Edward Snowden continues to deliver gifts to the U.S.: the gift of self-awareness. Who can possibly argue that the information he released is not vital to our democracy? Or, as Snowden said, what gave him the right as a security analyst to know about our wiretapping Angela Merkel without his fellow citizens knowing it too? Here is Dirk Kurbjuweit in Spiegel writing about paranoid democracies, Israel, the U.S. and the former South Africa, which depend on freedom myths, ideas of themselves as paradise, and paranoia:
To understand the United States, it’s worth taking a look at other paranoid democracies. In southern Africa, Boer settlers battled the local population for land. To this day, the Boers still have a glorified view of their history, as suggested by Boer expressions like “Eie land, vrye volk,” or “One land, free people.” A strict apartheid system was implemented in South Africa starting in 1948. The system enabled the Boers to isolate themselves from the black majority and create a democracy, but only for whites, making it entirely undemocratic. Fear was the basis of that state. It built nuclear bombs, even though it had no enemies….
In Israel, too, politics are shaped by fear — and a justified one. The country is surrounded by enemies, some of which have made the renewed extermination of the Jews their objective. But does that mean that the Israelis have to have their presumed enemies murdered abroad? One of today’s symbols of political paranoia is the giant wall that seals off Palestinian areas from Israeli territory. “Homeland” is actually based on an Israeli TV series.
The United States differs in many respects from South Africa during apartheid and Israel today. But the three countries are similar in terms of the triad of freedom myth, paradise and fear. This has led to the development of a tremendous ability to put up a fight, but also a heightened sensitivity.
Political paranoia requires an enemy, or at least the concept of an enemy…
Unfortunately, however, a paranoid democracy tends to use tools that are beneath a democracy, the tools of a dictatorship, and they include as much surveillance as possible.
Information is the most valuable thing in a paranoid world.
“politics are shaped by fear — and a justified one.”
How is it justified? The system is built around the IDF and the companies that make money from the IDF. Is that right? The only way to do it ? And why are all the neighbours enemies ? Says who ?
America, for all its flaws, is lightyears away from former Apartheid South Africa and current Apartheid Israel.
It would simply be impossible to think about the segregated school system in Israel happening in America in this day and age where Arabs are concentrated into their own schools.
America had that experiment and we all know what happened.
Or take foreign workers in Israel forced to sign NDA’s promising not to impregnate Jewish women(in America’s case, that’d be white women) for racial paranoia.
Is America paranoid? Yes, there’s that strain. Whether it is the Red Scare of the 50s or the “Islam is taking over America from within” movement, you have that strain. But America tends to get over it, and it gets embarrassed looking back. Israel’s primary lesson is usually “we went too soft” and then double down on paranoia and racism.
As I wrote a few days ago; can anyone even think about a de Klerk emerging in Israel? You gotta give the Afrikaaners that. They don’t assassinate the people who want peace(even if Rabin was far more hardline than his airbrushed image is usually portayed).
The US didnt use to be a paranoid –that is something that evolved among right wing imperialist after WWII as the US took the position of superpower creating justified blowback by some countries.
Israel’s fear is, like the US’s, only ‘justified’ in the same way —fear that some blowback to their agression/actions is going to finally give them what they deserve.
Terrorist, crooks, murders, etc. whether they are the US, Israel or ALQ or whoever are always ‘fearful’ of their crimes or victims catching up with them.
Most, if not all, settler colonial societies are/were defined by fear, dead ideologies and violence. Guatemala has the world’s highest murder rate. The US imprisons more per head than anywhere else. Australian Aboriginal people have a life expectancy 30 years less than that of white Australians. Israel is just following the rest. It’s another settler colonial state with the same issues.
“Information is the most valuable thing in a paranoid world”. And in a authoritarian one, just think what power a dictator would have, when able to listen and read every communication every member of the public ever made and to store that information for ever. Frightening yes, it’s happening now, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.