The Prisoner
Why didn’t Edward Snowden agree to be jailed, abused, silenced, and quite possibly
tortured? This is what Melissa
Harris-Perry wants to know.
Harris-Perry is one of MSNBC’s minor weekend anchors, a professor currently
at Tulane University who started out retailing her academic pretensions as a
sometime guest on the Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes shows: her job was to inject
fancy words like “discourse” and “paradigm” into the standard
lefty-”progressive” boilerplate propaganda we’ve come to expect from
that venue. With a magisterial tone bordering on the parodic, and complete protection
from having to defend her views against any contrary opinions, Harris-Perry
soon carved out a niche for herself as a dogged defender of the Obama administration,
no matter what the circumstances. So when Snowden emerged as the biggest whistleblower
in American history, exposing the existence of a secret surveillance apparatus that snakes into every aspect of American life, she sprang to the Dear Leader’s
defense and delivered an “open letter” to Snowden that underscores
why no one needs to take her seriously:
“Dear Ed,
“It’s me, Melissa.
“I hear you’re looking for a country. Well, wouldn’t you know, I have
an idea for you! How about…this one?
“Come on back to the U.S.A., Ed. I know you’re not super pleased with
the government these days–and I feel you. The information you revealed about
surveillance raises serious issues about the behaviors of our leaders and how
they justify and hide those practices from the public. But, here is the deal:
it’s time to come home and face the consequences of the actions for which you
are so proud.”
Isn’t that cute? For an alleged “feminist” to write such a girlish
letter really is quite an accomplishment. Think of what she had to endure in
order to do it: first she had to revert back to her old, pre-feminist, pre-Women’s
Studies self, and find her “It’s me, Melissa” voice. Then she had
to forget all those fancy words she learned in Professor Phony’s “Gendered
Discourse as the Paradigmatic Exemplar of Our Racist Society” course, and
reconnect with her girlish infatuation with exclamation points. And it wasn’t
over yet! Then she had to unlearn proper English grammar before she could
write a sentence like “I feel you” – instead of, you know, I feel
for you.
Whew! After all that, I’m surprised she had the energy to continue all
the way to the end, but our girl Melissa is no shrinking violet. What she lacks
in credibility she more than makes up for with all that energy.
Okay, so why should Snowden throw himself on the mercy of the Big O and “face
the consequences”? After all, he’s a whistleblower, not a suicide bomber:
why should he give up what remains of his freedom?
“I know you must feel you’ve already given up a lot to reveal government
secrets,” avers Harris-Perry, “your well-paid job, your life in Hawaii,
your passport.
“And maybe your intentions were completely altruistic–it’s not that
you wanted attention, but that you wanted us, the public, to know just how much
information our government has about us. That is something worth talking about.
But by engaging in this Tom
Hanks-worthy, border-jumping drama through some of the world’s most
totalitarian states, you’re making yourself the story.”
Maybe his intentions were completely altruistic – and maybe not. Harris-Perry
isn’t fooled. She knows he gave up his career, his relationships, his family,
everything, just to get attention. Why else would he try to escape? Right?
And he’s traveling through “some of the world’s most totalitarian states,”
which sounds dicey, if not ominous. Never mind that Hong Kong, where many thousands
of Americans and other Westerners live and work, is hardly North Korea, but
we’ll pass that one by. Because, you see, it’s all Snowden’s fault that
“journalists” of Harris-Perry’s ilk choose to focus on everything
but what the whistleblower is blowing the whistle on. He is selfishly – even
narcissistically – refusing to doom himself to life in prison, and therefore
it follows – as the night does the day – that “journalists” like Harris-Perry
are justified in completely ignoring why the Obama administration is
calling out its Ringwraiths
in hot pursuit.
And if you don’t see the “logic” of that, why you’re just not conversant
with the kind of academic rigor routinely demanded of a professor who was granted
tenure at Princeton. Of course, there’s the odd fact that Princeton’s Center
for African American Studies refused to promote her to a full professorship
– it is bruited about she was asked in no uncertain terms to leave Princeton
– and that colleagues such as Cornell West call her “a
fake, a fraud, and a liar,” but never mind all
that.
I’m talking about her, instead of her arguments, because Harris-Perry
doesn’t make any real arguments: all we get is snark, or, as Prof. West puts
it in describing her academic style, “a lot of twittering.” The best
she can come up with is the kind of bromide Twitter was made for: “Come
home and face the consequences” leaves you with 105 characters to go.
Okay, I’ll admit it: I chose an easy target. Sure, there are plenty of party-lining
Regimists around, and I could’ve had my pick. What’s interesting about Harris-Perry’s
particular take on what has been the Regimist theme song of the month is how
far it goes in characterizing Snowden as an agent of sinister foreign powers,
just as the neocons of the Bush years demonized the antiwar movement as agents
of terrorism:
“We’re talking about you. I can imagine you’d say, “Well, then
stop! Just talk about something else.” But here’s the problem, even if
your initial leak didn’t compromise national security, your new cloak-and-dagger
game is having real and tangible geopolitical consequences. So, well, we have
to talk about…you.
“We’re talking about how maybe now you’re compromising national security
by jumping from country to country, causing international incidents and straining
U.S. relationships with Russia and China. Really. Important. Relationships.
And we’re talking about how you praised countries like Russia and Venezuela
for ‘standing against human rights violations’ and ‘refusing to compromise their
principles.’”
“I mean, where do you even come up with that kind of garbage, Ed? What
are you thinking?”
Here is a statism so single-minded, so obtuse, that the desire to escape
its depredations is considered the worst treason of all. Who would argue that
escaped slaves in the South were guilty of “compromising national security”
by “jumping from country to country” and “causing international
incidents” in their efforts to find safe haven in, say, Canada, or one
of Britain’s Caribbean possessions? And, no, the analogy is not a bit overdrawn:
Snowden is not only fleeing State oppression, he’s doing it because he refuses
to be a slave to the government. He is our Spartacus, almost alone in the
arena, facing off against the Regime and its talking head gladiators.
In Harris-Perry’s world, to speak is to “compromise national security,”
and to escape from the clutches of an all-pervasive Spy State is treason. The
subtext of the letter to Snowden is: you must come home and be punished as an
example – and a warning – to others. This is the new theme of the Obamaites
and their Republican enablers: as this Scott Horton interview with McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay lays out in some detail, the Obama administration is in the midst
of a “security” clampdown in its own ranks. Non-classified information
ordinarily available to the media is now inaccessible and an internal spying
regime has been instituted, which encourages government employees to report
on each other for “suspicious” behavior.
This is important because whistleblowers like Snowden, Bradley Manning, John
Kiriakou, Dan Ellsberg, and others too numerous to mention individually deprive
our rulers of the one ingredient essential to any despotism, whether it be monarchical
or “democratic,” and that is secrecy. After all, if the folks out
in the cornfields ever got wind of what their wise leaders were really up to,
those proverbial
peasants-with-pitchforks would be at
the gates in no time. It’s therefore usually necessary to conduct the ugly
business of government behind doors more than halfway closed, relying on a compliant
media to simply omit or downplay reporting on certain matters. However, in the
case of the NSA’s “architecture of oppression,” as Snowden perceptively
described it, all this subterfuge about America being the land of the free and
an international exemplar of liberal democracy is thrown overboard very quickly,
and suddenly it becomes a felony to reveal the decision of a duly constituted
court. It becomes a felony to reveal that you’ve received a National Security
Letter, or to discuss its contents. And the highest treason of all is trying
to escape.
Listening to Harris-Perry’s tirade, I wondered whether I had stumbled on a
heretofore unknown episode of The Prisoner, the cult classic 1960s television
series written by and starring Patrick McGoohan, in which a former British intelligence
agent who has committed some unknown treason finds himself imprisoned in a place
known as The Village. McGoohan’s pioneering series presents a prescient portrait
of the anesthetizing Prozac-ed out mass culture of America today: the Village,
with it’s pastel houses, outfitted with every comfort, are set in a garden-like
“controlled community,” where calming voices are carried on the wind
and daily medication prevents coherent thought. Everyone is subject to 24-hour
surveillance, and cameras are everywhere. Each episode tells the story of one
unsuccessful escape attempt after another, while McGoohan – the prisoner – probes
ever deeper into the true nature of the Village. We don’t know what crime he’s
been imprisoned for, but the clear implication is that it’s something big, almost
Snowden-like. I’m surprised no one has brought up the McGoohan connection: the
story lines are parallel if not identical. Snowden seems to be fleshing out
McGoohan’s scripts in the front page headlines of every newspaper.
In the series, the Village employs its agents, who are constantly trying to
entrap McGoohan into confessing to his alleged crimes, and giving up some Big
Secret he supposedly possesses, but he resists. Harris-Perry, in her faux concern
for the issues raised by Snowden’s exposure of massive government spying on
innocent Americans, is straight out of an episode of The Prisoner, in
which an agent of the Village tells him to give up his secret because his “level
of celebrity” will somehow protect him. Really? Not, I suspect, if Harris-Perry
and her fellow
Madam Defarges over at MSNBC have anything to say about it.
I agree with Harris-Perry on one point: it is valid to discuss Snowden, his
politics, his personal journey from agent of the state to enemy of the state,
but unlike her I don’t think this detracts at all from the actual content of
the documents he has made available to Glenn Greenwald and the staff of the Guardian newspaper. Greenwald tells a very interesting back story to
all this in his talk given at the “Socialism” conference, in which
he relates how and under what circumstances he met Snowden, and how that meeting
inspired him to think about how real change comes about.
Snowden’s personal example is inspiring, and focusing on him, far from detracting
from his message, only serves to draw out the attention span of the public for
these things: it underscores rather than trivializes the real meaning of the
revelations. Indeed, the very effort to capture Snowden dramatizes, in vivid
terms, the kind of global hegemony the US seeks to enforce, and brings home
the important point that the NSA’s “architecture of oppression” is
just a part of it. The international blockade separating Snowden from his right
to asylum is another part of it, another example of the tentacles of the Empire
exercising their global reach.
And yet, in spite of all that, Snowden remains out of their clutches – and
that’s why, in part, he’s become an international folk hero. This is the source
and significance of the “celebrity” that protected him from the Chinese
regime, but won’t help him if the American authorities ever get their hands
on him. Snowden is so popular in China that the Communists didn’t dare turn
him over to the US. The same is true in Russia, where Putin has a real hot potato
on his hands. Snowden has continued to elude them all precisely because of his
international grassroots support, although it is a mistake to believe that will
help him if he listens to Harris-Perry and comes back to the US.
Or would it? After weeks of being subjected to one of the biggest smear campaigns
in recent memory – denounced as a traitor by Regime sock puppets “left”
and “right” – the polls show Americans overwhelmingly hail Snowden
as a whistleblower and a hero. Anyone who thinks that means he’ll get a better
deal in Obama’s America than he got in Hong Kong or Russia (so far) is living
in a fool’s paradise. It’s later than you think.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often
made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here
is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with
an Introduction by Prof. George
W. Carey, a Foreword
by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott
Richert and David
Gordon (ISI
Books, 2008).
You can buy An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books,
2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Read more by Justin Raimondo
Republished with permission from: Antiwar
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/the-prisoner/50328/
