by Bonnie Greer
03 July 2013
from
TheTelegraph Website
Diplomatic rows and farcical airport
spats over the fate of the NSA
whistleblower
are obscuring his real political significance,
says Bonnie
Greer
Edward Snowden
is believed to be still in Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow
Photo: AP
We arrived yesterday at an absurd moment in the saga of the American
whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The presidential plane carrying Bolivia’s Evo
Morales home from a conference in Moscow was searched during a stop-over in
Vienna on suspicion of carrying Snowden to 0asylum in Latin America. The
Bolivians declared that France, Italy, Spain and Portugal had refused to
allow the plane to enter their airspace, forcing it to land in Austria.
Bolivia, no friend of the US, accused European countries of doing the US’s
dirty work.
“We have no doubt that it was an order from the White House,” Sacha Llorenti, the country’s ambassador to the UN, said. “By no means
should a diplomatic plane with the president be diverted from its route and
forced to land in another country.”
France, Spain and Portugal subsequently denied that they had closed their
airspace.
Austria insisted that President Morales had agreed to a voluntary
inspection of his plane; Austria’s deputy chancellor, Michael Spindelegger,
said:
“Our colleagues from the airport had a look and can give assurances
that no one is on board who is not a Bolivian citizen.”
Eventually, amid
talk from the Bolivians of an act of aggression and a violation of
international law, the plane was allowed to take off.
About 21 countries have become involved in Snowden’s request for asylum.
Five have rejected granting Snowden asylum, seven have said they would
consider a request if made on their soil, and eight said they had either not
made a decision or not received a request.
Obama warned that any
offer of asylum to Snowden would carry a heavy cost.
Meanwhile, Snowden is believed still to be in Sheremetyevo airport in
Moscow.
Russia has no extradition treaty with the US; President Putin has
stated that there is a possibility that Snowden could stay, but that he must
not leak information “against our American partners”.
He ended this
statement by saying that,
“this may sound surprising coming from my lips”.
If you look at the photograph of presidents Obama and Putin at the G8 last
month, seated together at a press conference almost with their backs to one
another, it would be easy to assume that Snowden would provide a perfect
opportunity for Putin to wreak mischief and mayhem.
This affair has
provided, instead, another chapter in the Game of Nations. And there sits
Snowden, in a Moscow transit lounge, the lead character in what must have
been, to him, an act that was straightforward: he had a personal mission to
complete.
To many, particularly those on the centre-Right, the Snowden revelations are
interesting in the particular, but no big thing in the general. Of course we
are spied on, listened to, observed, the argument runs: what’s new?
London
has more security cameras per mile than any city on earth. You are likely to
be captured up to 500 times a day if you live in the West End as I do. Our
smart phones have become big data collectors, and as long as we’ve done
nothing wrong, we have nothing to hide.
Snowden is, to those who feel that way, another Lefty on the run; not worth
thinking about other than as an amusement, a bit of a divertissement in the
daily news bulletins.
Then there are those who argue that, while the US government should
prosecute Snowden, the media’s focus on his personal life, his whereabouts,
what he is about to do next, draws attention away from more important
issues: serious questions about US government surveillance and how the
Patriot Act and the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are interpreted.
But they’re wrong. Something new is revealing itself in the tale of Edward
Snowden and it is coming quickly into the general consciousness. Snowden is
part of the global town square, created by social media, which is
effectively running politics in Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, and will do so in the
West, too.
Snowden, who spent his 30th birthday on the run, is one of a new breed I
call the “Libertarian Millennial”.
Apolitical, perhaps even post-political,
they do what they do because they have come to their own conclusions in
their own time and in their own way.
“I don’t want to live in a society that
does these [surveillance] sort of things… I do not want to live in a world
where everything I do and say is recorded,” Snowden declares.
There you have
it: “I don’t”, “I do not” and “everything I do and say” are the key phrases
here.
Snowden is not like the main whistleblower of my youth, Daniel Ellsberg, who
in 1971 leaked what became known as
the Pentagon Papers, a defence
department history of American involvement in Vietnam.
Ellsberg was steeped
in the security mechanisms of the United States; he knew what the
consequences of his leak were.
He was a professional who saw what he did as
part of what we, the young, were doing in the streets. He pondered long and
hard over his actions and, in doing what he did, saw himself as part of
something bigger, something collective.
In a sense, he took his permission from those of us who were against the
Vietnam War. Ellsberg came back to us as the vehicles who would take his
action forward. The press were largely on his side. They knew him, not
necessarily in the particular, but where he came from. They understood his
intentions. He was not alone.
At the trial of Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of
passing
classified material to the WikiLeaks website, attorneys are arguing over
what the prosecution calls Manning’s “arrogance” and the defence call his
“good intentions”. But Manning’s actions fit neither of those definitions,
as we usually understand them.
He and Snowden and other Millennials are
empowered by the tools that they are also at war with; it is these tools
that are their engines, the shapers of their consciousness. They are neither
of the Left nor the Right.
It is no surprise that Snowden contributed to the 2012 presidential campaign
of Ron Paul, who supports curtailing the powers of government. In his
maverick stance, and that of his son, Senator Rand Paul, the young find a
model for taking on the system as a personal quest.
Snowden becomes, in his
fight, what Millennials look up to:
a charismatic individual, who by sheer
power of self-belief can create support, even a movement.
The darker version of these charismatic individuals are the lone wolves who
commit their acts of terror in plain view.
In Boston, the hijacking of a car and the revelation of his crime to its
passenger was not simply a mistake or youthful stupidity on the part of the
alleged bomber who survived. Tweeting his whereabouts, his thoughts, his
feelings was apparently necessary to what he set out to do. Tweeting
completed the act.
In Woolwich, the alleged killers of
Drummer Rigby
remained at the scene seemingly in order to be filmed for YouTube.
In the world of the Libertarian Millennial, the act is not complete without
social media, without the bringing together of the crowd as receptor of
their personal feelings, their manifesto.
And since it is embedded
technology - which we wear on our bodies or will even have implanted inside
our bodies - that is our future, more and more LMs will emerge, both as lone
wolves - individuals out to do maximum physical harm and wreak mayhem in the
name of a religion or a political ideology; or as charismatic individuals,
people doing what they think is right, and through that effort, rallying
people and movements around them.
Snowden has been quoted as having written:
“The consent of the governed is
not consent if it is not informed.” And that “the truth is coming, and it
cannot be stopped.”
His breed of Libertarian Millennial is coming, too.
It
is they who cannot be stopped.
