Guest columnist
UNM instructor
joberst@unm.edu
It would have been easy for NSA analyst Edward Snowden to say nothing, to stay quiet and keep doing what he was doing. It would have been easy for him to live his comfortable and lucrative life, rake in the money of his well-paid position at the American spy agency and get rich. It would have been easy for him to have a family, raise his children at the country’s most exclusive schools, enjoy the reputation that comes with a prestigious job for the government and feel good about it.
Because it is so easy to continue doing the silent harm he was doing, virtually everyone in the political caste keeps doing it. No one stands up against the everyday nightmare of the normalcy of political criminality. The rationalized self-defense mechanisms are ubiquitous.
We’ll invade the privacy of anyone anywhere to protect the country against the omnipresent threat of terrorism, for “we have to have the balance between security and privacy,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says. The American media, the U.S. Pravda of radio, television and the corporate press, chime in to bring people into line with the policies of the Politburo in Congress and the White House.
Thus most shut off their moral-democratic conscience.
One day, Edward Snowden followed a different impulse. He decided to step out of the haven of his security zone, give up his social-financial foundation and quit America like Randall Robinson. But he did it with the big bang of forcing America to look at its ugly Orwellian face, which increasingly resembles both 1984’s Big Brother and Animal Farm’s Napoleon with his attack dogs ready to strike against the democratic Snowballs of the world.
Snowden knew the risk of his looming annihilation symbolized by Julian Assange’s flight to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and epitomized by the torturous incarceration of fellow hero Bradley Manning.
Hence, Snowden prepared for his escape and has so far managed to evade the tentacles of the totalitarian kraken. He knows best that his fight is far from over. He may not survive it. He can be easily droned to death like countless others, including four American citizens.
So why did he do it? What made him muster the courage against all odds and reveal to the world how the NSA’s efforts dwarf the operations of the East German Stasi?
A fundamental disgust with American hypocrisy: evil’s audacious pretence of goodness proudly parading as democracy while undermining it everywhere it can. When spies accuse others of spying and war criminals exonerate themselves in public, as Bush and Cheney did, those who can challenge the impunity of injustice are called to action.
Snowden decided to follow his conscience and heed the call.
In the name of democracy a government has to uphold transparency so that an active and conscientious citizenry can engage in the political process of self-rule. The invisible veil of secrecy excludes the public from its legal-political affairs.
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The house of democracy is prone to collapse without the foundation and structure of a republic. Democracy works only if we set it to keep itself working at all levels of society, as economist Richard Wolff says.
Hence, we are in desperate need of more Mannings and Snowdens, and we need to support them in their courage.
They are the leading defenders of democracy against its dictatorial assailants who wreak havoc around the globe, as we saw in the leaked video from July 12, 2007 of a U.S. helicopter in Baghdad gunning down civilians, journalists and children purely for sadistic pleasure.
With these disgusting images in mind, every member of the U.S. war machine has the obligation to disrupt it. This is the legacy we inherit from the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted the Hitler regime and paid the ultimate price.
It is also the legacy of American heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X who died in the continuous struggle against militarism and racism.
There’s a scene between two characters in Bertolt Brecht’s “The Life of Galileo”: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no heroes,” says Andrea to Galileo, to which Galileo replies: “Unhappy is the land that is in need to breed heroes.”
It is this fundamental disposition of unhappiness that has plagued this country from its beginning.
