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> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. I was born during th
by veidr 13y ago
> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia.
I was born during the Cold War and I don't see it that way. In fact, I think you have it precisely backwards.
I remember being alive when the USSR and East Germany were going concerns, and those countries seemed so horrible -- the USA really was on what any sane person (by my definition) would describe as the right side of that struggle.
Living under constant surveillance, scared to speak out even in private, corruption and bad pretense in place of the rule of law? Those things were horrible, and living under such a regime sounded unimaginably awful.
Fast forward some decades and here comes Snowden. That shit really resonated with me and virtually all friends of my age (39).
America is becoming that kind of place. Most of us had a creepy feeling that was happening after the G. W. Bush debacle, but Snowden proved it.
It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children.
The Cold War resonates, but in exactly the opposite of what you describe. We've got all that shit now: hyper-surveillance, secret and therefore meaningless 'laws', kidnapping, torture, America has fucking gulags now. The difference between us and East Germany is now mainly a matter of scale. But as Snowden showed, we were scaling up pretty fucking fast.
Snowden blew the lid off of it, he exposed the massive scale of it, and then he was literally running for his fucking life like some kind of Jason Bourne figure. He had a massive, ruthless security apparatus chasing him, willing do who knows what, and if they caught him it meant he was going to be tortured in solitary confinement for the rest of his life like Bradley Manning.
Nobody in their right mind would begrudge him from going any fucking place he had to in order to escape that.
And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed.
- couchand 13y agoIt's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children. exactly.
- teamgb 13y ago> And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed. Imagine this was 1980 and the issue at hand was apartheid. Jelly-fish CEOs print an open letter in newspapers, asking governments to improve race relations because unhappy black folk don't want to buy their products. Not once is Nelson Mandela mentioned in the letter, so out of the public eye, his years in prison continue. Are we supposed to be impressed with this?
- chris_mahan 13y agoPreach it, Brother!
- samstave 13y agoI am 39 also, and I have also been following "Conspiracy Theory" topics since the late 80s. I have been aware of, and decrying, this sort of thing for two solid decades now. The GP's question is predicated on the assumption that people have not been paying attention to the creep toward tyranny that these programs have brought for years... but the fact is that not only have people been paying attention; there has been a decades long effort to shield mainstream awareness of this. Media has been more than just complicit in MISO (PSyOP) activities to marginalize anyone who has been discussing these topics. Christ, Hollywood has been out-right guilty of running PR for the MIC bastards for 30 years now. There is a very clear crew responsible for this as well. The CIA built by GHW Bush and his cabal of war/drug profiteers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDFHd5eEzw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDFHd5eEzw You owe it to yourself to watch that 39 minutes.
- ptaffs 13y agoMikko Hypponen said some interesting things in a recent TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed_the_world_s_trust_time_to_act.html http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed... and specifically emphasises the point that until the whistleblow, we didn't know about the surveilance. Anyone who suggested the government was capturing or listening to calls was branded a crackpot or tin-foil hat wearer. These are Mikko's points.