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On that note…
Today I turn my column over to an extraordinary conversation I had with Garry Kasparov, founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, a legendary Russian dissident, and of course, a former World Chess Champion. His perspective on the current authoritarian actions of the U.S. president and his administration and its blatant attacks on free speech now in the public view are vital. And he is unsparing in the role Hollywood needs to play right now.
Garry draws connections between the Soviet Union of the 1990s and America today — just in case Kimmel’s return to ABC has left you feeling like the battle here is already won.
“Evil doesn’t die. It can be buried for a while… but the moment we lose our vigilance, the moment we turn complacent and we forget about it, it comes back,” Garry tells me. He remembers when America was once considered a “beacon of hope, the guardian of global democracy.”
“Today, it’s not the same,” he says.
You can read a complete transcript of our conversation below, because I think it is that important to hear what he has to say.
“Don’t undermine Hollywood’s role in shaping not just the cultural life, but political life,” he says, noting how movies like To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heat of the Night pushed the fight against systemic racism to the front of the discourse during the 1960s. “So I think now it’s very important to recognize that we need to come up with a different vision, basically how to adjust American democratic institutions to the challenge of 21st century…. I think Hollywood could do much more and be very proactive in supporting this dissent. This is what America is missing: the experience of dissidents, not like me, but many others. The fight of tyranny versus freedom is global.”
On Kimmel, he adds, “We should not treat it as a single incident… Dictators, or would-be dictators, they always lie about what they’ve done. But very often they’ll tell you exactly what they’re going to do.”
Read on for the full transcript:
