Where at least we know we’re free
by digby
This review of Laura Poitras’ Citizen Four by David Bromwich in the New York Review of Books is well worth reading. In fact, it’s essential if you care to understand Poitras’ work and the meaning of it. He discusses this film in detail but also puts it in the context of her earlier work which is something I haven’t seen anyone else do.
The whole thing is very thought provoking but I think this is a very keen observation:
The president handed the work to an inside legal team and eventually a commission or two and did not sack the heads of intelligence who took us far on a questionable path and lied about it. Meanwhile, the attorney general indicted Snowden on a charge of treason. In their self-protective understanding of the duties of high office in the national security state—in their refusal to face up to and reform the ungoverned exercise of power that Snowden revealed—Obama and Holder acted in a way that showed them to be profoundly unfree. So, too, did the generals, Keith Alexander and James Clapper, when they spoke under oath to Congress with so little regard for the importance of truth in a system that depends on informed consent.
The strangest revelation of Citizenfour may therefore be this: Snowden, in his hotel room with his journalistic confidants Greenwald and Poitras and MacAskill, affords a picture of a free man. It shows in his posture, and in a sense of humor touched by self-irony. He is not haunted by any fretful concern with what comes next. He is sure he has done something he chose, and sure that someone had to do it. He acted in obedience to a principle; and it was right that the actor should disappear in the action. Citizenfour, by simply using the real-life actor as a way to consider the nature of freedom, honors the premise that moved Snowden to take his unique and drastic step. “The final value of action,” wrote Emerson, “is, that it is a resource.” It is up to other Americans now, the uncertain end of Citizenfour says, to rouse ourselves and find the value of Snowden’s action as a resource.
This tracks with what I see as the fundamental problem of the National Security State and America’s military empire: it has a life of its own and operates on its own logic. It goes all the way back to the immediate post-WWII period and has built itself up over time to the point at which it lives beyond our ostensibly democratic system. Politicians, bureaucrats and Generals are doing its bidding as much as the other way around. And it’s no more obviously illustrated than in this cynical piece by Michael Hirsch in the Politico. Basically he jadedly declares that nobody cares so whatever. But it isn’t that people don’t care. They care profoundly. But they quite logically understand that they are powerless — unfree — to do anything about it. Like this comment from back in 2008 which I referenced in my Salon piece about rethinking our approach to reforming the surveillance state.
“The FISA bill is obviously imperfect, but I do not believe that a serious Presidential candidate can afford to vote ‘no’ on legislation that is intended to help prevent terrorist attacks. If Obama were to oppose the bill as a whole, he would be handing McCain — who didn’t even bother to show up and vote today — a huge opening to scare voters and paint Obama as weak on terrorism.”
Waddaya gonna do? People hear the fearmongering, they see the cynicism among the elites, they watch their world grow ever less private and they feel impotent. You can’t really blame them. So they just … accept it. Then they can be proud to be Americans where at least they know they’re free.
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