So it is clear at last. The real reason, apparent after Edward Snowden’s and Bradley Manning’s revelations, for the popularity of all those dumb zombie films is that every value that Westerners grew up cherishing since the Second World War is now dead or dying, reduced to ravenous corpses shambling along, controlled by authorities as cold-blooded themselves as zombies, and all transformed from human beings into grim creatures devouring anyone showing a spark of humanity. Snowden’s unforgivable crime is that he flushed our rulers’ profit-warped Orwellian agenda into plain sight. State managers are doing their clumsy bullying best to distract us from their indefensible practice of total surveillance.
So democratic forms are just delicate facades behind which beady-eyed and -brained elites strive to shape popular opinion and to snuff out dissent. The US Patriot Act, in retrospect, was the 21st century Magna Carta for America’s rulers, liberating them from any trace of true public accountability. The legislature long has been dominated by sociopathic tycoons dispensing campaign bribes — bribes funded by tax breaks they purchased — to sidestep the popular will. The US mainstream media, corralled and gelded, are designed to conceal or explain away systemic outrages of rapacious bankers, corporate hustlers, and national security managers who have no interest in justice or fairness, only in covertly crafting a sleek authoritarian order that suits themselves. Democracy, as legendary American singer Woody Guthrie long ago observed of this looming threat, is becoming only a word, a mere sound, a pawn of propaganda. Yet take heart. If it were too late to reverse these ugly trends, we would never have heard of Manning or Snowden or any other ‘whistleblower’, which is the new Washington term for honest citizens.
Edward Snowden is the latest hated messenger to bring to light evidence of this slick agenda in action. One almost wants to collapse in grimacing laughter at the extraordinarily dimwitted way smug American officials have reacted. Rather than strategically concede they overstepped their constitutional roles and back off, they instead flex their muscles in a steroid rage. The elected Ecuadorian leader cannot even fly home safely, not because of terrorism, but because the US was pouting. Viewed sanely, rather than through the lenses of American unilateralism, the plight is almost hilarious and promises to go on being vastly entertaining as well as illuminating for the rest of us. The high-placed criminals, despite being caught red-handed obliterating democracy, embark in remorseless pursuit of the would-be saviour of democracy instead. Forming a posse is how these indignant honchos try to switch the subject from their hideous betrayal of the US instead to the miscreant Snowden breaking his promise to hide from fellow citizens all the unconscionable excesses and idiocies of his bosses. The US government, run by interchangeable Republicans and Democrats, blatantly ignore their supreme oaths to the Constitution. The numerous times obedient TV pundits soothingly claimed, falsely, that the NSA mass surveillance programme did not violate the Fourth amendment, was appalling. The arbitrary extent of domestic spying even managed to violate the Patriot Act, and that is hard to do. Hannah Arendt was right: profound evil lurks within the banality of bureaucracies.
The average police movie or TV programme features a routine warning to suspects that anything they say may be taken down and used against them. How terribly quaint. Now we know that absolutely anything you communicate electronically is taken down without your permission in order to be stored for whatever purpose the surveillance agency sees fit. The first silly rebuff by government spokespersons, and their fans in the media, was that the government was not listening in to all communiqués, merely recording them, until the day, probably the next, it might have to resort to these records to intimidate and silence you. Even the far right in American politics can figure out what unbridled surveillance might mean for their own liberty.
What a whopping missed opportunity. Had President Barack Obama sincerely promoted transparency this NSA revelation would have been a huge boon, a chance for him to demonstrate devotion to the Constitution of the United States and the public good. Instead, he recites scripts the indignant agencies scribble for him just as he relays the bidding of banking racketeers in misjudging economic policy. What we know now is extremely interesting when you think about it. The US government possesses all the evidence any eager prosecutor could dream of for throwing the culprits of the financial crisis in jail.
Indeed, the US, and no doubt some other governments, through magical monitoring devices, possesses all the means it needs to track every untaxed offshore illegal dollar that big firms and wealthy individuals have parked out of reach. If the NSA can carry out detailed industrial espionage, it doubtless is privy to every corporate scheme to evade the law. But are intrusive state agencies peeking into bigwigs like the Irish Bank CEO who guffawed about lying in order to hoover up a multi-billion taxpayer bailout? No, the spooks are strangely inattentive even though they can be redirected to such popular public tasks. Security agencies opt to spy upon ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrators instead, even installing government security and police units inside Wall Street basements for closer collaborations with kleptomaniac brokers and bankers.
As this saga unfolds it may dawn on the American public that scary technological marvels can be turned around under popular pressure to scrutinise insider dealing, corrupt lobbying, and to tamp down the haughty excesses of powerful institutions. No one is more frightened of, and hostile to, democratic outcomes than the people formally in charge. They are proving it every day and we do not need anything more complex than a TV set or radio to witness it. Let the Snowden spectacle, and the education it provides about the growing US police state, proceed. And do divide Obama’s old Nobel Peace Prize between a far more richly deserving Snowden and Corporal Bradley Manning. After all, it’s never been used.
The writers are the authors of Parables of Permanent War and No Clean Hands