Snowden
It’s July 4, birthday of the American revolution, and two Ivy League historians, Steve Walt and David Bromwich, are celebrating the man in the transit lounge at the Moscow airport, Edward Snowden.
Walt writes that the founding fathers (sorry about that) would approve, because they broke the law, too, to a higher end:
isn’t it also possible that they would have seen in him a kindred spirit — someone who took an irrevocable step on a matter of principle? In particular, they might have seen in him a man who recognized the natural tendency of governments to extend their control over citizens, usually in the name of national security.
Let us not forget that the Founding Fathers repeatedly warned about the dangers of standing armies, which they rightly understood to be a perennial threat to liberty. Or that James Madison famously warned that no nation can remain free in a state of perpetual warfare, a sentiment that Barack Obama recently quoted but does not seem to have fully taken to heart. The Founders also gave Americans the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because they understood that defending individual privacy against the grasp of government authority is an essential human right as well as an important safeguard of freedom.
…the Snowden affair reminds us that large and well-funded government bureaucracies have a powerful tendency to expand, to hide their activities behind walls of secrecy, and to depend on a cowed and co-opted populace to look the other way.
Snowden may have broken the law, but so did the Founding Fathers when they issued that famous declaration 237 years ago. They did so in defiance of a powerful empire, just as Snowden did. The world is better off that they chose to defy the laws of their time, and Snowden’s idealistic act may leave us better off too. I suspect Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of those revolutionaries might have understood.
And here is Bromwich in the London Review of Books, on how deeply engraved authoritarianism now is in our culture.
Snowden had looked for ways of serving his country in the grim months after September 2001 (he would have been 18 then). He joined the army, hoping to be taken on in special forces, but broke both legs in a training accident and then dropped out, disaffected with an anti-Arab racism in the mood which took him by surprise. He had never finished high school but had no difficulty passing the test for a diploma equivalent. Since his computer skills were prodigious and easily recognised, he was an obvious candidate for well-paying security work in the IT industry, and, by his mid-twenties, had worked his way to the highest clearance for analysing secret data. At the same time he was educating himself in the disagreeable facts of America’s War on Terror, and the moral and legal implications of the national security state. He was pressed by larger doubts the more he learned. … In conversations with friends over the last few years, he made no effort to hide the trouble of conscience that gnawed at him. It also seems to be true – though in the interview he doesn’t clearly formulate the point – that even as he went to work and made use of his privileged access, he felt a degree of remorse at the superiority he enjoyed over ordinary citizens, any of whom might be subject to exposure at any moment by the eye of the government he worked for. The remorse (if this surmise is correct) came not from a suspicion that he didn’t deserve the privilege, but from the conviction that no one deserved it….
We, in America, now support a class of guardians who pass unchallenged through a revolving door that at once separates and connects government and the vast security apparatus that has sprung up in the last 12 years. The cabinet officers and agency heads and company heads ‘move on’ but stay the same, from NSA to CIA or from NSA to Booz Allen Hamilton; and to the serious players, this seems a meritocracy without reproach and without peril….. Nothing like this system was anticipated or could possibly have been admired by the framers of the constitutional democracies of the United States and Europe. The system, as Snowden plainly recognised, is incompatible with ‘the democratic model,’ and can only be practised or accepted by people who have given up on every element of liberal democracy except the ideas of common defence and general welfare…
What was most strange – but predictable once you thought about it – was how far the reactions cut across political lines. This was not a test of Democrat against Republican, or welfare-state liberal versus big-business conservative. Rather it was an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’ obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.
Philip Stephens in the FT complements Bromwich’s observation about the reaction of the establishment
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fcb1fb26-e3e4-11e2-91a3-00144feabdc0.html
For “American Founding Fathers” I often use “American Founding Visionaries” — to avoid any rebukes about political incorrectness. Visionaries of the highest order is what they were.
One wonders if Stephen Walt, from a career standpoint, worries about getting on the wrong side of the military-industrial-intelligence-security complex. He’s already crossed the Israel lobby, and the Israel lobby is largely synonymous with the military-industrial-intelligence-security complex, so perhaps he figures, what the hell — I’ve already burned my bridges.
Goering gave the answer at Nuremberg. He said democracies were easy to control, all you had to do was instill fear in them, fear of some boggie man out to get them. Unlike Pearl Harbor, a direct military strike on an American military base, where the emminent threat spoke for itself beyond reasonable doubt, the Reichstag Fire and the 9/11 attack were much more ambiguous. They were both a signal to be interpreted, not a punch in the face by an aerial fist clearly marked with The Rising Sun insignia.
Well, in both the case of the Reichstag Fire and 9/11, that signal was interpreted, and in both cases the (intentionally kept) ignorant were given their boogy-men. The 9/11 Commission Report was a great treason, ignoring the stated specific motives given by the attackers, attributing it to generic “foreign policy,” to which our elected leaders added: “our lifestyle.”
I hear no groundswell of support from Dick and Jane for Snowden. They never head of Niemoller. Most never even heard of the Pentagon Papers, and, besides, although our young men are legally required to register for the military draft, there’s no penalty for not doing so–unless the young man goes looking for, say, a Pell Grant. Our body bags are shipped home in utter privacy, free from the collusive press eye. Only the tiny percent of military familes suffer, for which they earn a respectful “Thank you for your service” by rare happenstance encounter. Obama’s military has banned the Guardian from all its computers accessible by our troops. Don’t wanna give our dumb cannon fodder any access to Snowden or Greenwald.
Not a single undeclared war the US has been engaged in, since at least Korea, has been a net benefit to the average American, but they’ve been a great boon to the elite. When real austerity comes to America, on the heels of sequestration, there will a peasant uprising, but the elite have been preparing for this, both the quantity of bullets our government has purchased, and the militarization of our local police, and the data base covering us all Snowden has evidenced, will be used against our late-blooming average Americans. Drones small as flies will be in the air outside their windows.
Too many liberals stayed in instead of dropping out. They are willing to embrace a protective authoritarianism as long as it is administered by a Democrat.
There is a strange hyper-activity in the hunt of Snowden. It is absolutely routine that different countries have different views on criminality and arrest warrants issued in one are disregarded in another. To use a well know example, check “Roman Polanski”. It is equally routine to view “treason” as a local crime, again we can check “Jonathan Pollard”. Suppose that Pollard would evade his arrest and manage to reach the territory of Israel. Nobody would expect him to be extradited to USA for something which is legal in Israel (passing some secrets to appropriate Israeli autorities). Snowden did not abuse teenage girls or pass secrets of military nature. Why he is so much more of an irritant?
The government of France knows something about that. Disclosure made by Snowden undermined the trust the French had in American government and now the demand time to reconsider key trade negotiations. Deep in the concomitant psychological trauma they lashed at the President of Bolivia who could harbor Snowden on his official plane (although it was searched already by equally traumatized Austrians? timeline is unclear). Now the French are twisted in a pretzel and say sorry to Bolivians and all Latin Americans.
What is happening? We know that even most famously good natured individuals can be very, very peeved. “Luke 12:10 And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” What kind of “Holy Spirit” was offended by Snowden?
Someone described this unpardonable offense as follows: making the government look bad, and in the most aggravated case, ridiculous. The French republic demurely protected her secret parts from the prying eyes, but now Snowden says that in fact it allowed American voyeurs to bug its consulate and to paw over millions of e-mails and phone calls. To cite a graphic novel: “I am ruined! Now nobody will marry me!”.