TomDispatch Over at the Nation, one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Schell begins a new piece by pointing out that four prominent Polish former Solidarity activists have come out with a powerful statement supporting Edward Snowden and that, at the same time, the word “dissident” has reemerged from the Cold War era (where it was applied Russian resistors and oppositionists), and is now beginning to be applied in the mainstream (and denied at the White House) to American whistleblowers. This leads him into a fascinating and nuanced discussion of the totalitarian tendencies developing in twenty-first century America. It’s a must-read piece on our changing world with a particularly powerful last line (which I won’t reproduce below!). Tom “And certainly, the four Poles, of all people, are as fully aware as any sensible person of the abyss of difference that separates the Obama administration from, say, the regime of Joseph Stalin, slayer of tens of millions of his own people. And yet it is chillingly true at the same time that the US government has gone further than any previous government—not excluding Stalin’s—in setting up machinery that satisfies certain tendencies that are in the genetic code of totalitarianism. One is the ambition to invade personal privacy without check or possibility of individual protection. This was impossible in the era of mere phone wiretapping, before the recent explosion of electronic communications—before the cellphones that disclose the whereabouts of their owners, the personal computers with their masses of personal data and easily penetrated defenses, the e-mails that flow through readily tapped cables and servers, the biometrics, the street-corner surveillance cameras. But now, to borrow the name of an intelligence program from the Bush years, “Total Information Awareness” is technologically within reach. The Bush and Obama administrations have taken giant strides in this direction. That China and Russia—and Britain, and many other countries—have done the same is hardly comforting to the humble individual under the eye of the universal spying apparatus. “A second totalitarian tendency has been the ambition to control the entire globe—a goal built into fascist as well as communist ideologies of the early twentieth century. In Hannah Arendt’s words, “Evidence that totalitarian governments aspire to conquer the globe and bring all countries on earth under their domination can be found repeatedly in Nazi and Bolshevik literature.” Neither achieved it, or even came close. But now, in the limited arena of information, a sort of shadow or rudiment of this ambition is near realization by the “sole superpower,” the United States. Much attention has been paid to Americans’ loss of privacy rights, but relatively overlooked in the debate over the government’s surveillance activities (at least in the United States) has been that all foreign communications—including those occurring in the lands of close allies, such as Germany—are fair game and are being swept into the US data banks.” thenation/article/176032/edward-snowden-and-chelsea-manning-new-dissidents#
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:43:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015