The fear that the government was inventing justifications to persecute citizens turned into a fear that they were justifying persecution by manipulating data that we did, in fact, produce. We create the trail, but they determine where it originates and leads. This is the anxiety that propels Snowden’s revelations.
A Culture of Paranoia
But the deeper fear, the real sadness, is that ordinary people are insignificant to the government, and that those in power are indifferent to our fate. You do not need a database to watch Americans suffer.
The Obama administration espouses moving rhetoric about some of our biggest problems—unemployment, violence, and inequality—but has had little success in solving them. Its frenetic pursuit of Snowden is remote from ordinary life. Citizens only feel the repercussions in paranoia, a grasp at self-importance despite all evidence to the contrary.
On July 31, journalist Michele Catalano became convinced that a Google search for “pressure cooker” and “backpacks” had caused a “joint terrorism task force” to pay a visit to her home. In reality, it was not a terrorism task force but the local Long Island police. They did not come because a cadre of distant observers had access to her Internet search history but because her husband’s former employer had asked them to investigate activity her husband had conducted on his work computer. As Gawker’s Adrien Chen writes, “The actually scary part of Catalano’s story—the creepy correlation of Google history in some distant control room—started, and ended, in her imagination.”
Fixing the NSA scandal will involve far more than reforming the NSA. It means changing America’s paranoid political culture, which means reviving trust in our leaders, which means finding leaders deserving of trust. It means that people in positions of power—in government and in corporations like Facebook and Google—need to come clean with what they know and why they want to know it. Our privacy settings, literally and figuratively, need to stop shifting. Our privacy expectations need to stop being dictated by those who read our mail.
Until then, paranoia will rule. “Power is impenetrable,” wrote Elias Canetti, in his 1960 study of paranoia in politics. “The man who has it sees through other men, but does not allow them to see through him.”
Edward Snowden proclaimed he could see through everybody. And then he said he was on our side. That is the novelty of this whole affair. He saw through us and we watched him run.
—Originally published August 5, 2013
Iraq and the Reinvention of Reality
The worst thing about the Iraq war was not that people got away with lying. It was that they did not—and it did not matter.
The tenth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq was a week of media culpa. Every day a new journalist or pundit came forward to atone for supporting a war predicated on disinformation. “I was excitable and over-reacted,” wrote blogger Andrew Sullivan, explaining why he once argued that no “serious person” could doubt Saddam Hussein’s intent to use WMDs with his co-conspirator al-Qaeda. “I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense,” wrote journalist David Ignatius, noting that, in retrospect, it did not.
The media’s failure to question the fallacies of the Bush administration has long been derided—as The Nation’s Greg Mitchell noted, they have been apologizing for years. But while it is right to criticize the media, it is wrong to hold them completely accountable. Plenty of people got Iraq wrong, but plenty of people—experts and ordinary citizens—got it right. The problem was that it made no difference.
“Without evidence, confidence cannot arise,” Hans Blix declared to the United Nations in the run-up to the war. He was wrong: confidence, like evidence, could be created. The warnings of Blix, Anthony Zinni, Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal columnists called out as fifth columnists, and the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world changed nothing. When revelation hit, it was with a sense of helplessness that defined the decade to come. Confidence, like evidence, could be destroyed.
The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived. “I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me,” wrote Bush speechwriter David Frum.
That was the message of the Iraq war: there is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth.
The Flavor of Our Time
In 2002, Ron Suskind, a reporter for The New York Times, met with an unnamed aide to George W. Bush who accused Suskind of being part of the “reality-based community.” The aide meant it as an insult: this was not the way the world worked anymore.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” said the aide, later alleged to be Bush adviser Karl Rove. “And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
* * *
Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived.
* * *
In one sense, this quote seems of a piece with its era—with the entry of “truthiness” into the dictionary; with the rise of entire industries, like reality TV, built on choreographed sincerity. But while we may associate the “creation of reality” with a wildly hubristic administration, it remains the flavor of our time, a manipulation that moves from crisis to crisis.
Ten years after the Iraq war, we continue to live in an era of hysterical panic about invented catastrophes and false reassurances about real catastrophes. We laugh bitterly at the “Mission Accomplished” sign raised nearly a decade before the war ended, but the Bush administration did accomplish something. They accomplished the mission of persuading everyday Americans that the unthinkable is normal.
We see remnants of this created reality in the financial crisis—the ongoing “great recession” that, like preemptive war, has transformed what Americans will accept. It is normal for criminal financiers to receive record bonuses in an age marked by austerity, it is normal for professionals to work years unpaid in the hope of someday landing a job, it is normal for one year of college to cost more than the average median income. This is normal, they say—but if Iraq should have taught us anything, it is how easily and brazenly “normal” can be redefined.
Iraq showed us that the consequences for gross negligence were less than anyone had imagined. This gaping disconnect between people and power, and the public’s resignation to adjusting to injustices rather than challenging them, has shaped the postwar era. If Iraq was launched on the illusion of invincibility, the financial crisis is abetted by the acceptance of powerlessness.
We Lost Accountability
On March 18, 2013, Tomas Young, a soldier who was paralyzed fighting in the Iraq war, published a letter from his deathbed:
“I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done.
You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.”
Tomas Young is thirty-three. (Editor’s note: Young died on November 10, 2014.) When he was twenty-one, he decided to protect the country he loved by enlisting in the armed forces. Like his fellow soldiers, he came of age in an era marked by a s
ocioeconomic gulf between the people who agitate for wars and the people who fight them. Like his fellow soldiers, he returned home to a country that denies veterans adequate health services or financial support. Because it is a recession, because times are tough. Because this is normal.
After September 11, 2001, President Bush drew criticism for calling on Americans to go shopping rather than relinquish comforts in a time of war. Young’s generation was not told to sacrifice—instead, they were the sacrifice. They paid the price with their lost opportunities, with their lost voice, with their defaulted investment in their nation.
We lost more in Iraq than a war. We lost accountability and faith in our institutions, and most of all, we lost the outrage that accompanies that loss, because we came to expect it and accept it as normal. This quiet acquiescence is, in the end, as damaging as any lie we were told.
—Originally published March 24, 2013
Where Following the Law Is Radical
In May 2005, the government of Uzbekistan fired on a massive protest in the city of Andijon, killing over seven hundred of its own citizens. Within weeks, a joke began to circulate on Uzbek Internet forums. It went something like this:
Q: Can an Uzbek participate in a demonstration in Uzbekistan?
A: Yes, but only once.
While meant to mock the brutality of the government of Islam Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan since its Soviet days, the joke is also a pointed jab at Uzbekistan’s legal system. In Uzbekistan, citizens are arrested, tortured, and even killed for carrying out acts permitted by law. Uzbekistan advertises itself as a democracy, and has a constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression and the protection of human rights. When citizens act on their constitutional rights by criticizing officials or organizing nonviolent protests, the government is quick to arrest them.
Uzbekistan is one of many states in Central Asia where the rule of law has eroded. This is not to say that these states are unstable: the cruel irony of illegality in Central Asia is that it is a stabilizing force. In Uzbekistan corruption at the state level is so pervasive that contesting state crimes is extremely difficult; corruption at the local level is so rampant that it has led to apathy among citizens, who are often unaware of their rights. But the existence of those rights raises an interesting question: What if people retained their faith in law after they lost their faith in government? What if citizens took the law at its word?
In 2010, a group of Uzbek lawyers created a website attempting to do just that. “Adolat” (“justice,” in Uzbek) was established with the goal of raising legal literacy among Uzbek citizens and, in doing so, improving the rule of law in Uzbekistan. “Adolat” is not asking that laws be changed, only that they be followed by state officials as well as citizens.
Justice as Radical Subversion?
The founders of “Adolat” are adamant that they are not an opposition group and that they have no interest in upending the existing constitutional system—in fact, they have featured President Karimov’s statements on the importance of the law on their website. Despite its apolitical agenda, “Adolat” has been banned. In Uzbekistan, showing people how to follow the law constitutes an act of radical subversion.
It is no mystery why Uzbeks are forbidden to read “Adolat.” The website asks Uzbek citizens to buy into a delusion: that they live in a just society where laws are something other than words on a piece of paper. By pretending that laws have meaning, they implore the government to give them meaning—a step which the Karimov regime seems unwilling to take. The legal experts of “Adolat” encourage discussion of civic issues and answer questions submitted by readers. (Sample query: “Where can I complain about abuse by the police?”) A lawyer who works for “Adolat” told me that the goal is not to “give fish” but to teach Uzbeks to “fish for themselves.” He believes a regular reader of the site should by now be well versed in writing an official complaint.
The Internet is often derided as a medium of inherent inaccuracy, the phrase “But I read it on the Internet!” a punch line. But for “Adolat,” the Internet serves as a way to turn Uzbekistan’s lip-service law into something sincere—an inversion of Uzbekistan’s cynical political culture, which extends to the Uzbek language itself.
Uzbek legal language implies that justice is an arbitrary construct. In layman’s terms, a defense attorney is an oqlovchi, literally a “whitener,” and a prosecutor is a qoralovchi, or “darkener.” Uzbek lawyers “whiten” or “darken” the aybdor—a term which means “defendant” but literally translates as “the guilty one.” Justice is reduced to theatrics and spin, fodder for jokes and sarcasm. The grim practices of Uzbekistan’s legal system underline this fact. One Uzbek former state official, when I asked him to define “guilt,” told me to look up “suspicious”—because “in reality, suspicious is the same as guilty.”
A Growing Trend in Central Asia
In contrast, “Adolat” takes care to explicate Uzbekistan’s legal code as well as introduce Uzbeks to unfamiliar legal concepts. A recent article was titled “Presumption of innocence [in Uzbek, literally “guiltlessness”]: a history and explanation”—a concept foreign to Uzbekistan in both theory and practice.
“Presumption of innocence” is one of many terms pertaining to law and politics entered into Uzbek language via the Internet. Several years ago, the Birdamlik Movement, an Uzbek opposition group, tried to bring the phrase “nonviolent protest” into Uzbek online discourse. The term was met with confusion not because Uzbek protest is violent, but because it is almost nonexistent. One Uzbek, after reading the definition, asked whether a protest would still be considered nonviolent after the government had killed the protesters.
The efforts of “Adolat” are part of a growing trend in Central Asia of citizens filling in where their states have failed. In Tajikistan, lawyers have created a similar online service for citizens to seek advice on legal affairs. In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and to a lesser extent, Uzbekistan, volunteer organizations have emerged to carry out civic acts the governments fail to accomplish: rebuilding infrastructure, providing child care, and issuing loans. While many of these informal groups have been criticized by state officials, their numbers continue to grow. One analyst credits this trend to “a spirit of civic volunteerism that has existed in Central Asia for centuries.”
And that is the tragedy of this situation. A new class of young, enterprising Central Asians has emerged, committed to the rule of law and ready to serve their countrymen—if their governments would only let them.
—Originally published June 14, 2012
Water Is a Human Right, But Who Is Considered a Human Being?
Water is a basic human right.
Few dispute this. From the Talmud to the Bible to the Quran, from the European Federation of Public Service Unions to the United Nations, societies throughout history have recognized water as a public good. To treat water as a commodity instead of a right is an act of violence. In May 2014, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon argued that “preventing people’s access to safe water is a denial of a fundamental human right.” He added: “Deliberate targeting of civilians and depriving them of essential supplies is a clear breach of international humanitarian and human rights law.”
Water is a right for all human beings. The question is: Who counts as a human being?
Not the poorest residents of Detroit, a U.S. city which has cut off water to citizens at a rate of three thousand people per week since the spring, totaling about 125,000 people at present. Local activists estimate that up to 300,000 people—nearly all poor and African American—will ultimately lose access to water. The reason for the cut, officials claim, is that residents cannot pay their water bills, which have spiked 120 percent in the last decade.
Detroit is one of the poorest cities in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Detroit is also surrounded by the largest supply of fresh water in the world. The U.S. does not lack for money, and Detroit does not lack for accessible water. What Detroit l
acks are people viewed as worthy of the compassion and resources given to their richer, whiter peers. They lack the rights and respect most U.S. citizens take for granted.
At a rally in June, lifelong Detroiter Renla Session spoke out for her community: “These are my fellow human beings. If they threatened to cut off water to an animal shelter, you would see thousands of people out here. It’s senseless … They just treat people like their lives mean nothing here in Detroit, and I’m tired of it.”
When rights are considered privileges, only the privileged have rights.
“They treat people like animals in Detroit,” an autoworker complained in July, but the U.S. treats its poorest citizens worse. When the government shut down in late 2013, the food program for impoverished women and children was suspended—but the animals in the National Zoo stayed fed. More attention was paid to the shutdown of the Panda Cam, a livestream of a bear cub, than to the suffering of America’s poorest citizens.
Water is a human right, but who is a human being? Corporations, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June, as the parched citizens of Detroit started filling up at water fountains.
“In its last day in session, the high court not only affirmed corporate personhood but expanded the human rights of corporations, who by some measures enjoy more protections than mortals—or ‘natural persons,’” wrote Dana Milbank at the Washington Post.
The mortals of Detroit enjoy no such protection. Perhaps that is why the city’s corporate venues—like its high-end golf club, hockey arena, football stadium, and over half of the city’s commercial and industrial users—still have their water running despite owing over $30 million, while its most impoverished residents have their water, and their rights, taken away.
The View from Flyover Country Page 14
