The foreign despondent

by David Benjamin

“First there was a single truck driver. in Genoa, then another, a friend of his, who went up to Milan… We have a printer in Genoa, he hands bundled papers off to three or four friends, and they spread it out among their friends. One takes ten, another takes twenty. And from there it goes everywhere…” 

— Alan Furst, from The Foreign Correspondent

PARIS — Coming back here in the February rain conveyed to me the same mood I felt while reading, earlier this month, Alan Furst’s espionage novel, The Foreign Correspondent, set in pre-World War II Paris. The story unfolds in an era of rising tyranny and global anxiety. Francisco Franco has finally crushed the republican forces in Spain. Mussolini and Hitler are busily hatching their Pact of Steel, creating a fascist swath that stretched across Europe from Madrid to Berlin, with only the French and their silly Maginot Line blocking the way. Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia are naked and afraid. Winston Churchill is considering a deal with the devil. Franklin D. Roosevelt, across the Atlantic, is stymied by political forces who prefer to deny the menace of sword-rattling megalomaniacs from Tokyo to Moscow to the heart of Europe. 

The protagonist of The Foreign Correspondent is Carlo Weisz, a roving reporter with Italian roots, fluent English, a job at Reuters in Paris and an anti-Nazi sweetheart in Berlin. His vocation typifies the journalist’s eternal dilemma. Besides his “day job” at Reuters — which could end any minute if his editor is cranky (or Hitler marches on Paris) — Weisz is ghostwriting the memoir of “Colonel Ferrara,” a defeated hero of the Spanish Civil War. He’s also a contributor — and eventually editor — of Liberazione, an anti-Mussolini underground tribune published in Paris and smuggled haphazardly to Italy via Genoa and Milan.  Furst describes the four-page thorn: “This paper kicked like a mule, barbed, witty, knowing and savage, with not a wisp of respect for Italy’s glorious fascismo or Il Duce or any of his achievements.”

Journalism has rarely been a career for seekers after job security. Moonlighting has always been the reporter’s hole card. But it isn’t just Weisz’ tenuous hold on a reliable paycheck that renders him this story’s Universal Journalist. His moment in history, on the cusp between turmoil and war, threatens not just his livelihood. It endangers his mission and impinges on his very existence. He’s being watched by governments whose power depends on twisting and suppressing the news he writes, who will go to any length to drown Weisz’ small voice beneath the thunder of propaganda. 

In an opening sequence of the story, the Italian secret police — called OVRA — clarify the stakes in the game by murdering Bottini, the editor of Liberazione in Paris. The mainstream press, too lazy to investigate, spoon-fed misinformation and gossip by Mussolini’s flacks, report the assassination not as political violence but as the murder-suicide of a cheating husband and his mistress. 

But the killing of Bottini is Furst’s fictional version of the real-life fate of Fritz Gerlich, editor of the Munich journal Der Gerade Weg, who made fun of Germany’s foremost National Socialist in 1932 (“DOES HITLER HAVE MONGOLIAN BLOOD?”) and was sent to Dachau — never to be heard again — in 1933. Frau Gerlich received in the mail, her husband’s eyeglasses, shattered and streaked with blood. Such is the warning shot demanding silence. 

Opting against silence, Weisz spends the book pursued by OVRA, dismissed by the Paris police, writing on the run, despairing of the future of Liberazione and negotiating with capitalists who momentarily defend the free press, but the next moment pander to der Feuhrer in the pursuit of the almighty deutschmark. 

Weisz’ voice and the efforts of his colleagues are condemned by the mightiest men in Europe as fake news, while state-sanctioned media pour out propaganda under 72-point headlines, with brass bands providing accompaniment. 

If this scenario sounds familiar, look around.

Since 2015, a burgeoning American autocrat (parodied by Sinclair Lewis eleven years before he was born) has been crusading against every legitimate news source, attacking every ambivalent and underpaid Carlo Weisz, calling them “fake news.” His cry is taken up by a brotherhood of fellow Mussolini wannabes — including the tinpot punks in charge of Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Syria, Italy (again?), Venezuela, Brazil, Israel, India, and so on. 

In the police states that our president envies, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Russia, extrajudicial killings by 21st-century versions of OVRA and Stasi, the NKVD and the Gestapo, are the price reporters must pay for “leaking” actual facts. 

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s personal Goebbels, a bully named Dominic Cummings, is waging a propaganda and fiscal war against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), for saying naughty things about Boris. Britain now also has its own state media, run by Rupert Murdoch. 

Speaking of state media, Murdoch, not coincidentally, also owns Fox News, known affectionately as Trump TV, where “newscasters” pump out pro-Trump propaganda 24/7. Fox News aggressively abets the efforts of America’s latter-day Mussolini (oh, if only Il Duce had had Twitter!) to discredit the professional press, muddying facts and inventing counter-narratives that cancel reality, confuse the curious and inflame the ignorant. Fox News even feeds Trump his daily list of talking points, a few of which he actually remembers.

The first priority of any tyrant is to housebreak the press, control broadcasting, silence critics, and bury facts beneath mountains of deodorized crap. In service of that mission, Trump’s third “press secretary,” Stephanie Grisham treats reporters like coronavirus carriers. Unlike her forebear, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who told lies at press briefings, Grisham has never had to lie at a press briefing because she has never held one. Contact between Trump and the media has been reduced to bursts of shouted boasting, bluster and buncombe on the White House driveway, often drowned out by the scream of helicopter blades and Kristen Welker. These events are meaningless, and everyone knows it. But the reporters still cluster ’round the great pretender, because what else ya gonna do? It’s your paycheck.

Housebroken.

Ideally, our dear leader communicates past the press — straight to you and me — through slogans, flags and “tweets,” and best of all through mass rallies, interrupted by Gregorian battle cries, in vast stadiums where nobody’s allowed to sit down. George Orwell, perhaps the 20th century’s most assiduous student of propaganda, previewed these gatherings in the “two minutes of hate” scenes in 1984. “Lock her up!” would have made George smile.

February 2020, when I read the adventures of Carlo Weisz — looking back to Rome and Berlin in 1939, remembering Oceania in 1984 — was a month when Bernie Sanders’ believers were using Twitter to trash Bernie’s “fellow” Democrats and Sean Hannity was using Fox News to trash Trump’s “fellow” Republicans, in an America gripped by a combed-over cult of personality. In this light, I couldn’t help but think that Alan Furst’s novel was both retrospect and foreshadowing. 

And I wonder if the farewell headline on Page One of the Times, on the brink of its purchase by Rupert Murdoch, on 4 November 2020, will read, in sardonic memory of 11 September 2001:

“We’re all Pravda readers now.”