I have been resistant to setting up a newsletter. It seems so presumptuous. But I seem to have attracted a few subscribers without posting anything, so it would now be rude not to!
Here’s the deal. I will write original material here and see if anyone is interested. My website (martinbright.com) will then serve as an archive for articles I write elsewhere, including Index on Censorship, where I am currently editor-at-large.
What will you find at The Bright Stuff? Anyone familiar with my work will know I have always been interested in those who set themselves in opposition to power: whistleblowers, dissidents and freethinkers.
I was inspired to become a journalist after travelling through Eastern Europe in 1989. Visiting Prague, Berlin, Leipzig and Gdansk and meeting young people my age (I was 23) changed the way I thought about the world. These were times of great optimism and hope. Those protesters on the streets wanted nothing more to do with those vicious, corrupted Iron Curtain regimes.
Three decades on, that hope has not entirely disappeared, but the conversations I am currently having with young journalists in Afghanistan or the American students in my journalism class are far darker and more anxious. Everything seemed possible in 1989 and real change came with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is hard to talk about hope to a generation which has lived through the crushing of the Arab Spring, a global pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But the inspiring stories of Gen Z still out there: the young women of Iran protesting against the murderous Khamenei regime, the anti-Putin journalists of the student magazine Doxa in Russia and the young people of Afghanistan who refuse to concede 20 years of freedom to the Taliban.
I will continue to celebrate these heroic individuals and their stories.