Voice of America Goes Quiet. And, Apocalypse Now?

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

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

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loinger.

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.

I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists.

What am I gonna tell them that their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?

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

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

It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Owinger.

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

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

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.

Programs and broadcasts have been going off off the air, and at this hour,

the VOA is effectively silent.

A bit of clarification: VOA and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting are federal entities, whereas Radio Free Europe/slash Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks are non-profit news organizations.

But 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.

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

Jodi Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, on CNN this week.

It's a risk to the U.S.

national security because it creates an environment in which myths and disinformation, lies and propaganda from autocrats around the world can flourish.

The Trump administration sees the mission a bit differently.

Here's the president at a press conference a little over a week ago.

What about the president of Banks?

Who's supposed to expel Palestinians out of Gaza?

Are you discussing that with him and giving him yourself?

Nobody's expelling any Palestinians.

I don't know.

Who are you with?

I'm a voice of America, sir.

Oh, no wonder.

Okay, voice of America.

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

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.

Carrie 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.

So, lacking formal power to change it, she's resorted to trashing its work.

Here on Steve Bannon's War War Room podcast.

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 age.

Lady, who once described herself to a gaggle of reporters as, quote, your worst freaking nightmare, is named in a lawsuit filed this week.

U.S.-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.

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.

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.

And so 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.

And by 1944, VOA was broadcasting in over 40 languages.

What would early listeners have heard when they turned on Voice Voice of America?

Listeners would have heard some straightforward news reports.

This is a voice speaking from America.

A voice from America at war.

But they would also hear American music like jazz being played across the airwaves.

The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America,

something that not every country has.

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

I mean, 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.

But 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.

Okay, and so how is that different from American propaganda?

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.

And 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.

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

You had at the very beginning among the pioneers those who believe 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 the Voice of America, but the VOA staff held its own.

And 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.

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.

What happened next?

How did the VOA's mission change after the Cold War?

There is another moment of soul-searching.

Democracy seems to have won.

The end of history.

Right.

This belief in the early 1990s that, well, everywhere is going to be free now.

And so the U.S.

can kind of pull back.

But then I think there is also a reevaluation of how much democracy has actually won at the end of the Cold War, right?

You have all of these new countries that are being born and civil wars that are breaking out.

And it is not clear that these are going to be democratic countries.

They could very easily become totalitarian countries.

And so 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.

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?

We can't necessarily say, well, this government regime toppled or this press regime became more open because of the presence of VOA.

But that's kind of the idea behind soft power, that it's influence, right?

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.

Promoting democracy, espousing the values of freedom of information, freedom of speech, this all sounds so great.

I mean, but are there examples of moments where the VOA didn't live up to these lofty goals?

You know, where's the line between promoting a free press and promoting a certain economic form, promoting the hegemony of American culture and businesses, right, in ways that have often made countries feel a little intruded upon, right?

Because when American culture starts to push out national culture, that's not ideal for the countries where VOA is broadcasting.

And so I think there is this tension between

soft promotion of democracy and free press and a kind of cultural imperialism.

And that is always going to be an issue with an organization like VOA because of its mission.

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.

Aaron Powell, 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 U.S.

to be spending its money.

The world has changed a lot in the last 80 years or so.

And are there better, more efficient, more effective ways of promoting a free press, both within the United States and abroad?

And I think it's worth having a conversation about the best ways to do that.

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, quote, Voice of America staff ordered not to call Hamas terrorists.

What are they talking about?

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.

But what they're responding to, and this is something that a number of media organizations within the U.S.

adhere to as well, is that the word terrorist in the U.S.

is a particularly politically loaded term that is used unevenly, depending on who is being spoken about.

But there is no ban on the word terrorist.

That's part of a much more nuanced conversation that is just one of journalistic protocols.

That same White House press release that I'd quoted before also pointed to articles from Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Collar, including one piece from the Daily Collar with the headline, Multiple Voice of America reporters have posted anti-Trump content on social media.

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.

And that's always the trick, right?

That reporters might have opinions, but you have to show that it's influencing the way that they cover the news.

And that's the missing piece in that particular accusation.

Nevertheless, some members of the right-wing media are ecstatic.

Here's Glenn Beck this week.

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.

You know, 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?

Yeah, I can.

I can, Dad.

It's going to hurt, but it's the right thing to do.

It's a fascinating viewpoint that has become much more prevalent on the right in the last 10 years or so that the U.S.

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.

And so 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.

And 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.

And that means that the U.S.

alliances in that world are with regimes like China, like Russia, these strong men states.

And so to see the U.S.

begin to withdraw from the institutions that were built to guard against totalitarianism says a lot about where the administration sees the U.S.

in the world.

And that's, I think, particularly worrisome.

Aaron Powell, 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.

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.

And 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 an entirely different ballgame when it comes to how people come to understand the world around them.

Nicole, thank you very much.

Thanks so much, Micah.

Nicole Hemmer is a historian and co-host with Jodi Avergan of the podcast, This Day in Esoteric Political History.

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This is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loewinger.

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

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

Bae Fong, 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.

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.

And by members of Congress.

And 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.

For their trenchant work, some RFA journalists have paid a steep price.

I received a call from our neighbor's daughter, Golchera Hoja, a Uyghur-American reporter at RFA.

She told me,

all my relatives arrested because of me, my work.

Almost certainly held in called re-education camps run by Chinese government.

Four other Uyghur service reporters have had close family members arrested and possibly sent to detention camps.

And 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.

They report without using their names.

Be Fong.

And 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

And they weren't the only ones celebrating.

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.

Meanwhile, Russian state television is celebrating the cuts to Radio Free Europe slash Radio Liberty.

In recent years, the Putin regime has targeted their journalists, including Alsu Kermasheva, who spent nine months last year in a Russian detention center.

Today, she's a press freedom advocate, but for more than 20 years, she worked for Radio Free Europe slash 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.

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.

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

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.

So there were beautiful times 20 plus years ago.

This is how it started.

And then what was the turn?

When did it become such an essential service?

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.

And 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.

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.

The investigation was launched on the charges I hadn't registered my American passport.

The investigation took five months.

You were on house arrest for five months?

Yes.

And I paid my fine, which was not more than a hundred dollars.

And I was about to pick up my passports from the investigator and leave when they arrested me.

And this time it was a real arrest, and they sent me to the detention center.

What was going through your mind?

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, and 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, but this is how it works that 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 RFERL.

The book is called Saying No to War, and 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.

And so you spent nine months in detention before the trial?

Yes, nine and a half months, 288 days, 40 Fridays.

I love Fridays, and I calculated my life in prison by Fridays.

What was life like during that time?

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.

And, you know, as there was a lack of books, I didn't have enough books.

I was reading ingredients 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.

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.

And if that repeats a couple of more times, you are not a human being already.

So I set my routine of exercise, reading, trying to maintain a healthy diet.

You received a press freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

And 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.

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 were several prisoners.

And I 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.

And 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, Ausu, it's Christmas time.

It's beautiful here.

My friends are celebrating, but 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.

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?

I was taken and brought to a prison in Moscow.

That's the notorious prison called Lefortova, former KGB prison.

I was kept there from Monday until Thursday, and on Thursday, the actual exchange happened.

Evan Gerskovich, Alsu Kermasheva, and Paul Whelan landed in Maryland late last night.

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.

It was a moment I was dreaming of for many, many months.

I couldn't couldn't cry in prison.

And I'm a person who

holds emotions when it's hard.

But since I was released, I think I've cried all my tears.

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 U.S.

Agency for Global Media, which is the entity that funds Radio for Europe/slash Radio Liberty?

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.

And the second thing, I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these these days.

What am I going to tell them that their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?

This were my thoughts immediately when I heard the news.

You said you don't know what to tell the family members of Radio Free Europe journalists who are in prison for their reporting, but I mean, for you,

you spent nine months for reporting that you did on behalf of this U.S.-funded news organization, and then an American president is accusing it of spreading, quote, 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?

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 are celebrating the rumors.

I mean, they've been trying to end our operations for years, for decades, and now suddenly our government is giving them this gift.

It's like an own goal, you know.

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

Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik,

and other outlets because Trump suddenly announced he's closing RFE RFE/slash RL and Voice of America.

They are closed now.

This is an awesome decision by Trump.

To which the host of the show, Vladimir Solovyov, responded,

I'm addressing independent journalists.

Die animals.

You are lying, vile, disgusting traitors to the motherland.

Die in a ditch.

Do you want to respond to that?

No, I don't want to respond to that.

I don't respond to things like that.

I saw saw that statement too.

I mean,

yeah.

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?

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 a 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.

But we were bringing those values of freedom of speech to our audiences.

Really, not much will change immediately if Radio for Europe stops, but in a long-term effect, it will be such a disaster and it will be so difficult to to start that over again, that experience that has been built for years, for 75 years.

Alsu, thank you very much.

Thank you, Monka, for having me.

Alsu Kermasheva is a journalist and press freedom advocate for Radio Free Europe slash Radio Liberty.

Coming up, recent times have felt, well, a touch apocalyptic.

Would it help you to know how our predecessors dealt with that end end-of-the-world feeling?

Stay tuned.

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this is on the media.

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

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

So many people look at this and they say, James, is this the apocalypse?

Elon and his nerd army have been combing through agencies blasting away bloat.

The media is calling it the Trump Pocalypse.

Yeah, there we are.

The zombie apocalypse within our Social Security Administration.

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

Dorian Linsky is a cultural journalist and author of the recent book, Everything Must Go, the stories we tell ourselves 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.

In Hinduism and Buddhism to this day, history is a cycle, a wheel.

and it has different phases, destruction and renovation, rebirth, decline.

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

Zoroaster, and then in Judaism, Christianity, it's a straight line.

That's a seismic change.

The world can actually end, and that is what dominates the Western imagination.

And it's summed up in the last book of the New Testament, Revelation.

You were shocked to find it so hard to follow.

The man who wrote it, John of Patmos, just seems to be a very angry, vindictive man.

In his telephone, it's not about forgiving sinners.

It's about slaying them.

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

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.

I mean, if you'd have told him that people would be talking about Revelation 2,000 years later, then he he would have been very disappointed because he was like, oh, well, the world still exists then.

But then finally, the Christian apocalypse gives way to new end-of-the-world scenarios.

And 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.

So 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.

And 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.

So all of these things are kind of in their heads that the world as we know it can be wiped out.

And 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 June and so on.

And I found that so fascinating that something that felt certainly to the people who are living here, the volcano, like an apocalyptic event, is the reason why Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley had to shelter indoors.

And 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.

And as you note, there's no deity.

The righteous are not reprieved.

It just ends in ultimate negation.

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.

and 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.

The apocalypse genre didn't really catch on until the end of the 19th century with H.

G.

Wells.

There's the whole idea of the fandasiècle, 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.

And you say he revolutionized the genre?

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.

Yes, Martians!

Do you mean you haven't heard?

Oh, Mr.

Teller, it's all over the world.

People would see themselves and they think, oh my god, how would I react to that?

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.

Yeah, 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.

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.

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.

On the other hand, there was that 1927 novel by Pierpont B.

Noyes called The Pallid Giant, in which he concludes that the only way a super weapon could end war is by finishing off the human race.

So 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 Pallid Giant point.

You know, the incubat 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.

So having plunged into the atomic age for real, let's talk about how it inspired Neville Schute's culture-shifting novel On the Beach in 1957.

The novel and later the film showed us something we hadn't quite seen before.

Well, this was a phenomenon that I think people have largely forgotten.

that Leo Salard, 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, weapons the radiation would get you eventually it's a really strange book because the tone is very sort of calm and subdued do you mean to tell me this whole damn war was an accident

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.

And yet it does end with absolutely everybody in the world dead.

And what Schute was really interested in was showing how people would respond to that, how people would feel about imminent extinction.

And that's such an important part of end of the world literature, that emotional dimension.

I wish we had time to dive into all of the possible scenarios you outline in your book, but we don't.

So let's stick to the ones that are largely man-made, like climate change or pandemics.

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 like where does this pandemic come from?

But actually I'd say that probably the best pandemic novels like Earth Abides by George Stewart or Station 11 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.

So 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.

And 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.

Station 11 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.

So seeing the fact that there are no more planes, rather than going, oh, well, good.

Aeroplanes 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.

What are you doing?

I'm making a museum, tribute to the best of the old days, reminder of how good we used to have it,

Something to aim for, to get back to.

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 11 is: no, once you break this stuff, then you realize what it is that you've lost.

I stood looking over the damage,

trying to remember the sweetness of life on Earth.

And that's why I find it the most moral, the most moving example.

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 sort of 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.

Yeah, in his novels, things are bad, but they're not the end.

He has great faith in sensible people of goodwill working together 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.

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

Yes.

Well, I think it's happening.

So it was both extremely important and many climate scientists were talking about the movie as an opportunity to discuss this problem.

But at the same time, they had to go, well, obviously it wouldn't happen like that.

Now, the other current frontrunner for most dreaded apocalypse is death by robots, or more recently, AI.

So jump back to our earlier anxieties around these thinking machines with the play RUR R from 1920.

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, and the idea is that on some biological level, humans have accepted that they're going to be replaced.

A humanitarian attempts to make the robots more human.

This makes them angry, violent, jealous.

They actually set about actively wiping out humanity and you essentially end with only one human left alive.

RUR was a really big deal.

In 1927, it was the first radio play to be aired by the BBC.

Yeah, an absolute cornerstone.

It was a crime to make robots.

No, Alchrist, I don't regret that even today.

Not even today.

Not even today, the last day of civilization.

Was Was it a crime to shatter the servitude of labor, the dreadful and humiliating labor that man had to undergo?

Work was too hard.

Well, you succeeded.

For profit,

for progress,

we have destroyed mankind.

These are like 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.

Well, you have thoroughly studied our centuries-long obsession with the apocalypse.

So 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?

So 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.

And 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.

Well, thank you, Dorian.

Terrific.

Thank you, Brooke.

Dorian Linsky is the author of the recent book, Everything Must Go.

That's it for this week's show.

On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong.

On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loewinger.