in Russia means steep fines and even prison time may await anyone who spreads reports about the invasion that differ from the official party line.
As a journalism instructor at UC San Diego, I often launched a new class with a student survey and discussion on the freedoms guaranteed to all U.S. citizens in the Bill of Rights. I asked students to rank by importance the notions of freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and government petition, the right to bear arms, to have a trial by jury and so on.
If they ranked freedom of the press as unimportant, as many frequently did because they had never known a world without it, I reminded them what life could be like, noting the, who, in weighing a choice between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” said he would choose the latter.
Average Americans may also forget how important the free exchange of ideas is to our way of life, and thus fail to appreciate the inherent danger of efforts to suppress voting rights, limit the ability to question authority or create laws to reverse democratic election results. Too many steps in that direction could take us to a point of no return.
Russia today should serve as a stark reminder of the Russia of old, before glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when free speech was not only unlikely but was punishable by a trip to a gulag, for public speakers and their family members. And we should remember it was