Micah Loewinger: A recent executive order cut funds for state media organizations, including Voice of America.

Speaker 2: At this hour, from everything I've heard from listeners and our engineers and transmitter facilities around the world, the VOA is effectively silent.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Radio Free Europe is also affected by the cuts. A journalist who spent nine months in a Russian prison for her work there grapples with the fallout.

Alsu Kurmasheva: I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists. What am I going to tell them? That their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, with everything that's been going on lately, there's a definite scent of apocalypse in the air.

Dorian Lynskey: The idea of it would be good if we just swept this all away.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. [music]

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Last weekend, multiple publicly funded news services became the latest items on the Trump administration's chopping block.

Speaker 6: All full-time employees and contractors working for the government-funded international broadcaster, Voice of America, were put on leave.

Speaker 7: Also part of the cuts, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, organizations whose intention is to provide unbiased news to countries who otherwise might not have access to it. They broadcast to more than 40 countries, including Russia, Ukraine, and China.

Speaker 8: Programs and broadcasts have been going off the air, and at this hour, the VOA is effectively silent.

Micah Loewinger: A bit of clarification. VOA and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting are federal entities, whereas Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks are nonprofit news organizations. All of them are funded by the United States Agency for Global Media. For just under $1 billion in its 2025 budget, USAGM was primed to pump out journalism and cultural programming in 64 languages.

Jodie Ginsberg: This isn't just a risk to those individuals who will now lose information about their countries.

Micah Loewinger: Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists on CNN this week.

Jodie Ginsberg: It's a risk to the US national security because it creates an environment in which mis and disinformation, lies, and propaganda from autocrats around the world can flourish.

Micah Loewinger: The Trump administration sees the mission a bit differently. Here's the president at a press conference a little over a week ago.

Speaker 10: What about the president's plan to expel Palestinians out of Gaza? Are you discussing that with him and giving him yoor--

Trump: Nobody's expelling any Palestinians. I don't know. Who are you with?

Speaker 11: I'm with AmericaStats.

Trump: Oh, no wonder. Okay, Voice of--

Micah Loewinger: The MAGA loyalist recently tasked with running VOA is also not a fan.

Kari Lake: I have been on the job for a couple of weeks now and I'm horrified by some of the things I'm learning about this agency.

Micah Loewinger: Kari Lake, loser of two statewide races in Arizona, hasn't been officially appointed because her expected boss, Brent Bozell, conservative media critic, and Trump's pick to run USAGM also hasn't been confirmed. Lacking formal power to change it, she's resorted to trashing its work here on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast.

Kari Lake: Unfortunately, the product is not pro-American. That's really a symptom, though, of a bigger problem. The disease is that the people who've been leading the umbrella agency--

Micah Loewinger: Lake, who once described herself to a gaggle of reporters as "your worst fricking nightmare" is named in a lawsuit filed this week.

Speaker 14: US-backed broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has filed a lawsuit over cuts to its funding by the Trump administration. The broadcaster says USAGM violated the Constitution by withholding money allocated by Congress.

Micah Loewinger: In order to better understand the 80-plus-year history of Voice of America, I spoke to Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University. She began by telling me about Robert E. Sherwood, the man who coined the organization's name.

Nicole Hemmer: He had seen the rise of fascism in places like Germany and Italy and had seen the way that radio had enabled that by spreading propaganda across those countries. He came to this idea of Voice of America with that idea that there could be this alternative voice that was accurate, that was telling the truth, but that was also showing the war through American eyes.

Micah Loewinger: By 1944, VOA was broadcasting in over 40 languages. What would early listeners have heard when they turned on Voice of America?

Nicole Hemmer: Listeners would have heard some straightforward news reports.

Speaker 16: This is a voice speaking from America, a voice from America at war.

Nicole Hemmer: They would also hear American music like jazz being played across the airwaves.

Speaker 17: The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America, something that not every country has.

Micah Loewinger: The idea here is that by promoting jazz music, listeners would be more open to American influence.

Nicole Hemmer: It sounds kind of funny now, but in both World War II and then in the Cold War that followed, American soft power, which is what VOA represented, was about showing that America could help other countries by helping them rebuild after the war. Also, they were saying, this is what you get with the American way of life. You get this innovative music, you get cool fashion and art, and that's what you get when you have a free and open and democratic society. It's not just about constitutionalism or rule of law, but it's about these things that make every day just a little sweeter.

Micah Loewinger: Okay. How is that different from American propaganda?

Nicole Hemmer: [laughs] That's a good question. It is American propaganda, but I think that part of its propaganda was that it was an open and accurate news source. It's written in the mission of VOA that it has to offer accurate information. They were doing that in countries that they believed were closed systems, that were only getting totalitarian messages, countries that didn't have a free press.

Micah Loewinger: On OTM back in 2003, we had on Alan Heil, who was a former VOA director, who explained it this way.

Alan Heil: You had, at the very beginning, among the pioneers, those who believed that the best policy was to tell the truth. General Stilwell, for example, said the Japanese gave us a hell of a beating in Burma. Now, that became a matter of some contention between the policymakers in Washington and Voice of America, but the VOA staff held its own. Later, we learned following World War II from some of the Japanese who were interrogated about their listening experiences that that made them really believe the Voice of America.

Nicole Hemmer: Right. This was part of VOA's strategy. You couldn't straight up lie to people and expect them to trust you as a source of news, that you had to tell them what was really happening. After the Cold War, there is a new regulation put in place for VOA that creates a kind of firewall between the organization and the federal government so that administrations aren't trying to take political control of the journalists.

Micah Loewinger: What happened next? How did the VOA's mission change after the Cold War?

Nicole Hemmer: There is another moment of soul searching. Democracy seems to have won.

Micah Loewinger: The end of history.

Nicole Hemmer: Right. This belief in the early 1990s that, well, everywhere is going to be free now, and so the US can kind of pull back. Then I think there is also a reevaluation of how much democracy has actually won at the end of the Cold War. You have all of these new countries that are being born and civil wars that are breaking out. It is not clear that these are going to be democratic countries. They could very easily become totalitarian countries. The VOA mission sort of becomes to continue modeling a free press, continue to push for more open societies in these countries that are going through transition.

Micah Loewinger: You've used this term, soft power, a few times. How successful has VOA been in spreading this kind of influence? Do we have any way of knowing that it's hit its mark?

Nicole Hemmer: We can't necessarily say, well, this government regime toppled or this press regime became more open because of the presence of VOA. That's kind of the idea behind soft power that's influence. It's providing a service that may not otherwise be available in the country where they are airing, and that that is going to essentially make people think more warmly of the United States and its form of government.

Micah Loewinger: Promoting democracy, espousing the values of freedom of information and freedom of speech, this all sounds so great. Are there examples of moments where the VOA didn't live up to these lofty goals?

Nicole Hemmer: Where's the line between promoting a free press and promoting a certain economic form, promoting the hegemony of American culture and businesses in ways that have often made countries feel a little intruded upon? Because when American culture starts to push out national culture, that's not ideal for the countries where VOA is broadcasting. I think there is this tension between soft promotion of democracy and free press and a kind of cultural imperialism. That is always going to be an issue with an organization like VOA, because of its mission.

Micah Loewinger: We're talking about an organization with hundreds of millions of dollars in its budget, which, to be fair, is a lot of money, given how hard it is to measure its success.

Nicole Hemmer: That's right. It is one of those organizations that I think it is fair to have a debate about, is this the best way for the US to be spending its money? The world has changed a lot in the last 80 years or so. Are there better, more efficient, more effective ways of promoting a free press, both within the United States and abroad? I think it's worth having a conversation about the best ways to do that.

Micah Loewinger: Despite the laws attempting to shield the Voice of America from political interference, the White House issued a press release titled The Voice of Radical America, which referred to a series of claims that it seemed to back up with a series of articles in right-wing media outlets, among them a National Review piece claiming "Voice of America's staff ordered not to call Hamas terrorists." What are they talking about?

Nicole Hemmer: There was a directive from VOA to avoid using the word terrorist when talking about members of Hamas. Now, people are free to call Hamas's activities acts of terror, terrorist acts. The word terrorism is not verboten nor is it banned to call members of Hamas terrorists. What they're responding to, and this is something that a number of media organizations within the US adhere to as well, is that the word terrorist in the US is a particularly politically loaded term that is used unevenly depending on who is being spoken about. There is no ban on the word terrorist. That's part of a much more nuanced conversation that is just one of journalistic protocols.

Micah Loewinger: That same White House press release that I'd quoted before also pointed to articles from Breitbart, Fox News, and The Daily Caller, including one piece from The Daily Caller with the headline Multiple Voice Of America Reporters Have Posted Anti-Trump Content On Social Media.

Nicole Hemmer: Now, it is true that people who work for VOA have said anti-Trump things on social media, but there has been no evidence that that has influenced reporting at VOA. That's always the trick, that reporters might have opinions, but you have to show that it's influencing the way that they cover the news. That's the missing piece in that particular accusation.

Micah Loewinger: Nevertheless, some members of the right-wing media are ecstatic. Here's Glenn Beck this week.

Glenn Beck: Now, I don't think we've had a problem in the east part of Europe for a while now with them not being free. When Donald Trump says, "Hey, I want you to go into this agency and fix it," it's kind of like, "Hey, there's a problem with your doggies in the shed. Can you go fix Old Yeller?" "Yes, I can. I can, Dad." It's going to hurt, but it's the right thing to do.

Nicole Hemmer: It's a fascinating viewpoint that has become much more prevalent on the right in the last 10 years or so, that the US doesn't have a role to play in the world. Glenn Beck would go on to say in that segment that NATO should be done away with. There is this larger set of goals that the dismantling of VOA plays into that makes right-wing audiences so happy. VOA stood for a defense of democracy and free press across the world.

This is an administration that does not stand for those things. This is an administration that doesn't believe in the liberal world order that's based on a set of rules, that's based on human rights but believes in a world order that is based on power. That means that the US alliances in that world are with regimes like China, like Russia, these strongmen states. To see the US begin to withdraw from the institutions that were built to guard against totalitarianism says a lot about where the administration sees the US in the world. That's, I think, particularly worrisome.

Micah Loewinger: Something you said earlier caught my ear, which is that one of the implicit ideas in the VOA early on was this idea that soft power or propaganda or whatever you want to call it is more compelling if it's true. I wonder if you look around at the Internet and our information ecosystem today and you can confidently say that that theory is right.

Nicole Hemmer: I don't think it holds true anymore at all. It's why things like fact-checking aren't particularly effective pushback against propaganda, because people aren't necessarily persuaded by facts. They're led much more by seeing things that they want to believe and believing them. Especially in a media environment where all of the signals of expertise and authority and experience have been stripped away. I think this is the biggest problem facing journalism right now, is that we're in an entirely different ballgame when it comes to how people come to understand the world around them.

Micah Loewinger: Nicole, thank you very much.

Nicole Hemmer: Thanks so much, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Nicole Hemmer is a historian and co-host with Jody Avirgan of the podcast This Day In Esoteric Political History.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, putting a human face on the funding cuts.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Last weekend, on a day dubbed Bloody Saturday, journalists at Radio Free Asia learned their work may soon be coming to an end.

Bay Fang: We were sent a grant termination letter on Saturday, effectively cutting off all of our funding.

Micah Loewinger: Bay Fang, president of Radio Free Asia, or RFA, which for 30 years has been producing boots-on-the ground reporting in countries where few, if any independent media outlets remain. In 2017, reporters for the RFA, Uyghur Service, the world's only independent Uyghur language outlet, were the first to uncover clues of the now infamous detention camps in Xinjiang in northwest China.

Bay Fang: One of our reporters found this out because he was calling around and just amazed at how many people were saying their relatives had been rounded up. He broke the story and then that was picked up by all sorts of different media.

Micah Loewinger: And by members of Congress.

Speaker 21: It goes on talking about ethnic Uyghurs held in political re-education camps. I'm going to put quotes around that because they're not re-education camps. They're concentration camps.

Micah Loewinger: For their trenchant work, Some RFA journalists have paid a steep price.

Gulchehra Hoja: I received call from our neighbor's daughter.

Micah Loewinger: Gulchehra Hoja, a Uyghur American reporter at RFA.

Gulchehra Hoja: She told me, all my relatives arrested because of me, my work. Almost certainly held in call re-education camps run by Chinese government.

Micah Loewinger: Four other Uyghur Service reporters have had close family members arrested and possibly sent to detention camps. In 2021, in nearby Myanmar, after a violent military coup sparked a long, bloody civil war, several journalists from RFA's Burmese Service were forced to leave, but a few stayed behind.

Bay Fang: They report without using their names.

Micah Loewinger: Bay Fang.

Bay Fang: They are able to get such stories as a villager found a cell phone that belonged to a junta soldier, and on the cell phone were selfies and videos that he had taken of him and his comrades committing war crimes.

Micah Loewinger: Using that cell phone footage, RFA reported in 2022 that 29 Burmese citizens were murdered by military junta soldiers in a small village. Multiple RFA workers and contributors in Vietnam are in prison for their journalism. It's a similar situation in Cambodia, which was ruled for nearly 40 years by a violent authoritarian government led by Hun Sen, now succeeded by his son.

Bay Fang: We were known as the last man standing after all of these different independent media were shut down by Hun Sen.

Speaker 23: Cambodia's leader has shut down the country's last independent media organization, Voice of Democracy Radio, known as VOD, has stopped operations as of today.

Bay Fang: It speaks for itself that Hun Sen put out on his own Facebook page that he's celebrating the fact that we have had our funding turned off. He actually thanked Donald Trump for that.

Micah Loewinger: They weren't the only ones celebrating.

Speaker 23: Chinese state media says Voice of America Has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag and will become a laughing stock of the times.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, Russian state television is celebrating the cuts to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In recent years, the Putin regime has targeted their journalists, including Alsu Kurmasheva, who spent nine months last year in a Russian detention center. Today, she's a press freedom advocate. For more than 20 years, she worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Tatar-Bashkir Service as a reporter, editor, and radio host, covering the stories of ethnic minorities in Russia and broadcasting in her native language of Tatar.

Alsu Kurmasheva: Tatars were one of the ethnic groups which had never had an independent media or schools or any institutions to develop the language, to develop the statehood, to develop ethnic identity.

Micah Loewinger: When she first joined the service, things were going so well that her boss in Prague, where she's based, told her that RFE was planning to pull out of the region.

Alsu Kurmasheva: This is how RFE operates. We have a history of shutting down the services. Whenever the press is self-sustaining in the country where we broadcast, we report the service, the department shuts down. There were beautiful times 20-plus years ago. This is how it started.

Micah Loewinger: Then what was the turn? When did it become such an essential service?

Alsu Kurmasheva: When Putin came To power, he started putting more pressure on journalists, on independent media. We slowly lost frequencies, FM frequencies. Then they shut down the radio. The Russian authorities later designated RFE as a foreign agent in Russia. Later, the recent development, this happened when I was in prison, the Russian authorities designated RFE as an undesirable organization, which makes working for us a criminal offense in Russia.

Micah Loewinger: I want to talk about what happened in May of 2023 when you were detained by Russian authorities. You were on a trip back to Kazan to care for your elderly mother.

Alsu Kurmasheva: The investigation was launched on the charges I hadn't registered my American pass. The investigation took five months.

Micah Loewinger: You were on house arrest for five months?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Yes, and I paid my fine, which was not more than $100. I was about to pick up my passports from the investigator and leave when they arrested me. This time, it was a real arrest, and they sent me to the detention center.

Micah Loewinger: What was going through your mind?

Alsu Kurmasheva: October 18th, I was cooking lunch at home, texting with my husband about school break later in October, which I was planning to be at home in Prague with my children already. Suddenly I heard noise at the door. I saw from the little eye in the door that they were showing me some paper that they need to take me away for investigation. Then I was taken to the Investigative Committee and charged with not registering as a foreign agent. That was absolutely a fake accusation. It didn't have any evidence against me.

This is how it works. They still put me to prison.

Later, that accusation was dropped and they built up new charges against me, which was based on the book that I co-edited at RFE/RL. The book is called Saying No to War. It's a collection of 40 stories of 40 people in Russia who opposed the war. The final charge I was charged with was that I was spreading fake information about Russian military.

Micah Loewinger: You spent nine months in detention before the trial?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Yes, nine and a half months. 288 days. 40 Fridays. I love Fridays. I calculated my life in prison by Fridays.

Micah Loewinger: What was life like during that time?

Alsu Kurmasheva: In prison, you can't control anything. You can't control your sleep. You can't control your food intake. You can't control basically nothing but at least your breath or your thought. That was very important. I set the routine to read. As there was lack of books, I didn't have enough books, I was reading ingredients on the food packages. I was learning the amount of sugar in each product. I know it sounds insane right now, but this is how I made my brain work, and this is how I try to control my thoughts so I don't be depressed.

Actually, nobody is depressed in prison. It's something beyond depression. It's everything around you deprives you of dignity. It was so cold in winter, and you don't want to brush your teeth in the morning. You don't want to get up to do it in the evening. If that repeats a couple of more times, you are not a human being already. I set my routine of exercise, reading, trying to maintain a healthy diet.

Micah Loewinger: You received a Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In your speech, you alluded to this image that stuck with me, where there was snow, and you were in a courtyard, and you started to build a little house out of the snow.

Alsu Kurmasheva: It was the first snow, and there was a very small courtyard, and we couldn't walk. I don't remember how many of us. There were several prisoners. Suddenly, without even thinking, I started building a lighthouse. Accidentally, I found in my pocket a candy wrapper, which was yellow and red, which I put on top. I was looking at that lighthouse for a very long time, thinking that, "Oh, my gosh, this is the light I feel from my friends and family from the free world."

There was this big campaign around the world to write to political prisoners in Russia. The best letters I got were from people I didn't know. Say one Russian woman from one of the European cities sent me a postcard saying, "Also, it's Christmas time. It's beautiful here. My friends are celebrating. I took this time, and I'm sitting in the next room where it's quiet, to write to you while everybody is eating." Those words will stay with me forever. They meant so much to me in that dark prison cell.

Micah Loewinger: Last July, you were brought to a courtroom for a secret trial in Kazan. On that same day, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was tried in another Russian city. He was sentenced to 16 years. You received six and a half years for, as you said, spreading false information. What happened after the sentence?

Alsu Kurmasheva: I was taken and brought to a prison in Moscow. That's the notorious prison called Lefortovo, former KGB prison. I was kept there from Monday until Thursday. On Thursday, the actual exchange happened.

Speaker 24: Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan landed in Maryland late last night.

Speaker 25: The negotiations that were involved in bringing these three home were described as a diplomatic feat yesterday involving half a dozen countries and months of hard work.

Alsu Kurmasheva: It was a moment I was dreaming of for many, many months. I couldn't cry in prison. I'm a person who holds emotions when it's hard, but since I was released, I think I've cried all my tears.

Micah Loewinger: What were your initial feelings when you got the news that President Donald Trump had signed an executive order cutting off all funding to the US Agency for Global Media, which is the entity that funds Radio for Europe/Radio Liberty?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Well, I thought about two things. First, millions of people will stop reading and watching our reporting. Russian and Chinese propaganda will fill in that empty space very quickly, very efficiently, because those countries are spending more money on soft power and on propaganda media than the United States. The second thing, I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days. What am I going to tell them? That their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing? These were my thoughts immediately when I heard the news.

Micah Loewinger: You said you don't know what to tell the family members of Radio Free Europe journalists who are in prison for their reporting. For you, you spent nine months for reporting that you did on behalf of this US-funded news organization. Then an American president is accusing it of spreading "radical propaganda," which was essentially the same charge that you got from that Russian secret court. How are you feeling about the work that you paid a sacrifice for?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Thank you for your words. You just took them out of my mouth and you said that exactly how I would put it. Because if we talk about cost to taxpayers, we are the most efficient example of soft power that America can have. Our effectiveness is proven by America's enemies to silence us. These days, propaganda media organizations in Russia and Iran are celebrating, and we are not out of business yet. They're celebrating the rumors. They've been trying to end our operations for years, for decades. Now, suddenly, our government is giving them this gift. It's like an own goal.

Micah Loewinger: To your point, on Sunday, Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia Today, was on one of Russia's state TV channels when she said.

Margarita Simonyan: Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other outlets because Trump suddenly announced he's closing RFE/RL and Voice of America. They are closed now. This is an awesome decision by Trump.

Micah Loewinger: To which the host of the show, Vladimir Solovyov, responded.

Vladimir Solovyov: I'm addressing independent journalists. Die, animals. You are lying, vile, disgusting traitors to the motherland. Die in a ditch.

Micah Loewinger: Do you want to respond to that?

Alsu Kurmasheva: No, I don't want to respond to that. I don't respond to things like that. I saw that statement, too.

Micah Loewinger: It was interesting to hear you use the term American soft power as part of the mission of Radio for Europe. How important to you was it that the work, in addition to being journalism, was about advancing American soft power?

Alsu Kurmasheva: When I was doing that job, I didn't think about it. I wasn't thinking about promoting anything. I wasn't thinking about being a soft power for somebody. This is what I was doing. I was giving voice to my people so they could take informed decisions for themselves. Journalism, open, objective journalism doesn't exist in certain countries with autocracies. People don't know that a media organization can be just reporting for the sake of reporting.

Those regimes are sure that every media organization should work for somebody's purpose, the ideology or politics or political parties or something. We were bringing those values of freedom of speech to our audiences. Really not much will change immediately if Radio for Europe stops. In a long term effect, it will be such a disaster and it will be so difficult to start that over again, that experience that have been built for years, for 75 years.

Micah Loewinger: Alsu, thank you very much.

Alsu Kurmasheva: Thank you, Micah, for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Alsu Kurmasheva is a journalist and press freedom advocate for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, recent times have felt, well, a touch apocalyptic. Would it help you to know how our predecessors dealt with that end-of-the-world feeling? Stay tuned.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. With everything that's been going on lately, there's a definite scent of apocalypse in the air.

Speaker 28: Floods that seem to me to be a new stage in climate change, they're like an apocalypse.

Speaker 29: So many people look at this and they say, "James, is this the apocalypse?"

Speaker 30: Elon and his nerd army have been combing through agencies, blasting away bloat. The media is calling it the Trumppocalypse.

Speaker 31: Yes, there we are, the zombie apocalypse within our Social Security administration.

Trump: We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.

Brooke Gladstone: Dorian Lynskey is a cultural journalist and author of the recent book Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World. He's chronicled just about every way we've imagined and reimagined how it would all go down, and even where this idea of the world coming to a blazing finale first came from.

Dorian Lynskey: In Hinduism and Buddhism to this day, history is a cycle, a wheel, and it has different phases. Destruction and renovation, rebirth, decline.

Brooke Gladstone: It was the ancient prophet Zoroaster, who lived around the 7th or 6th century BC, who offered a new and different scenario.

Dorian Lynskey: Zoroaster and then in Judaism, Christianity, it's a straight line. That's a seismic change. The world can actually end. That is what dominates the Western imagination.

Brooke Gladstone: It's summed up in the last book of the New Testament, Revelation. You were shocked to find it so hard to follow.

Dorian Lynskey: The man who wrote it, John of Patmos, he just seems to be a very angry, vindictive man. In his telling, it's not about forgiving sinners, it's about slaying them.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, the author was probably a little bitter because the Romans had exiled him to the island of Patmos.

Dorian Lynskey: Most historians would agree that what he's talking about is the Roman Empire, the mark of the beast, and 666 and the seven horns. These are all references to Rome. If you'd have told him that people would be talking about Revelation 2,000 years later, then he would be very disappointed because he was like, "Oh, well, the world still exists then."

Brooke Gladstone: Then finally, the Christian apocalypse gives way to new end-of-the world scenarios. It was something that looked very much like apocalypse that brought Mary Shelley and Lord Byron and other literary lights together in a mansion overlooking Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. It was quite a year and quite an era.

Dorian Lynskey: You've got scientific discoveries that the Earth is much older than the Church claimed, discoveries of the first dinosaur skeletons, and the idea that catastrophe could reshape the Earth. Then you also have that mirrored in politics through the French Revolution, and the idea that the world as you knew it could be turned upside down. Also, a lot of people like Byron and Shelley, they were traveling around Europe, fascinated by the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. All of these things are in their heads that the world as we know it can be wiped out.

Then in 1815, this volcano in Indonesia called Tambora erupts, the biggest eruption in modern history. Creates so many particles of dirt and sulfur that they circle the Earth. Come summer of 1816, the climate is just ruined. You've got snowstorms and dune and so on. I found that so fascinating that something that felt certainly to the people who are living near the volcano, like an apocalypse is the reason why Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley had to shelter indoors. That's when Byron said, "Well, let's all write a ghost story." This leads Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. Byron never finishes his story, but what he does do is write this poem, Darkness.

Brooke Gladstone: As you note, there's no deity. The righteous are not reprieved. It just ends in ultimate negation.

Dorian Lynskey: The thing about darkness, and this kind of horrified some critics at the time, is that it's utterly hopeless. We talked about Revelation earlier. For those that have not been killed or sent to hell, it's a very happy ending for the righteous. Byron sort of shuts down the world. The sun goes out, people freeze, they starve, kill, and eat each other. Utter bleakness and annihilation, which is just not comprehensible to the Christian mind.

Brooke Gladstone: The apocalypse genre didn't really catch on until the end of the 19th century with H.G. Wells.

Dorian Lynskey: There's the whole idea of the Fin de Siècle technology is changing. All these ideas swimming around in the late 19th century that even though the British Empire is at its height, there is a sense that it is also in decline. H.G. Wells really begins his career with a vision at the end of the world in his novel The Time Machine.

Brooke Gladstone: You say he revolutionized the genre?

Dorian Lynskey: Science fiction up to that point tended to have lots of different outlandish things happening. H.G. Wells's very smart instinct was that if you take the world as it is and then you just drop one absolutely bizarre incident into it, whether that be a time machine or a Martian invasion.

Speaker 33: These Martians. You mean you haven't heard? Oh, Mr. Chandler is all over the world.

Dorian Lynskey: People would see themselves and they think, "Oh, my God, how would I react to that?"

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us to the Great War. Before 1918, you say that two-thirds of our end-of-the-world scenarios involved natural disaster, and only a third stemmed from human activity. After the war, it reversed.

Dorian Lynskey: Yes, because it was such a moral shock. One of the many changes wrought by the First World War was this sense that the end of the world would be caused by our own stupidity and selfishness, that there would be another world war, and that it would be final.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that there was an idea floating around that maybe scientists should invent a weapon that could annihilate the whole world because maybe that would force the world to make peace.

Dorian Lynskey: It was a really popular idea, like the inventors of dynamite, poison gas, thought that this would be such a horrific thing, nobody would dare fight a war again.

Brooke Gladstone: On the other hand, there was that 1927 novel by Pierrepont B. Noyes called The Pallid Giant, in which he concludes that the only way a superweapon could end war is by finishing off the human race.

Dorian Lynskey: What you get in The Pallid Giant is something very prophetic about the Cold War, that the fear of somebody else using the weapon would mean that you would use it first. What you actually then saw in the Cold War was that people were so horrified by it that they wouldn't use those weapons, and yet we had some very, very close shaves that were only revealed later. That also proves The Palid Giant point, the InCubed missile crisis. It could so easily have gone the other way, and it would have been fear of the other side using the weapon that would have brought about the calamity.

Brooke Gladstone: Having plunged into the atomic age for real. Let's talk about how it inspired Nevil Shute's culture-shifting novel on the beach in 1957. The novel and later the film showed us something we hadn't quite seen before.

Dorian Lynskey: Well, this was a phenomenon that I think people have largely forgotten that Leo Szilard, one of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, had come up with the possibility of something called a cobalt bomb, where you would create this sort of jacket of cobalt around an atomic bomb which had a much longer half-life. The radiation would be far more dangerous and far more long-lasting. This was the weapon people were most terrified about. That's the doomsday device in the Planet of the Apes.

It never existed, but it was this terrifying concept because it would poison everyone. Even if you were as in on the beach in Australia, far away from the exchange of weapons, the radiation would get you eventually. It's a really strange book because the tone is very calm and subdued.

Speaker 33: Do you mean to tell me this whole damn war was an accident?

Speaker 34: No, it wasn't an accident. I didn't say that. Somehow granted the time for examination, we shall find that our so-called civilization was gloriously destroyed by a handful of vacuum tubes and transistors.

Dorian Lynskey: Yet it does end with absolutely everybody in the world dead. What Shute was really interested in was showing how people would respond to that, how people would feel about imminent extinction. That's such an important part of end-of-the-world literature, that emotional dimension.

Brooke Gladstone: I wish we had time to dive into all of the possible scenarios you outline in your book, but we don't. Let's stick to the ones that are largely man-made, like climate change or pandemics.

Dorian Lynskey: It can seem almost like a force of nature, or you get different versions where it turns out it's a government virus bioweapon that has leaked. In thrillers, that really matters, is where does this pandemic come from? Actually, I'd say probably the best pandemic novels like Earth Abides by George Stewart or Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, it's not really about where it starts, the attempts to mitigate it, or any of that. It's more about what it does to humanity, how it would feel to live through that, and the chances of preserving decent, humane, civilized values, the possibility of rebuilding society and what society that would be, who would be left, what choices would they make?

Brooke Gladstone: Back In March of 2020, during the early days of the lockdown, there were headlines about dolphins returning to city harbors and goats wandering in the street. You noted the prevalence of that meme, that humanity is the virus and COVID is the vaccine. Now, you weren't crazy about that meme, and you saw the novel by Emily St. John Mandel, set 20 years after a pandemic that kills 99% of humanity as a kind of rebuttal.

Dorian Lynskey: Station Eleven became, in a way, my moral lodestar while writing the book. St. John Mandel really cares about the people who have died, the things we have lost. Seeing the fact that there are no more planes, rather than going, "Oh, well, good, airplanes are monstrosities and technology is bad," which is a huge theme of a lot of apocalyptic literature, she's sort of going, "My God, what a miracle it was that we could fly." She draws your attention to the things about modern life that we take for granted and that are kind of miraculous.

Speaker 35: What are you doing?

Speaker 36: I'm making a museum, tribute to the best of the old days, a reminder of how good we used to have it. Something to aim for, to get back to.

Dorian Lynskey: So many writers seem to hate a lot of modern life, and that calls back to John of Patmos and Revelation, the idea of it would be good if we just swept this all away. You can see that manifesting now in various political movements, this idea of, let's just break and burn everything because it's corrupt and decadent and it's not working anymore. What you get in Station Eleven is no, once you break this stuff, then you realize what it is that you've lost.

Speaker 35: I stood looking over the damage, trying to remember the sweetness of life on Earth.

Dorian Lynskey: That's why I find it the most moral, the most moving example.

Brooke Gladstone: How about the apocalyptic nature of climate change? There's been an apocalyptic strain in environmentalism since the movement began in the '60s. You've observed that Kim Stanley Robinson, a longtime writer of climate-based science fiction, is an exception to the impotence creation of a lot of climate science fiction that you complained about, and I totally agree. He enables us to see how we might live in a world transformed by climate upheaval. His imagination stretches beyond catastrophe.

Dorian Lynskey: Yes. In his novels, things are bad, but they're not the end. He has great faith in sensible people of goodwill working together to make things not as bad as they could be. It's a very hard thing to do, even much, much harder to do in films. To this day, I think the biggest film that is explicitly about climate change is Day After Tomorrow from 2004. It depicts something that could happen, but it has it happening in a matter of days.

Speaker 37: You recall what you said about how a polar melting might disrupt the North Atlantic Current?

Speaker 38: Yes.

Speaker 37: Well, I think it's happening.

Dorian Lynskey: It was both extremely important, and many climate scientists were talking about the movie as an opportunity to discuss this problem. At the same time, they had to go, "Well, obviously it wouldn't happen like that."

Brooke Gladstone: Now, the other current frontrunner for most dreaded apocalypse is death by robots or more recently, AI. Jump back to our earlier anxieties around these thinking machines with the play RUR from 1920.

Dorian Lynskey: Literally, the play that invents the word robot is about the end of the world as well. It is about these intelligent humanoids replacing humanity in all of these different jobs. Then there is a fertility crisis. The idea is that on some biological level, humans have accepted that they're going to be replaced. A humanitarian attempts to make robots more human. This makes them angry, violent, jealous. They actually set about actively wiping out humanity. You essentially end with only one human left alive.

Brooke Gladstone: RUR was a really big deal. In 1927, it was the first radio play to be aired by the BBC.

Dorian Lynskey: Yes, an absolute cornerstone.

Alquist: It was a crime to make robots.

Speaker 40: No, Alquist, I don't regret that even today.

Alquist: Not even today?

Speaker 40: Not even today, the last day of civilization. Was it a crime to shatter the servitude of labor, the dreadful and humiliating labor that man had to undergo? Work was too hard.

Alquist: Well, you succeeded for profit, for progress. We have destroyed mankind.

Dorian Lynskey: These are very, very old ideas that continue to play out in our discussion of what AI might do to us because it has a mind of its own or because we've given it the wrong instructions.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, you have thoroughly studied our centuries-long obsession with the apocalypse. What's it taught you about facing the current moment we're in, which feels like an endless onslaught of bad, bad, and more bad?

Dorian Lynskey: It's not that bad things haven't happened, but the worst thing, the actual end of the world, is perhaps not the thing that we should be fearing. I worry about things getting worse. I don't worry about things ending. I would say it does make me more appreciative of life as it is. I do resist what I call doomerism. I don't think that that is useful, and I don't think it's morally righteous. There should be some sense of what to appreciate and what to salvage and an awareness of the preciousness of life rather than contemplating the end.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, thank you, Dorian.

Dorian Lynskey: Terrific. Thank you, Brooke.

[MUSIC - Toots Thielemans: In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning]

Brooke Gladstone: Dorian Linskey is author of the recent book Everything Must Go.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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