Enemies of the State

When freedom of speech becomes a crime.

Jun 18, 2025

German-born Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1929, went into exile when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Being Jewish, had he stayed in Germany, he most likely would have been sent to a concentration camp. His books, including “Death in Venice,” were banned by the Nazis, his political writings were burned, and he was stripped of his citizenship in absentia.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and pro-democracy leader, was arrested in Myanmar as part of a military coup d'état that overthrew the democratically elected government led by her party, the National League for Democracy. She was arrested and imprisoned for “incitement and violations of the Official Secrets Act” for encouraging public protests against the coup.

Alexei Navalny, the prominent Russian opposition leader and vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, was barred from returning to Russia after recovering from a poisoning attempt during a flight to Moscow in 2020. Knowing he would be arrested, Navalny nevertheless returned to Russia on January 17, 2021. He was immediately sent to an Arctic prison camp.

Thomas Mann, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Alexei Navalny

Imprisoning critics and silencing the opposition is a tactic of oppressive regimes designed to stoke fear and consolidate power.

The list of nations aggressively seeking to stifle dissent is long. It includes China, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Eritrea, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many of these countries have revoked the citizenship of dissidents, human rights activists, and journalists, or banned them from entering their countries.

Now, the United States is in the mix. The Trump administration has been arresting vocal foreign students at universities, often without warning or recourse for appeals.

Last week, Australian Alistair Kitchen, a 33-year-old Australian blogger who spent six years in New York at Columbia University earning his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees, was detained at the airport in Los Angeles for 12 hours, interrogated by US Customs and Border Protection agents, and deported back to Australia due to his writings on the Columbia University student protests. He subsequently stated, “I was panicked… they knew everything about me… I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

American-born Hasan Piker has 4.5 million social media followers and has been characterized as the “Joe Rogan of the left.” Piker was detained at the Chicago airport while flying home to the United States last month. Agents questioned him for hours about his political beliefs and his criticism of the war in Gaza. He subsequently noted, “The government is now officially willing and able to intimidate you for your speech. That is a direct violation of the First Amendment.”

Trump Travel Bans

This month, Trump targeted 19 countries for travel bans or restricted visas, with another 36 nations recently listed for inclusion if they fail to address “various security or diplomatic concerns within two months.”

Critics note that these are all nations populated by people of color, while 59 white South Africans, who claimed they were victims of racial discrimination in South Africa, were recently welcomed in the U.S. under a refugee plan initiated by Donald Trump.

Afrikaners from South Africa arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia on May 12, 2025. NBC News

Afrikaners are part of the white supremacist minority that ruled South Africa during apartheid. Under that rule, lasting from 1948 until the early 1990s, black citizens were forcibly removed from their land, which then went to white owners. During Apartheid, more than 20,000 black citizens were killed, with 3,500 cases of documented torture by security forces.

As part of his justification for bringing the Afrikaners to America, Donald Trump displayed a photo of a graveyard to the media last month at the White House, claiming that it demonstrated "genocide" against white farmers in South Africa.

The photo actually showed humanitarian workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo burying bodies after a conflict; they were not white farmers in South Africa.

Meanwhile, ICE continues to conduct mass arrests of nonwhite immigrants, the majority of whom have no criminal records. Masked ICE agents are now showing up at routine immigration hearings across the country to grab people in the hallways after they appear for their regularly scheduled court appointments.

Even though his citizenship was restored after the fall of the Third Reich, Thomas Mann refused to live in Germany and passed away in Switzerland in 1955. He was 80 years old. Mann’s works often dealt with reason, morality, and the darker, irrational aspects of human nature. In his novel “The Magic Mountain,” he observed, “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”

Alexei Navalny died at age 47 in Russia’s Arctic prison camp in February 2024. In his memoir, he wrote, “We must do what they fear--tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.”

Aung San Suu Kyi turns 80 years old today. She continues to serve a 27-year sentence under house arrest in Myanmar. In her collection of essays titled “Freedom from Fear,” she noted, “Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery, courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.”