The odyssey of Edward Snowden is nothing short of fascinating.
The chap is desperate to relocate from his native USA to any place where they won’t clap him in prison for a rather long time.
His options, never endless to begin with, are narrowing faster than you can say ‘the Yanks are angry.’ Potential havens have been told in no uncertain terms that harbouring Snowden would mean getting on America’s bad side.
For the time being he’s cooped up in a hotel at Moscow’s Shermetievo Airport, waiting for 21 countries to act on his application for political asylum.
His first choice was Russia itself, which shows just how desperate the poor man is getting. Putin was magnanimous enough to offer refuge, but only on condition that Snowden stop blowing his whistle.
If you aren’t fluent in Russian, allow me to translate: this means Snowden isn’t supposed to reveal American secrets to anyone other than the Russians. As if they haven’t pumped him dry already – if they hadn’t he wouldn’t be allowed to breathe the fume-stinking Sheremetievo air.
Anyway, Snowden has refused to play along, and quite right too. If he clammed up at this stage, he’d lose whatever celebrity status he has gained. And surely becoming a celebrity was the whole purpose of the exercise – what else would anyone else wish to become these days?
Apparently, however, Venezuela, Nicaragua and possibly Bolivia have begun to nibble on Snowden’s line.
Now I don’t know if living in Danny Ortega’s Sandinista paradise is better or worse than spending a few years in an American minimum-security prison. Suffice it to say that the choice isn’t necessarily straightforward.
Of course a maximum-security jail would be a different matter. The advantage there is that a weedy white chap is guaranteed a vigorous sex life. The disadvantage is that this may not be the kind of sex life he’d normally choose.
It’s fairly clear that Snowden’s motives are far from noble, closer to those of Herostratus than of St Francis. But it does happen at times that bad impulses motivate good deeds, and in this sense my sympathy is with Snowden, sorry excuse for a human being that he may be.
For I regard all modern, post-Christendom governments as profoundly corrupt by definition. They have become nothing but giant bureaucracies, meaning nothing but self-serving.
All such bureaucracies, be that governments, large corporations, the NHS, you name it, have one thing in common. They serve those who run them and hardly anyone else.
Just consider this. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Marx’s dreaded capitalism was at its peak and robber barons at their most oppressive, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 1:28. Yet in 2005, with ‘democracy’ in full bloom and egalitarianism proudly reigning supreme, this ratio was 1:158.
Thus the ultimate ends of any corporation, acquisition of wealth, are now reached by management only or at least predominantly. The arrangement is at heart more USSR than USA, and the same goes for our governments.
They are no longer our servants, our friends or even our allies. They pursue ends that aren’t just different from ours but are actively hostile to them.
Even as corporate executives are single-mindedly committed to maximising their own returns at the expense of everyone else’s, modern states are just as committed to increasing their power at the expense of our liberties.
Smugly growing ever more certain of their own impunity, they’ll impose any abomination upon us, provided their own power to impose even greater abominations grows as a result.
Thus our Education Secretary Michael Gove, who’s supposed to be a good egg, comparatively, is threatening severe punishment to anyone using the word ‘gay’ as anything other than ringing praise.
He hasn’t specified the nature of the punishment, but contextually it sounds like a custodial sentence. Now what would he do to a brazen chap quipping in jest that ‘gay’ is an acronym for ‘Got Aids Yet’? Nothing short of the death penalty would be commensurate with such a crime – bring it back, I say.
In light of all that one has to welcome anything (well, practically anything) that puts the brakes on the state juggernaut. Less power for them means more power for us – it’s as simple as that.
You’ll notice that modern governments have become past masters at using any conflicts, such as wars or threats of terrorism, to increase their power exponentially – this regardless of whether or not they achieve their ostensible objective.
Their ability to put paid to the privacy of our personal communications may or may not reduce our safety vis-à-vis terrorism. What it is absolutely guaranteed to do is reduce our liberty vis-à-vis the state, and this constitutes a far deadlier threat to our society than the odd bomb going off on a bus.
In any case, why does the state need free access to the e-mails I exchange with my friends Peter, Tony, James, Stephen and Sally? The chances of any of us ever flying a jumbo jet into a building are considerably less than zero, although the idea of doing it to 10 Downing Street isn’t without a certain attraction.
I hope you won’t think me unfashionably biased if I suggest that by far likelier culprits are to be found in a group whose members are typically named Ahmed, Mohammed or Tariq. This observation, I hasten to add, is based exclusively on historical evidence, not any ethnic or racial prejudice.
So why not monitor mostly e-mail exchanges between Tazeem and Abdul rather than those between Peter and Alex? Surely this would be logistically easier, cheaper and more productive?
It would also be impossible – just as it’s impossible for our police to favour tall black strangers for stopping and searching, or for our airport security to focus on the usual suspects.
To do so would be discriminatory – and discrimination of any kind, except in favour of state power, is a crime possibly worse than murder and certainly worse than burglary. So if airport security guards want to pat down a young Rasta wearing a psychedelic T-shirt, they must also pat down a middle-aged gentleman wearing a tweed suit.
So first the state introduces asinine, counterproductive, politically motivated regulations and then it uses them to justify infringing upon the most fundamental liberty of the individual.
That’s why I say more power to Snowden’s elbow. Any action that slows down the despotic growth of our spivocracy ought to be welcomed – whatever the perpetrator’s motives, personality traits or moral fibre.