No Moral Superpower: Arundhati Roy, Edward Snowden, and the Crimes of Empire
Published on
Friday, October 14, 2016
by
Common Dreams
No Moral Superpower: Arundhati Roy, Edward Snowden, and the Crimes of Empire
by
Jake Johnson
The September 2014 edition of Wired, which featured Snowden embracing the
American flag. (Image: Wired magazine cover detail/with overlay)
When Arundhati Roy was preparing, in 2014, for a trip to Moscow to meet
Edward Snowden, she was troubled by two things.
One of them was the fact that the meeting was arranged to take place at the
Ritz-Carlton, a beacon of luxury, celebrity, and unfettered greed - a
symbol, in short, of what Roy has spent much of her life opposing.
"My last political outing had been some weeks spent walking with Maoist
guerrillas and sleeping underneath the stars in the Dandakaranya forest,"
she wrote. "And this next one was going to be in the Ritz?"
The other issue was the cover of the September 2014 edition of Wired, which
featured Snowden embracing the American flag. Mainstream media outlets
wondered if it was "his first big PR plunder," but Roy, the great opponent
of nationalism, looked deeper.
"All I'm saying is: what does that American flag mean to people outside of
America?" she asked the actor and screenwriter John Cusack, who has worked
with Snowden, and with the legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, at the
Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The flag, Roy argues, is not just vapid iconography; it exudes a narrative,
a history, one that, while distorted by the powerful, can never be forgotten
by the victims.
"The courageous acts of Ellsberg, Snowden, and many others have allowed us
to glimpse the inner workings of the system that perpetuates such
atrocities, and they have given us information that is necessary in the
fight for a better future."
"I am happy - awed - that there are people of such intelligence, such
compassion, that have defected from the state," she continued. "They are
heroic. Absolutely. They've risked their lives, their freedom...but then
there's that part of me that thinks...How could you ever have believed in
it? What do you feel betrayed by? Is it possible to have a moral state? A
moral superpower?"
It is often forgotten that Snowden did once believe in "it," if only for a
short time. As he recounts in an interview with the Guardian, "I wanted to
fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human
being to help free people from oppression."
But despite her misgivings - about the magazine cover, about the opulent
hotel, indeed about Snowden himself - Roy agreed to join John Cusack and
Daniel Ellsberg on the trip to Moscow. When they arrived, they confronted a
man who knew, or thought he knew, why they wanted to meet him.
"I know why you're here," Snowden said to Roy. "To radicalize me."
Parts of the conversation that followed are transcribed in the newly
released book Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, which also includes
penetrating discussions between Roy and Cusack on the usual topics -
imperialism, nuclear proliferation, the militarization of police, the
corporatization of NGOs.
Ellsberg and Snowden, for reasons that should be obvious, bonded quickly,
and had much to talk about. Soon, though, Roy found an opportunity to
interject a few queries of her own. She asked about the magazine and the
flag, and about why Snowden initially supported the invasion of Iraq "when
millions of people all over the world were marching against it."
His forthright reply put Roy at ease.
"I fell for the propaganda," he said.
He fell for the propaganda - for the nationalistic imagery, for the soaring
promises that always accompany deadly military projects - in the same way
then that many of us have fallen for it since. President Obama's promises of
greater transparency and a more peaceful future, we must remember, had
millions enraptured, inspired, hopeful. Meanwhile, as Snowden told Roy, we
were "sleepwalking into a total surveillance state."
"That's the dark future," Snowden said, a situation in which "we have both a
super-state that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited
capacity to know [about the people it is targeting] - and that's a very
dangerous combination."
While Snowden's focus is relatively narrow, Roy always returns to the big
picture - to Daniel Berrigan's point that "Every nation-state tends toward
the imperial." She also frequently alludes to what Hannah Arendt called
humanity's "active, aggressive" capacity to deny the relevant facts, to be
deceived by appealing lies, by colorful stories about the past and by
fantastical predictions of what the future will bring. Related is the
tendency to ignore the historical backdrop, to view events in a vacuum;
Donald Trump's rise has done much to bring this tendency to the surface.
Countless pundits, liberal and conservative, have characterized Trump as a
unique evil, a radical departure from the civilized political establishment
that existed prior to his dangerous candidacy - a departure, even, from the
conservative movement, which has been granted an air of legitimacy by these
same commentators.
But, as Roy reminds us, this "civilized political establishment" has never
existed. That Trump is an odious character does nothing to change this fact.
"Forget the genocide of American Indians, forget slavery, forget Hiroshima,
forget Cambodia, forget Vietnam," Roy said to Cusack, lamenting the
historical amnesia - both willful and not - of the powerful and the
punditry. "I can't understand those people who believe that the excesses are
just aberrations."
Excesses, in Roy's view, are embedded in the very concept of empire.
"Isn't the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their
ability to be ruthless, genocidal?" Roy writes. "Doesn't the height of a
country's 'success' usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?"
Responding to Trump's infamous promise to "make America great again," many,
including the campaign of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, have peddled the
line that America is already great - that while mistakes have been made,
America's character and the intentions of its leaders are essentially good.
"The United States is an exceptional nation," Hillary Clinton said on the
campaign trail in August. "I believe we are still Lincoln's last, best hope
of Earth. We're still Reagan's shining city on a hill. We're still Robert
Kennedy's great, unselfish, compassionate country."
Yet on the front page of Wednesday's New York Times, one is forced to
confront a rather different story: The story of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, who
was imprisoned for years without being convicted of a crime. For months, he
was tortured by the CIA.
"Music blasted nearly 24 hours a day while he was chained in solitary
confinement so dark that he could not see the shackles on his arms or the
walls of his cell," James Risen writes. "The Americans routinely hauled him
from his cell to a room where, he said, they hanged him from chains, once
for two days. They wrapped a collar around his neck and pulled it to slam
him against a wall, he said. And they shaved his head, laid him on a plastic
tarp and poured gallons of ice water on him, inducing a feeling of
drowning."
Move just beyond the front page, and you'll find the heartbreaking testimony
of Mohammed al-Asaadi, a Yemeni man living with his wife and four children
at the heart of a nation currently under assault by Saudi Arabia, the
heinous dictatorship that receives weaponry and strategic assistance from
the United States.
"How will our future be beautiful if they have destroyed Yemen?" Mohammed's
12-year-old daughter Haneen wrote on Facebook.
Internally, American officials have worried about their complicity in the
killing of civilians, according to a report by Reuters, but the Obama
administration has, nonetheless, continued to approve arms sales to the
Saudi Kingdom; in total, the Guardian reports, "The Obama administration has
offered to sell $115bn worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia over its eight years
in office, more than any previous US administration."
Suleiman Abdullah Salim refers to the prison in which he was tortured as
"The Darkness"; "it is," he told the Times, "always there." To look just at
America's recent past is to see that The Darkness has been imposed
repeatedly on the world's most vulnerable populations: The forceful
subversion of democracy to protect corporate interests, bombings in the name
of peace, the proliferation of death squads in the name of freedom, torture
in the name of security.
These heinous acts are hardly far off in the distant past. The use of Agent
Orange against the Vietnamese, for instance, may appear, at a cursory
glance, to be the work of a bygone, uncivilized order; progress has been
made since those days, it is said. Seems plausible, until you examine recent
reports confirming that American forces made extensive use of chemical
warfare in Iraq.
And contrary to the narrative favored by our political leaders, these are
not merely sharp and temporary diversions from the norm of justice; they are
the norm, a norm that is profoundly unjust. The courageous acts of Ellsberg,
Snowden, and many others have allowed us to glimpse the inner workings of
the system that perpetuates such atrocities, and they have given us
information that is necessary in the fight for a better future.
But nothing they revealed should be surprising - that a superpower such as
the United States would relentlessly bomb poor nations (as in the case of
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and seek to establish a surveillance state,
under which information is indiscriminately collected and stored, is hardly
remarkable.
Nor is it remarkable that those who dare to expose these facts - and to call
them what they are: crimes - almost inevitably become pariahs, and usually
worse. Snowden and Julian Assange are in exile; Jeffrey Sterling and Chelsea
Manning are in prison.
_____
After hours of conversation, Roy recalls Ellsberg "lying back on John's bed,
Christ-like, with his arms flung open, weeping for what the United States
has turned into.
"That the best thing that the best people in our country like Ed can do is
to go to prison . . . or be an exile in Russia?" he said. "This is what it's
come to in my country . . . it's horrible, you know. . . ."
His despair, Roy notes, is understandable: "He knows now, forty years after
he made the Pentagon Papers public, that even though particular individuals
have gone, the machine keeps on turning."
The war on whistleblowers continues, unabated. Civilians are maimed and
killed by drone strikes, authorized in secret by America's commander in
chief, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. The environment is plundered,
both at home and abroad, for profit, while the health of poor communities is
disregarded as a mere externality, capitalism's "collateral damage."
All the while, we are told that the very system that got us into this mess
of perpetual war and environmental degradation can pull us out - that the
very corporations whose activities have accelerated the warming of the
planet can lead the fight for environmental justice, peace, and equality.
"But," Roy argues, echoing George Orwell, "capitalism will fail too." The
existential question we face, then, is: what, and who, will replace it?
"We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of
the abyss," Roy concludes. "It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful
intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to
safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to
be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those
who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License
Jake Johnson
Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter:
@wordsofdissent
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No Moral Superpower: Arundhati Roy, Edward Snowden, and the Crimes of Empire
Published on
Friday, October 14, 2016
by
Common Dreams
No Moral Superpower: Arundhati Roy, Edward Snowden, and the Crimes of Empire
by
Jake Johnson
. 19 Comments
.
. The September 2014 edition of Wired, which featured Snowden
embracing the American flag. (Image: Wired magazine cover detail/with
overlay)
. When Arundhati Roy was preparing, in 2014, for a trip to Moscow to
meet Edward Snowden, she was troubled by two things.
. One of them was the fact that the meeting was arranged to take place
at the Ritz-Carlton, a beacon of luxury, celebrity, and unfettered greed - a
symbol, in short, of what Roy has spent much of her life opposing.
. "My last political outing had been some weeks spent walking with
Maoist guerrillas and sleeping underneath the stars in the Dandakaranya
forest," she wrote. "And this next one was going to be in the Ritz?"
. The other issue was the cover of the September 2014 edition of
Wired, which featured Snowden embracing the American flag. Mainstream media
outlets wondered if it was "his first big PR plunder," but Roy, the great
opponent of nationalism, looked deeper.
"All I'm saying is: what does that American flag mean to people outside of
America?" she asked the actor and screenwriter John Cusack, who has worked
with Snowden, and with the legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, at the
Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The flag, Roy argues, is not just vapid iconography; it exudes a narrative,
a history, one that, while distorted by the powerful, can never be forgotten
by the victims.
"The courageous acts of Ellsberg, Snowden, and many others have allowed us
to glimpse the inner workings of the system that perpetuates such
atrocities, and they have given us information that is necessary in the
fight for a better future."
"I am happy - awed - that there are people of such intelligence, such
compassion, that have defected from the state," she continued. "They are
heroic. Absolutely. They've risked their lives, their freedom...but then
there's that part of me that thinks...How could you ever have believed in
it? What do you feel betrayed by? Is it possible to have a moral state? A
moral superpower?"
It is often forgotten that Snowden did once believe in "it," if only for a
short time. As he recounts in an interview with the Guardian, "I wanted to
fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human
being to help free people from oppression."
But despite her misgivings - about the magazine cover, about the opulent
hotel, indeed about Snowden himself - Roy agreed to join John Cusack and
Daniel Ellsberg on the trip to Moscow. When they arrived, they confronted a
man who knew, or thought he knew, why they wanted to meet him.
"I know why you're here," Snowden said to Roy. "To radicalize me."
Parts of the conversation that followed are transcribed in the newly
released book Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, which also includes
penetrating discussions between Roy and Cusack on the usual topics -
imperialism, nuclear proliferation, the militarization of police, the
corporatization of NGOs.
Ellsberg and Snowden, for reasons that should be obvious, bonded quickly,
and had much to talk about. Soon, though, Roy found an opportunity to
interject a few queries of her own. She asked about the magazine and the
flag, and about why Snowden initially supported the invasion of Iraq "when
millions of people all over the world were marching against it."
His forthright reply put Roy at ease.
"I fell for the propaganda," he said.
He fell for the propaganda - for the nationalistic imagery, for the soaring
promises that always accompany deadly military projects - in the same way
then that many of us have fallen for it since. President Obama's promises of
greater transparency and a more peaceful future, we must remember, had
millions enraptured, inspired, hopeful. Meanwhile, as Snowden told Roy, we
were "sleepwalking into a total surveillance state."
"That's the dark future," Snowden said, a situation in which "we have both a
super-state that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited
capacity to know [about the people it is targeting] - and that's a very
dangerous combination."
While Snowden's focus is relatively narrow, Roy always returns to the big
picture - to Daniel Berrigan's point that "Every nation-state tends toward
the imperial." She also frequently alludes to what Hannah Arendt called
humanity's "active, aggressive" capacity to deny the relevant facts, to be
deceived by appealing lies, by colorful stories about the past and by
fantastical predictions of what the future will bring. Related is the
tendency to ignore the historical backdrop, to view events in a vacuum;
Donald Trump's rise has done much to bring this tendency to the surface.
Countless pundits, liberal and conservative, have characterized Trump as a
unique evil, a radical departure from the civilized political establishment
that existed prior to his dangerous candidacy - a departure, even, from the
conservative movement, which has been granted an air of legitimacy by these
same commentators.
But, as Roy reminds us, this "civilized political establishment" has never
existed. That Trump is an odious character does nothing to change this fact.
"Forget the genocide of American Indians, forget slavery, forget Hiroshima,
forget Cambodia, forget Vietnam," Roy said to Cusack, lamenting the
historical amnesia - both willful and not - of the powerful and the
punditry. "I can't understand those people who believe that the excesses are
just aberrations."
Excesses, in Roy's view, are embedded in the very concept of empire.
"Isn't the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their
ability to be ruthless, genocidal?" Roy writes. "Doesn't the height of a
country's 'success' usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?"
Responding to Trump's infamous promise to "make America great again," many,
including the campaign of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, have peddled the
line that America is already great - that while mistakes have been made,
America's character and the intentions of its leaders are essentially good.
"The United States is an exceptional nation," Hillary Clinton said on the
campaign trail in August. "I believe we are still Lincoln's last, best hope
of Earth. We're still Reagan's shining city on a hill. We're still Robert
Kennedy's great, unselfish, compassionate country."
Yet on the front page of Wednesday's New York Times, one is forced to
confront a rather different story: The story of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, who
was imprisoned for years without being convicted of a crime. For months, he
was tortured by the CIA.
"Music blasted nearly 24 hours a day while he was chained in solitary
confinement so dark that he could not see the shackles on his arms or the
walls of his cell," James Risen writes. "The Americans routinely hauled him
from his cell to a room where, he said, they hanged him from chains, once
for two days. They wrapped a collar around his neck and pulled it to slam
him against a wall, he said. And they shaved his head, laid him on a plastic
tarp and poured gallons of ice water on him, inducing a feeling of
drowning."
Move just beyond the front page, and you'll find the heartbreaking testimony
of Mohammed al-Asaadi, a Yemeni man living with his wife and four children
at the heart of a nation currently under assault by Saudi Arabia, the
heinous dictatorship that receives weaponry and strategic assistance from
the United States.
"How will our future be beautiful if they have destroyed Yemen?" Mohammed's
12-year-old daughter Haneen wrote on Facebook.
Internally, American officials have worried about their complicity in the
killing of civilians, according to a report by Reuters, but the Obama
administration has, nonetheless, continued to approve arms sales to the
Saudi Kingdom; in total, the Guardian reports, "The Obama administration has
offered to sell $115bn worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia over its eight years
in office, more than any previous US administration."
Suleiman Abdullah Salim refers to the prison in which he was tortured as
"The Darkness"; "it is," he told the Times, "always there." To look just at
America's recent past is to see that The Darkness has been imposed
repeatedly on the world's most vulnerable populations: The forceful
subversion of democracy to protect corporate interests, bombings in the name
of peace, the proliferation of death squads in the name of freedom, torture
in the name of security.
These heinous acts are hardly far off in the distant past. The use of Agent
Orange against the Vietnamese, for instance, may appear, at a cursory
glance, to be the work of a bygone, uncivilized order; progress has been
made since those days, it is said. Seems plausible, until you examine recent
reports confirming that American forces made extensive use of chemical
warfare in Iraq.
And contrary to the narrative favored by our political leaders, these are
not merely sharp and temporary diversions from the norm of justice; they are
the norm, a norm that is profoundly unjust. The courageous acts of Ellsberg,
Snowden, and many others have allowed us to glimpse the inner workings of
the system that perpetuates such atrocities, and they have given us
information that is necessary in the fight for a better future.
But nothing they revealed should be surprising - that a superpower such as
the United States would relentlessly bomb poor nations (as in the case of
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and seek to establish a surveillance state,
under which information is indiscriminately collected and stored, is hardly
remarkable.
Nor is it remarkable that those who dare to expose these facts - and to call
them what they are: crimes - almost inevitably become pariahs, and usually
worse. Snowden and Julian Assange are in exile; Jeffrey Sterling and Chelsea
Manning are in prison.
_____
After hours of conversation, Roy recalls Ellsberg "lying back on John's bed,
Christ-like, with his arms flung open, weeping for what the United States
has turned into.
"That the best thing that the best people in our country like Ed can do is
to go to prison . . . or be an exile in Russia?" he said. "This is what it's
come to in my country . . . it's horrible, you know. . . ."
His despair, Roy notes, is understandable: "He knows now, forty years after
he made the Pentagon Papers public, that even though particular individuals
have gone, the machine keeps on turning."
The war on whistleblowers continues, unabated. Civilians are maimed and
killed by drone strikes, authorized in secret by America's commander in
chief, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. The environment is plundered,
both at home and abroad, for profit, while the health of poor communities is
disregarded as a mere externality, capitalism's "collateral damage."
All the while, we are told that the very system that got us into this mess
of perpetual war and environmental degradation can pull us out - that the
very corporations whose activities have accelerated the warming of the
planet can lead the fight for environmental justice, peace, and equality.
"But," Roy argues, echoing George Orwell, "capitalism will fail too." The
existential question we face, then, is: what, and who, will replace it?
"We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of
the abyss," Roy concludes. "It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful
intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to
safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to
be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those
who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License
/author/jake-johnson
/author/jake-johnson/author/jake-johnson
Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter:
@wordsofdissent
