We\u2019re all aware of the reputed Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Upheaval seems to be in the air. According to Wikipedia, the interesting times curse was linked with a second, more worrisome curse: \u201cMay you come to the attention of those in authority.\u201d<\/p>\n
If a young computer nerd like Edward Snowden can access so much secret information concerning US citizens\u2019 lives, what\u2019s to stop some righteous NSA employee with the moral intelligence of Adolf Eichmann from accessing the same material and, in collusion with a para-military cabal of like-minded and armed patriots, deciding someone (me!) is a national security threat in need of neutralization?<\/p>\n
Paranoia? Maybe. But I see it as paying attention and having the historically-based imagination to understand we\u2019re no longer in Kansas \u2013 that we actually live in Oz and Toto has been declared a terrorist. The basis of Franz Kafka\u2019s absurd world, of course, is that what you know about yourself doesn\u2019t matter if powerful, secretive elements act hostilely against you based on what they think they know about you.<\/p>\n
At an anti-Iraq War demonstration in Philadelphia some years ago, a Civil Affairs cop took me aside and told me the FBI had just called him about me. He seemed to be warning me so I could clean up any suspicious behavior. Since I was exercising my first amendment rights, I felt I had nothing to hide. But, then, I began to wonder why exactly some FBI drone thought I might be a threat and how dangerous for me such a person might be.<\/p>\n
It all distills down to Power versus Truth and which one is the lodestar for one\u2019s actions. The Obama administration\u2019s current obsession with crushing whistleblowers is clearly about Power and assuring the bloated national security apparatus he oversees retains all its accumulated Power. This is done by controlling access to the Truth.<\/p>\n
In his 2011 book\u00a0The Future of Power<\/em>, Joseph Nye, Jr. says we live in an age of the \u201cdiffusion of power\u201d in which the nation state is no longer the only game in town. \u201cTransnational actors\u201d of all sorts \u2013 corporations, terrorist networks, affinity groups, media and entertainment forces \u2013 all vie for power and attention. The fact our lives are overwhelmed by computers, social media and the forces of economic globalization is central to this diffusion. I would argue that US militarism and the burgeoning police state has become a power center in its own right separate from whatever \u201cThe United States of America\u201d is \u2013 and that this militaristic power center is more and more driven by its own self-aggrandizing impulses.<\/p>\n The nonviolent antiwar\/peace movement is, then, arguably a countervailing power center within the land mass that is the United States of America. Unfortunately, this power center has yet to reach any kind of critical mass analogous to how frustrations with corruption are being manifested in Brazil and Egypt. The cruel truth, it\u2019s hard to get anywhere in today\u2019s world unless you\u2019re rich or well armed.<\/p>\n The military goes to great lengths to keep up with change. Consider four-star General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, appearing at a hacker convention in jeans and hip t-shirt to recruit young computer nerds to join the NSA or to work with the new US Cyber Command. Edward Snowden was one of these recruits. You can be sure his whistleblower actions have raised fears in the NSA and Cyber Command of other backfiring young nerds. If past is prologue in our national security state, this fear can only lead to more secrecy, more self-aggrandizing behavior and more fear of backfiring nerds \u2013 in a dark and ever widening gyre of paranoia.<\/p>\n The times are challenging for leaders of nation states everywhere. In America, it must be tough to stay on top of a 250-year-old democratic experiment while continuing to propagate and believe in the beloved myth of American Exceptionalism. It\u2019s like being in a roller-coaster car dazzled and delighted with the incredible view from the ride\u2019s apogee \u2013 all the while terrified of the frightening gravity-driven fall you know is coming. How does a leader keep a grip on it all?<\/p>\n The diffusion of power, Nye points out, involves several things including the natural dynamic of decline, the complementary rise of other, formerly less powerful global entities and the increasing democratization of information flow thanks to computers. You see examples of the diffusion of US power everywhere in the news these days. It\u2019s clearly evident in how Iraq was finally sorted out in favor of our Shiite enemies and in stories out of Afghanistan now.<\/p>\n Consider a news story from the great reporter Rod Nordland of\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0about the Afghan Taliban negotiating team in Qatar. His prose assumes a moderately incredulous tone as he reports on the Taliban\u2019s two-front strategy involving diplomatic talks in Qatar, on one hand, and continuing attacks on US troops and Afghan government forces inside Afghanistan, on the other. As it opens to talks, the US, of course, is not easing off on special ops night raids and drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The obvious hypocrisy, here, is never recognized. The same with the fact the Taliban are Afghanis and we reside halfway around the globe. The diffusion of US power is evident in the rise of Taliban credibility in Qatar as the Qatar government ignores expressed US wishes and delivers heat-seeker missiles to Islamic rebels in Syria.<\/p>\n The bluster of John McCain, our equivalent of an aged ayatollah, aside, US leaders no longer have the national will or the resources for large military operations. The big stick created by Teddy Roosevelt is not so imposing anymore \u2013 and the Taliban know it. The Vietnam and Iraq debacles helped accomplish that, making it clear George Bush the elder was wrong when he said, \u201cWe\u2019ve licked the Vietnam syndrome.\u201d Vietnam is a lesson of history American propaganda cannot quash.<\/p>\n The diffusion of US power is clear when both China and Russia refuse to turn over Edward Snowden. As he left for Africa, President Obama pulled back on the previous heated rhetoric and said, \u201cI\u2019m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.\u201d The symbolism of the statement was clear. US projection of military power is shifting from the classic brute invasion force to a finesse-oriented doctrine noted for cyber intelligence and secret killer programs focused on leadership. Lop off their head. Still, the United States is far from out of the global power game, as is evident in how we\u2019re intimidating other nations vis-a-vis Snowden\u2019s stateless plight.<\/p>\n In the cyber war realm, one of the stranger events recently was the Justice Department\u2019s announcement that it was criminally investigating retired four-star\u00a0Marine General James Cartwright<\/a>, the guy who virtually founded US Cyber Command. Like Snowden, he allegedly leaked secret information to the press. In his case, it was information about the Stuxnet cyber attack on Iran. So far, Cartwright has not fled to Hong Kong or taken up residence in an airport VIP lounge.<\/p>\n In the Stuxnet case, the US and Israel are clearly the aggressors against Iran. It should also be clear why the US government feels the need to crack down so hard on the release of such information to the American people. After all, it\u2019s no secret to the Iranians, who know who did it and how they did it. But if Americans know this it will be more difficult in the future for our leaders to cite Iranian defensive reactions as outrages justifying a military response. Better to keep the citizens in the dark.<\/p>\n More sobering than the obsessive hunt for whistleblowers is the political argument that the US media should be seen as a \u201ccombatant\u201d in future wars.<\/p>\n Ralph Peters is a retired lieutenant colonel, a columnist for\u00a0USA Today<\/em>\u00a0and a\u00a0Fox News<\/em>\u00a0Strategic Analyst. He writes that, \u201cThe media are now full-blown participants in the wars of the information age, and \u2018lethal journalism\u2019 will prove to be one of the greatest battlefield challenges facing generals and privates alike.\u201d By \u201clethal journalism\u201d he means the reporting of embarrassing facts about a military operation that affects the civilian-based decision to continue that operation.<\/p>\n The worst case of \u201clethal journalism\u201d he can think of is the first battle for Falluja. The press reported the battle as morally problematic and politicians pressed the military to stop its assault \u2013 at the point the military, to free the city of terrorists, was about to obliterate the city. (I was in Falluja just before this assault was begun.) The point militarists like Peters can\u2019t grasp is that an information-based moral brake on a military operation is not a bad thing if seen in a human context above and beyond that of the closed military culture his thinking flourishes in.<\/p>\n If this kind of criticism grows, most mainstream media will fall in line and, as they now do, self-censor themselves and focus on personality journalism. The Snowden case is a classic example. Instead of whetting the media\u2019s appetite to dig for more real information about massive spying on the American people, Snowden has mostly become a personality-centered human interest story. Will he get out of the Moscow airport? Who will take him in? Both MSNBC and Fox News literally reduced the story to the preposterous comic headline \u201cWhere\u2019s Waldo?<\/p>\n Thomas Friedman likes to assume \u201cthe view from 30,000 feet.\u201d From there, we seem to be living through an epochal shift no less profound than the one from feudalism to the modern world of nation states \u2013 headed for a technology-driven synthesis of the two. Facing such shifting sands, our military is frantically gearing up for cyberwar and developing sophisticated methods for secretly killing the leaders of problematic power centers.<\/p>\n In such a transnational future, one might ask what happens to nation-state relics like the First Amendment? The Second Amendment seems safe, since it\u2019s protected by gun-lovers friendly to militaristic and police institutions. On the other hand, those who favor the First Amendment tend to be in opposition to militarism and police state power centers. What happens to them when the current top-down hunt for leakers becomes more institutionalized as a hostility toward the freedom of information? It\u2019s not hard to imagine a future when the Constitutional protections of a \u201cfree\u201d press only include those who go along with the government\u2019s self-imposed and ever-expanding rules of secrecy. Our current Supreme Court seems not far from that now.<\/p>\n Popular Culture as the Canary in the Mine<\/strong><\/p>\n If so many decisions and actions of our government are secret, where is one to look for an understanding of reality? For me, popular culture is like a canary in the mine offering up prescient warnings of danger out of the human imagination.<\/p>\n Noir<\/em>\u00a0or crime fiction is an interesting genre in this respect. We see a hard-boiled, violent sensibility everywhere, in novels, movies, TV shows and computer games. More and more, the killer seems to be our favorite popular archetype and extra-legal, under-the-radar operations the preferred mode for getting things done. Annie Leibovitz captures the murkiness of the\u00a0noir<\/em>\u00a0sensibility in a\u00a0series of constructed photos<\/a>, below, featuring A-list Hollywood actors.<\/p>\n The new\u00a0noir<\/em>\u00a0novel\u00a0Rake<\/em>\u00a0by Scott Phillips is about a male actor who plays a popular doctor on a TV soap opera. He\u2019s a charming sociopath who beds beautiful women with ease, a Special Forces vet who was drummed out of the service for behaving badly. He\u2019s in Paris setting up a movie deal and murders a man to advance the production\u2019s fund-raising. The homicide detective on the case knows our protagonist did it, but he does not pursue the case. The victim was an arms dealer, a real bad sort who deserved to die. Plus, the protagonist is giving the detective\u2019s daughter a part in the movie; she\u2019s also a hot babe he has designs on.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a fictional\u00a0noir<\/em>\u00a0comedy right? As I finished the short book, I learned that football star Aaron Hernandez allegedly shot a guy to death in an industrial park not unlike the fictional murder location in\u00a0Rake<\/em>. The police now say Hernandez knocked off two other guys days before he appeared on\u00a0Good Morning America<\/em>\u00a0as charming as any mainstream sociopath. The 23-year-old had just landed a $40 million contract with the New England Patriots.<\/p>\n Killing is in the air. It\u2019s become the ultimate corner-cutting strategy; sexy men and women posturing with fetishistic weapons is an entertainment clich\u00c3\u00a9. The Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger isn\u2019t concerned about being known as a sadistic, bloody murderer; what really pisses Whitey off is being seen as an FBI rat. On the militarism front, secret Seal Team killers are high fashion. Nowhere in the culture does killing seem to be treated as morally wrong. Such a posture is not sexy; it\u2019s boring. As in all good melodrama, it\u2019s all good guys and bad guys.<\/p>\n