Zhang Yingyue has a powerful FSB piece on growing up in Maoist China and how the BBC and VOA, once the voice of freedom have lost that voice in pursuit of yet another empty totalitarian ideology.
From Freedom's Whispers to Tyrant’s Tools: How the BBC and VOA Lost Their Soul
"The freedom to speak means nothing if you only whisper what you’re told to say."
When I was a teenage girl growing up in the iron grip of Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution, I dreamed of the outside world and risked everything to listen to its voices. While classmates denounced their parents and teachers under red banners and revolutionary slogans, I stayed up into the night, crouched beside a battered shortwave radio, tuning it inch by inch until the static gave way to a foreign miracle: “This is the Voice of America.” Or: “This is London. The BBC World Service.”
To be caught listening to such broadcasts was dangerous. Not merely “frowned upon,” but life-ruining dangerous. A neighbour’s son had disappeared after being overheard repeating a joke he’d heard on the BBC. My father and mother, both CPP members and a senior civil servant in the security department and a university lecturer respectively, were denounced as counterrevolutionaries and sent to labour camps. And yet, I listened. Terrified and in secret, but I listened to those calm, reasoned, and often warm voices—my lifeline to the world beyond claustrophobic, hysterical Beijing.
The whole piece is well worth reading as warning that nothing is forever, including the freedoms we once thought were permanent.
"The freedom to speak means nothing if you only whisper what you’re told to say."
When I was a teenage girl growing up in the iron grip of Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution, I dreamed of the outside world and risked everything to listen to its voices. While classmates denounced their parents and teachers under red banners and revolutionary slogans, I stayed up into the night, crouched beside a battered shortwave radio, tuning it inch by inch until the static gave way to a foreign miracle: “This is the Voice of America.” Or: “This is London. The BBC World Service.”
To be caught listening to such broadcasts was dangerous. Not merely “frowned upon,” but life-ruining dangerous. A neighbour’s son had disappeared after being overheard repeating a joke he’d heard on the BBC. My father and mother, both CPP members and a senior civil servant in the security department and a university lecturer respectively, were denounced as counterrevolutionaries and sent to labour camps. And yet, I listened. Terrified and in secret, but I listened to those calm, reasoned, and often warm voices—my lifeline to the world beyond claustrophobic, hysterical Beijing.
The whole piece is well worth reading as warning that nothing is forever, including the freedoms we once thought were permanent.
The tragedy is not just what the BBC and VOA have become but what they’ve left behind. In silencing dissent, they have silenced curiosity. In enforcing conformity, they’ve extinguished courage. In replacing inquiry with ideology, they’ve traded journalism for propaganda. To the editors, producers, and journalists within those institutions who still remember what free speech actually means: speak up. Or if you can’t, walk away. The machinery you serve no longer deserves the loyalty of free minds.
To readers across the world, especially in places still fighting for the freedoms the West once championed: don’t be fooled. The loudest voices are not always the bravest. Sometimes, the real dissidents are the ones being deplatformed, not those on the front page.
And to my younger self, crouched beside a radio in the dead of night: I’m sorry. The voices we trusted changed. But the truths they once whispered, that freedom is fragile, that speech matters, that tyranny wears many masks, are still true. Even if you have to say them alone.
To readers across the world, especially in places still fighting for the freedoms the West once championed: don’t be fooled. The loudest voices are not always the bravest. Sometimes, the real dissidents are the ones being deplatformed, not those on the front page.
And to my younger self, crouched beside a radio in the dead of night: I’m sorry. The voices we trusted changed. But the truths they once whispered, that freedom is fragile, that speech matters, that tyranny wears many masks, are still true. Even if you have to say them alone.
1 comment:
Wonderful.
Read it all.
Think.
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