Recently, on a hot Saturday afternoon, I went to a Stop Starving Gaza protest in Midtown Manhattan. In a city of 8.5 million people, there were maybe a couple of thousand people there, fewer than one would see at a weekend protest in Dublin. One of the speakers was Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student activist who was for a while disappeared by the administration.
The student protests at Columbia, which spread to other university campuses during the Biden administration, set off a cascade of attacks on freedom of assembly and expression. This was a crucial part of what is now a much broader process of shutting down freedoms in an era of American authoritarianism.
Under Donald Trump’s presidency, censorious, chilling incursions on academic freedom have become normal, if still objectively shocking. The Trump administration keeps moving the goalposts – investigations into “anti-Semitism” bloomed into threats to cut funding, curtailing research, blocking enrolments of international students, and various forms of censorship and oppression.
Many universities are folding to demands, as if appeasement works in these contexts. One wonders what might have happened had even a small but effective section of the American public stood with and supported student protesters in those moments. But it’s too late now.
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After the protest, I went to the cinema to see My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow. This extraordinary documentary follows the lives of a group of young journalists orbiting the outlet TV Rain, as Russia moved from authoritarianism to totalitarianism. They are labelled “foreign agents”, and we see how the process unfolds in real time, its feeling and impact, all escalating with increasing velocity towards the invasion of Ukraine.
The documentary is 5½ hours long and earns every minute. Time plays an interesting role both in this film and in how a country – be that Russia or the US – falls apart. There is the creeping foreboding and then the rush of collapse.
Some people in the film reflect on how 10 years ago things weren’t like this, how a year ago you had so much more freedom, how six months ago things were better. They struggle with identifying the moment one should flee. How long do you wait until it’s too late? When can you possibly know the point at which the chipping away becomes the thud of boots in the stairwell and a knock at the door?
In attendance were the documentary’s film-maker, Julia Loktev, and two journalists who feature in the film, now in exile: TV Rain presenter Anna Nemzer and Ksenia Mironova, a young reporter at TV Rain who recently graduated from the New York Film Academy.
In 2022, Mironova’s partner, the journalist Ivan Safronov, was sentenced to 22 years in a penal colony by a Moscow court for “high treason”. Amnesty International said he was tried “solely for his journalistic work”.
The audience, in stunned silence, gathered themselves. Here was a film about the recent Russian past demonstrating a version of an American future.
Nemzer told the audience not to ignore unpleasant signals, because the signals aren’t just signals, they’re real. She said being in the US brought a sense of deja vu. Certain things reminded her of those days in Moscow, including the “nervous laughter” and the playing out of worst-case scenarios.
I have found that spending time in the US at this moment in history can be summed up by the same sentence in two different tones. The first is, breezily: life goes on and people are continuing with their day-to-day lives. The second is, worryingly: life goes on and people are continuing with their day-to-day lives. The dominant quality of existing in such a context is a feeling of “normality”.
It was affirming to see this sentiment articulated in My Undesirable Friends, when one journalist, speaking to an academic, asks how could it be that they felt like they were in a maelstrom and yet everyone else was going about their lives as usual. But the experience of authoritarianism or totalitarianism, the academic said, is not 100 per cent oppression 100 per cent of the time. It induces cognitive dissonance.
As alarms are sounded – by American journalists, students, academics, activists, opposition politicians, human rights organisations and lawyers who understand what’s unfolding – I remember reading that there were restaurants operating in Dublin during the Famine. And so in the US, the tourists see the sights, the lights go up on Broadway stages, the frozen margarita machine churns, the trains clatter through the subway stations, the freshly-pressed laundry is collected, the influencers snap selfies on brownstone stoops, the skateboarders fist-bump, the young men go for their daily runs shirtless and sweating through humid streets, the fire hydrant bursts open to the delight of a bounding dog, The Hunting Wives gets binged, The New Yorker drops into the mailbox, and people say “who knows what will happen?“, while knowing exactly what is going to happen.
[ Daniel Geary: America is suffering from an epidemic of mass cowardiceOpens in new window ]
And back in the cinema, Loktev mentions a line of advice Nemzer had in the film that didn’t make the cut: “Don’t fall before you’re shot.”
