If you looked closely at the shortwave radio pictures you’ll notice that I changed the frequency to 13″10. If you’re familiar with “All The Light We Cannot See” you will know the significance of this.

What led me to writing this was the following article published in RawStory:

This is the comment and the image I posted in response:

Seeing that the author, D. Earl Stephens, finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes led me to finding the image below.. It is a cautionary reminder. How many lives will be disrupted, and even lost (Trump already is responsible for uncountable Covid deaths), once an American fascist dictator is overthrown? Will there even be an American newspaper to write the article? It’s possible the story with be online on BBC and The Guardian, if we’re even able to access them on a censored Internet. Will it be like WWII where people will be hiding illegal shortwave radios so they can hear the truth?

I was thinking of the plot of a TV mini-series we just finished watching, All The Light We Cannot See, which is a NetFlix mini-series based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Doerr.

Without spoilers suffice to say that the story is set in a small coastal village in NAZI occupied France near the end of World War II and involves a blind teenaged girl and a young German officer and shortwave radios. People in Germany and occupied counties were encouraged by the NAZI regime to have inexpensive AM radios which only carried NAZI broadcasts. Shortwave radios could receive overseas broadcasts. It was a treasonable offense to listen to oversees broadcasts. Anyone caught doing so faced a spell in a concentration camp and in the first year of the war alone, 1500 Germans were imprisoned for listening to London-based broadcasts.. (Reference)

You could say that in addition to the human stars of the mini-series send and recieve (transceiver) shortwave radios were the other stars.

If the Gestapo, shown in the background above (see original photo), found the shortwave recievers like those above in a home there’s a chance the owners would have been shot. If they found a transceiver like the one in the middle and the one the heroes in “All The Light We Cannot See” used I expect they would first be tortured to reveal who their were sending messages to, and then they, their family, and probably their friends and neighbors would be killed.

As things stand now in the United States, even with the shortcomings of The New York Times lamented in the article by Stephens, by and large we still have media that tells the truth. Of course we have Fox News which, as pointed out by Stephens, being shown on American military bases and it has stories like the one shown below (not a link), but you get the idea – the president is called a wannabe dictator. Obviously in the side-by-side photos below one of the two people pictured is a wannabe dictator and it isn’t President Biden.

If we had a President Donald J. Trump it may be a stretch to see any media not towing his party line being outlawed. I can’t see how he could block regular radio, televsion, and the Internet, but he could sure try to make it diffucult for non-complaint media outlets to survive.

We won’t be living in fear and hunkering down in attics or secret rooms listening to shortwave radios to hear the truth or in some cases broadcasting coded messages to the American Resistance who would be like freedom fighter partisans in NAZI occupied countries during World War II. We won’t be waiting for the Trump gestapo to come knocking at our doors to search our houses for illegal radios and arresting us if they find them, or even to to shoot us, our families, and our neighbors on the spot like the Gestapo and the SS did.

Instead we will be living with a kind of existential fear which is not related to our own inevitable death, but rather to to experiencing the death of democracy.

Related: How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler.….

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