Reichstag, the
parliament building in Berlin, burned, and
Hitler, who had just recently been appointed
chancellor, used it as a pretext for restricting
political freedoms in really profound ways,
in ways that—to create a state of exception,
what his favorite legal theorist, Carl Schmitt,
called a state of exception, which is when
the sovereign claims extraordinary power.
Well, I think that that has all happened in
this country, and it happened in the wake
of September 11th.
The state of emergency that went into effect
three days after September 11th has never
been lifted.
It was renewed by President Obama every September
for seven years of his presidency, the seven
Septembers that he was president.
We continue to be in the state of emergency.
The War Powers Act passed with one dissenting
vote three days after September 11th, continues
to be in effect and has been used by President
Obama and now by President Trump.
And there’s also been a 16-year run of concentrating—increasing
concentration of power in the executive branch—under
George W. Bush, basically, in the interest
of shoring up more military and surveillance
power; under President Obama, for some of
the same and some other reasons, having to
do with a Congress that was intent on paralyzing
him.
But basically, I think that chain of events
did a lot to create the possibility of Trump,
to create the very possibility of a politician
who could run for autocrat in this country
and get elected.
AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning author and journalist
Masha Gessen.
Her new book is The Future is History: How
Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.
It’s been shortlisted for the National Book
Award.
When we come back, Congressmember Nydia Velázquez
has just returned from Puerto Rico.
Stay with us.
