COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Russia could handover
Edward Snowden to US to ‘curry favour’ with Donald Trump, report suggests”
I've never regarded Snowden as a terribly sympathetic figure
or as a public hero.
To my mind, he is in a different class than Chelsea Manning
and Julian Assange - both genuinely heroic figures.
Snowden did one good, brave thing, but, with a great deal of
what he has said since, he has become rather tiresome.
Early on, despite an effort to not speak too much, he gave
me the impression of a very homesick, privileged American upper-middle class
young man.
And that impression has only been re-confirmed, time and
time again. In today's world, that's not a sympathetic image.
America's privileged class has caused immense suffering in
our world, and it remains focused only on its own comforts and attitudes,
including the comforts of its rights and freedoms. Rights and freedoms with
Guantanamo just 90 miles offshore?
Even the version of freedom and rights people like Snowden
appear to embrace seem greatly irrelevant to much of the world and even for
many ordinary Americans.
He has never really shown any opposition to the greatest
mass killer of our time, Barack Obama. I lose all sympathy with anyone who
accepts hundreds of thousands of deaths in half a dozen countries.
He is a cool technocrat who did what he did - reveal the
NSA's hi-tech and pervasive spying - out of a kind of cool, standoffish,
libertarian attitude, one I don't find overly sympathetic.
Chelsea Manning saw a video of ruthless American helicopter
pilots joyously machine-gunning an unarmed man desperately trying to avoid them.
That was what motivated her heroic effort. It would have motivated me, too,
absolutely.
Nothing like that motivated Snowden. Nor has there ever been
a hint of opposition to America's relentless and brutal imperial march across
the globe, complete with mass killing, torture, and destroying countless homes.
No, we have just a cool technical concern for American
Rights, much as you might expect from another cold historical figure, Thomas
Jefferson, another privileged upper-class man, one who was the utterly
unrepentant lifetime holder of over two hundred slaves who also went on at
length over “rights and freedoms,” at least as they applied to himself and his
class.
Jefferson's ideas of rights and freedoms, despite his facile
phrases written almost as public relations slogans for history, always were
effectively limited to his own class. When Haitian slaves rose in bloody revolt
against Napoleon’s France, President Jefferson gladly supported and helped
Napoleon over the people seeking freedom from servitude and abuse.
