{"id":58093,"date":"2015-05-18T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=58093"},"modified":"2015-05-12T19:59:04","modified_gmt":"2015-05-12T18:59:04","slug":"a-nation-of-snitches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/05\/a-nation-of-snitches\/","title":{"rendered":"A Nation of Snitches"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Freedom demands the destruction of the security and surveillance organs and the disempowering of the millions of informants who work for the state.” Are we living in a time bomb where informants keep a populace in a state of fear?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A Transportation Security Administration sign at Los Angeles\u2019 main rail terminal, Union Station, urges that suspicious activities be reported to authorities. It declares, \u201cIf You See Something Say Something.\u201d (AP \/ Damian Dovarganes)<\/p><\/div>\n

A totalitarian state is only as strong as its informants. And the United States has a lot of them. They read our emails. They listen to, download and store our phone calls. They photograph us on street corners, on subway platforms, in stores, on highways and in public and private buildings. They track us through our electronic devices. They infiltrate our organizations. They entice and facilitate \u201cacts of terrorism\u201d by Muslims, radical environmentalists, activists and Black Bloc<\/a> anarchists, framing these hapless dissidents and sending them off to prison for years. They have amassed detailed profiles of our habits, our tastes, our peculiar proclivities, our medical and financial records, our sexual orientations, our employment histories, our shopping habits and our criminal records. They store this information in government computers. It sits there, waiting like a time bomb, for the moment when the state decides to criminalize us.<\/p>\n

Totalitarian states record even the most banal of our activities so that when it comes time to lock us up they can invest these activities with subversive or criminal intent. And citizens who know, because of the courage of Edward Snowden, that they are being watched but naively believe they \u201chave done nothing wrong\u201d do not grasp this dark and terrifying logic.<\/p>\n

Tyranny is always welded together by subterranean networks of informants. These informants keep a populace in a state of fear. They perpetuate constant anxiety and enforce isolation through distrust. The state uses wholesale surveillance and spying to break down trust and deny us the privacy to think and speak freely.<\/p>\n

A state security and surveillance apparatus, at the same time, conditions all citizens to become informants. In airports and train, subway and bus stations the recruitment campaign is relentless. We are fed lurid government videos and other messages warning us to be vigilant and report anything suspicious. The videos, on endless loops broadcast through mounted television screens, have the prerequisite ominous music, the shady-looking criminal types, the alert citizen calling the authorities and in some cases the apprehended evildoer being led away in handcuffs. The message to be hypervigilant and help the state ferret out dangerous internal enemies is at the same time disseminated throughout government agencies, the mass media, the press and the entertainment industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you see something say something,\u201d goes the chorus.<\/p>\n

In any Amtrak station, waiting passengers are told to tell authorities\u2014some of whom often can be found walking among us with dogs\u2014about anyone who \u201clooks like they are in an unauthorized area,\u201d who is \u201cloitering, staring or watching employees and customers,\u201d who is \u201cexpressing an unusual level of interest in operations, equipment, and personnel,\u201d who is \u201cdressed inappropriately for the weather conditions, such as a bulky coat in summer,\u201d who \u201cis acting extremely nervous or anxious,\u201d who is \u201crestricting an individual\u2019s freedom of movement\u201d or who is \u201cbeing coached on what to say to law enforcement or immigration officials.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GovernmentSurveillance051115<\/a><\/p>\n

What is especially disturbing about this constant call to become a citizen informant is that it directs our eyes away from what we should see\u2014the death of our democracy, the growing presence and omnipotence of the police state, and the evisceration, in the name of our security, of our most basic civil liberties.<\/p>\n

Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes us, often unconsciously, conform in our outward and inward behavior. It conditions us to relate to those around us with suspicion. It destroys the possibility of organizing, community and dissent. We have built what Robert Gellately<\/a> calls a \u201cculture of denunciation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snitches in prisons, the quintessential totalitarian system, are the glue that allows prison authorities to maintain control and keep prisoners divided and weak. Snitches also populate the courts, where the police make secret deals to drop or mitigate charges against them in exchange for their selling out individuals targeted by the state. Our prisons are filled with people serving long sentences based on false statements that informants provided in exchange for leniency.<\/p>\n

There are no rules in this dirty game. Police, like prison officials, can offer snitches deals that lack judicial oversight or control. (Deals sometimes involve something as trivial as allowing a prisoner access to food like cheeseburgers.) Snitches allow the state to skirt what is left of our legal protections. Snitches can obtain information for the authorities and do not have to give their targets a Miranda warning<\/a>. And because of the desperation of most who are recruited to snitch, informants will do almost anything asked of them by authorities.<\/p>\n

Just as infected as the prisons and the courts are poor neighborhoods, which abound with snitches, many of them low-level drug dealers allowed to sell on the streets in exchange for information. And from there our culture of snitches spirals upward into the headquarters of the National Security Agency, Homeland Security and the FBI.<\/p>\n

Systems of police and military authority are ruthless when their own, such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, become informants on behalf of the common good. The power structure imposes walls of silence and harsh forms of retribution within its ranks in an effort to make sure no one speaks. Power understands that once it is divided, once those inside its walls become snitches, it becomes as weak and vulnerable as those it subjugates.<\/p>\n

We will not be able to reclaim our democracy and free ourselves from tyranny until the informants and the vast networks that sustain them are banished. As long as we are watched 24 hours a day we cannot use the word \u201cliberty.\u201d This is the relationship of a master and a slave. Any prisoner understands this.<\/p>\n

Alexander Solzhenitsyn<\/a> in his masterpiece \u201cThe Gulag Archipelago,\u201d which chronicles his time in Josef Stalin\u2019s gulags and is a brilliant reflection of the nature of oppression and tyranny, describes a moment when an influx of western Ukrainians who had been soldiers during World War II arrived at his camp, at Ekibastuz. The Ukrainians, he wrote, \u201cwere horrified by the apathy and slavery they saw, and reached for their knives.\u201d They began to murder the informants.<\/p>\n

Solzhenitsyn continued:<\/p>\n

\u201cKill the stoolie!\u201d That was it, the vital link! A knife in the heart of the stoolie! Make knives and cut the stoolie\u2019s throats\u2014that was it! <\/em><\/p>\n

Now as I write this chapter, rows of humane books frown down at me from the walls, the tarnished gilt on their well-worn spines glinting reproachfully like stars through the cloud. Nothing in the world should be sought through violence! By taking up the sword, the knife, the rifle, we quickly put ourselves on the level of tormentors and persecutors. And there will be no end to it. \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

There will be no end. \u2026 Here, at my desk, in a warm place, I agree completely.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground\u2014from the hole you\u2019re in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.<\/em><\/p>\n

There will be no end of it! … But will there be a beginning? Will there be a ray of hope in our lives or not?<\/em><\/p>\n

The oppressed at least concluded that evil cannot be cast out by good.<\/em><\/p>\n

The eradication of some snitches and intimidation of others transformed the camp. It was, Solzhenitsyn admits, an imperfect justice since there was no \u201cdocumentary confirmation that a man was an informer.\u201d But, he noted, even this \u201cimproperly constituted, illegal, and invisible court was much more acute in its judgments, much less often mistaken, than any of the tribunals, panels of three, courts-martial, or Special Boards with which we are familiar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf the five thousand men about a dozen were killed, but with every stroke of the knife more and more of the clinging, twining tentacles fell away,\u201d he wrote. \u201cA remarkable fresh breeze was blowing! On the surface we were prisoners living in a camp just as before, but in reality we had become free\u2014free because for the very first time in our lives we had started saying openly and aloud all that we thought! No one who has not experienced this transition can imagine what it is like!<\/p>\n

And the informers \u2026 stopped informing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The camp bosses, he wrote \u201cwere suddenly blind and deaf. To all appearances, the tubby major, his equally tubby second in command, Captain Prokofiev, and all the wardens walked freely about the camp, where nothing threatened them; moved among us, watched us\u2014and yet saw nothing! Because a man in uniform sees and hears nothing without stoolies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The system of internal control in the camp broke down. Prisoners no longer would serve as foremen on work details. Prisoners organized their own self-governing council. Guards began to move about the camp in fear and no longer treated prisoners like cattle. Pilfering and theft among prisoners stopped. \u201cThe old camp mentality\u2014you die first, I\u2019ll wait a bit; there is no justice so forget it; that\u2019s the way it was, and that\u2019s the way it will be\u2014also began to disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Solzhenitsyn concluded this chapter, \u201cBehind the Wire the Ground Is Burning,\u201d in Volume 3 of his book, with this reflection.<\/p>\n

Purged of human filth, delivered from spies and eavesdroppers we looked about and saw, wide-eyed that \u2026 we were thousands! That we were \u2026 politicals! That we could resist!<\/em><\/p>\n

We had chosen well; the chain would snap if we tugged at this link\u2014the stoolies, the talebearers and traitors! Our own kind had made our lives impossible. As on some ancient sacrificial altar, their blood had been shed that we might be freed from the curse that hung over us.<\/em><\/p>\n

The revolution was gathering strength. The wind that seemed to have subsided had sprung up again in a hurricane to fill our eager lungs.<\/em><\/p>\n

Later in the book Solzhenitsyn would write, \u201cOur little island had experienced an earthquake\u2014and ceased to belong to the Archipelago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freedom demands the destruction of the security and surveillance organs and the disempowering of the millions of informants who work for the state. This is not a call to murder our own stoolies\u2014although some of the 2.3 million prisoners in cages in America\u2019s own gulags would perhaps rightly accuse me of writing this from a position of privilege and comfort and not understanding the brutal dynamics of oppression \u2013 but instead to accept that unless these informants on the streets, in the prisons and manning our massive, government data-collection centers are disarmed we will never achieve liberty. I do not have quick and simple suggestions for how this is to be accomplished. But I know it must.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a9 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truthdig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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