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<\/a>unreliable servant. Inside those thousands such as yourself lurk lineages of thought \u2014 deep commitments to the Internet as Nirvana, and wide reaching linkages to friends whose own lives have been catapulted by the financial downturn. The Morse code of Anonymous and Occupy drilled an ethical migraine into your brilliant heads. You are not alone. There are many like you who are equally unmoored from the work that you have been doing for the world disorder.<\/p>\nOthers before you had alerted the world to NSA espionage, people such as NSA employee Russell Tice (as early as May 2005) and AT&T employee Mark Klein. Several others blew the whistle on racial profiling and on unethical treatment of prisoners in the post-911 period, people such as Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld as well as former FBI agents Bassem Youssef and Sibel Edmonds. Then, of course, there is Bradley Manning, who is facing a court martial in Maryland, where you once lived. Manning\u2019s release through Wikileaks lifted the lid from under sleazy diplomatic manoeuvres and provided compelling evidence of war crimes (notably through video of the 2007 Apache Gunship murder of Iraqi civilians). People like Bradley Manning and you have no other avenue to remain true to your conscience than to come out to the public. The Whistleblower Protection Act excludes people who work in the intelligence community. In 2006, Thomas Gimble, Inspector General for the Department of Defense, told the US Congress that the name Intelligence Community Whistleblower Act of 1998 \u201cis a misnomer.\u201d The Act actually protects classified information that comes to Congress from the Executive branch. Smoke and mirrors. \u201cIf living unfreely but comfortably is something you\u2019re willing to accept,\u201d you told Greenwald, then so be it. People like Manning and Tice, and of course you, have no other option \u2014 what you did is what you must do.<\/p>\n
In television stations across the United States, liberal commentators shrug off the calming presence of their caf\u00c3\u00a9 lattes to hyperventilate about your treasonous behaviour. You should have turned yourself in, they say, as Daniel Ellsberg did (although Ellsberg himself says that the times have changed, and he too would have fled, sitting with you in a Moscow airport, watching the time slip by with too hot coffee in too badly insulated cups). You have taken refuge with totalitarian regimes, they say, as if your revelations have not shown the totalitarian nature of the government that tore up your passport. You have secrets in your computers that you have sold to the enemy, they say, when you had already told them, \u201cIf I had just wanted to harm the US? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that\u2019s not my intention.\u201d Those who spy on the world accuse you of being a spy, a logical train of thought that does not interfere with the blather that slips so easily from a liberalism entombed in the aspic of imperial arrogance.<\/p>\n
Events in Egypt \u2014 the enormous energy of the population that has taken to the streets on several occasions to defend their vision for the future combined with the tragedy that their hopes might be narrowed to a two horse race between the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood \u2014 help focus my mind. So does the news that the North Atlantic states put the life of the Bolivian president Evo Morales in peril because they thought that you might be on that aircraft. Bombs went off in the Mahabodhi temple in India, where the Buddha gained Enlightenment. On Twitter, a friend writes, \u201cGautam Buddha would just smile and go back to his meditation. Mere mortals fighting for power in this life of maya.\u201d But Buddha was a canny observer of the world of maya. \u201cThe King, although he may be the ruler of all land this side of the sea, up to the ocean\u2019s shore, would, still insatiate, covet that which is beyond the sea.\u201d That is the King of Profit and Power whose will is omnipotence and, as you know better than us, omniscience.<\/p>\n
Beneath these colossal tragedies, this \u201cocean of misery,\u201d as the Buddha put it, lies an alternative. The Buddha could not establish it. \u201cI have gained coolness,\u201d he said, \u201cand have attained nirvana<\/i>.\u201d It was his task to \u201cgo out\u201d of the social world and to \u201carrive at\u201d his preferred community of the monks. The exit and re-entry is no longer as it was then \u2014 now it is to \u201cgo out\u201d of the clutches of the Washington Consensus and to \u201carrive at\u201d a new dispensation that suits the people. Latin America is closer to its objective, which is why it has the courage to welcome you, as it did Julian Assange. I hope you will find a way to get there \u2014 a UN laissez-passer to ease the passage to Caracas, to Managua or to Quito. Perhaps someday we can meet in Plaza Bol\u00c3\u00advar at Caf\u00c3\u00a9 Venezuela, drink a caf\u00c3\u00a9 bombon and watch Egypt\u2019s revolution consolidate into the kind of catalyst for Latin America that Venezuela has become.<\/p>\n
Better burn this.<\/p>\n
Vijay Prashad<\/strong>\u00a0will be in conversation with his editor Andy Hsiao (Verso Books) at the\u00a0Brecht Forum<\/a>\u00a0on July 24 in New York City on his new book,\u00a0<\/em><\/em><\/em>The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n