The title of Dana Milbank’s Washington Post piece says it all: “Stalin, Mao and Khomeini couldn’t quell freedom’s voice. But Trump did.”
Here is a taste:
Voice of America went on the air eight weeks after Pearl Harbor. “We bring you voices from America,” journalist William Harlan Hale said in German on Feb. 1, 1942, in VOA’s first broadcast. “Today, and daily from now on, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”
In the 83 years since then, VOA has been the voice of freedom across the globe, a constant force countering totalitarianism during World War II, the Cold War and the decades since.
Adolf Hitler couldn’t silence it. Joseph Stalin and his successors, right up through Vladimir Putin, couldn’t silence it. Mao Zedong and his successors, through Xi Jinping, couldn’t silence it. Ruhollah Khomeini and the ayatollahs couldn’t silence it.
But Donald Trump has just silenced the voice of freedom. For the first time since 1942, VOA has been taken off the air, after Trump put virtually all of its 1,300 staff members on leave. The administration also shut down VOA’s sister outlets Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.
The world’s autocrats are doing somersaults.
“The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag,” the Chinese Communist Party’s international media outlet, Global Times, wrote on Monday about the demise of what it calls a “lie factory.” It celebrated the silencing of this lone voice for truth in China: “From smearing human rights in China’s Xinjiang to hyping up disputes in the South China Sea, from supporting ‘Taiwan independence’ forces to backing Hong Kong rioters, from fabricating the so-called China virus narrative to promoting the claim of China’s ‘overcapacity,’ almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it.” And it concurred with Elon Musk’s view that VOA is “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves.”
CCP propagandist Hu Xijin, the Global Times’s former editor, called the VOA shutdown “great news,” explaining that “almost everyone in China knows the Voice of America because it is an iconic symbol of American ideological infiltration into China.”
In Iran, where VOA is officially banned as an “enemy broadcaster,” the state-aligned news agency Tabnak celebrated: “Trump administration shuts down anti-Iranian media outlet Voice of America.” VOA, with a newsroom of about 100 Farsi speakers, reached a combined social-media following of 9.5 million in Iran, thwarting the regime with 24/7 news delivered via satellite and VPNs.
Russia, too, can celebrate the demise of a news outlet it last year categorized as an “undesirable organization” and a threat to its national security. In Africa and in Latin America, Russian and Chinese propaganda outlets, which have been expanding, will no longer have their lies challenged by a fact-based U.S. alternative.
Combined with the Trump administration’s canceling of most foreign aid, the silencing of VOA, which boasted a weekly audience of about 360 million people in nearly 50 languages, signals the complete surrender of U.S. “soft power,” influence gained over decades using means other than warfare.
Read the rest here.
