{"id":66400,"date":"2015-11-16T12:04:53","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T12:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=66400"},"modified":"2015-11-23T09:53:52","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T09:53:52","slug":"meeting-ed-snowden-ii-we-brought-you-the-promise-of-the-future-but-our-tongue-stammered-and-barked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/meeting-ed-snowden-ii-we-brought-you-the-promise-of-the-future-but-our-tongue-stammered-and-barked\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Ed Snowden \u2013 \u201cWe Brought You the Promise of the Future, but Our Tongue Stammered and Barked\u2026\u201d (II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

My phone rang at three in the morning. It was John Cusack asking me if I would go with him to Moscow to meet Edward Snowden…<\/em><\/p>\n

16 Nov 2015 – <\/em>I\u2019d met John several times; I\u2019d walked the streets of Chicago with him, a hulking fellow hunched into his black hoo\u00addie, trying not to be recognised. I\u2019d seen and loved several of the iconic films he has written and acted in and I knew that he\u2019d come out early on Snowden\u2019s side with The Snowden Principle<\/em>, an essay he wrote only days after the story broke and the US government was calling for Snowden\u2019s head. We had had conversations that usually lasted several hours, but I embraced Cusack as a true comrade only after I opened his refrigerator and found nothing but an old brass bus horn and a pair of small antlers in his freezer.<\/p>\n

\"Rolling<\/a>

Rolling Thunder A US army chopper flies over the bodies of Viet Cong guerrillas near Tan Phu village<\/p><\/div>\n

I told him that I would love to meet Edward Snowden in Moscow.<\/p>\n

The other person who would be travelling with us was Daniel Ellsberg\u2014Snowden of the \u201960s\u2014the whistleblower who made public the Pentagon papers during the Vietnam war. I had met Dan briefly, more than 10 years ago, when he gave me his book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Dan comes down pretty ruthlessly on himself in his book. Only by reading it\u2014and you should\u2014can you even begin to understand the disquieting combination of guilt and pride he has lived with for about 50 of his 84 years. This makes Dan a complicated, conflicted man\u2014half-hero, half-haunted spectre\u2014a man who has tried to do penance for his past deeds by speaking, writing, protesting and getting arrested in acts of civil disobedience for decades.<\/p>\n

In the first few chapters of Secrets<\/em>, he tells of how, in 1965, when he was a young employee in the Pentagon, orders came straight from Robert McNamara\u2019s office (\u201cIt was like an order from God\u201d) to gather \u201catrocity details\u201d about Viet Cong attacks on civilians and military bases anywhere in Vietnam. McNamara, Secretary of Defence at the time, needed the information to justify \u201cretaliatory action\u201d\u2014which essentially meant he needed a justification for bombing South Vietnam. The \u201catrocity\u201d gatherer that \u201cGod\u201d chose was Daniel Ellsberg:<\/p>\n

I had no doubts or hesitation as I went down to the Joint War Room to do my best. That\u2019s the memory I have to deal with…. Briefly I told the colonel I needed details of atrocities….<\/em><\/p>\n

Above all I wanted the gory details of the injuries to the Americans at Pleiku and especially at Qui Nhon. I told the colonel \u201cI need blood\u201d…. Most of the reports didn\u2019t go into gory details, but some of them did. The district chief had been disemboweled in front of the village, and his family, his wife and four children had been killed too. \u201cGreat! That\u2019s what I want to know! That\u2019s what we need! More of that! Can you find other stories like that?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Within weeks, the campaign called Rolling Thunder was announced. American jets began to bomb South Vietnam. Something like 175,000 marines were deployed in that small country on the other side of the world, 8,000 miles away from Washington, DC. The war would go on for eight more years. (According to the testimonies in the recently published book about the Vietnam War Kill Anything that Moves<\/em> by Nick Turse, what the US army did in Vietnam as it moved from village to village with orders to \u201ckill anything that moves\u201d\u2014which included women, children and livestock\u2014was just as vicious, though on a much larger scale, as anything ISIS is doing now. It had the added benefit of being backed up by the most powerful air force in the world.)<\/p>\n

By the end of the Vietnam war, three million Vietnamese people and 58,000 US troops had been killed and enough bombs had been dropped to cover the whole of Vietnam in several inches of steel. Here\u2019s Dan again: \u201cI have never been able to explain to myself\u2014so I can\u2019t explain to anyone else\u2014why I stayed in the Pentagon job after the bombing started. Simple careerism isn\u2019t an adequate explanation; I wasn\u2019t wedded to that role or to more research from the inside; I\u2019d learned as much as I needed to. That nights\u2019 work was the worst thing I\u2019ve ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I first read Secrets<\/em>, I was unsettled by my admiration and sympathy for Dan on the one hand and my anger, not at him of course, but at what he so candidly admitted to having been part of on the other. Those two feelings ran on clear, parallel tracks, refusing to converge. I knew that when my raw nerves met his, we would be friends, which is how it turned out.<\/p>\n

Perhaps my initial unease, my inability to react simply and generously to what was clearly an act of courage and conscience on Dan\u2019s part had to do with my having grown up in Kerala, where, in 1957, one of the first-ever democratically elected Communist governments in the world came to power. So, like Vietnam, we too had jungles, rivers, rice fields, and Communists. I grew up in a sea of red flags, workers\u2019 processions and chants of Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live the Revolution)! <\/strong>Had a strong wind blown the Vietnam war a couple of thousand miles westward, I would have been a \u201cgook\u201d\u2014a kill-able, bomb-able, Napalm-able type\u2014another body to add local colour in Apocalypse Now<\/em>. (Hollywood won the Vietnam war, even if America didn\u2019t. And Vietnam is a Free Market Economy now. So who am I to be taking things to heart all these years later?)<\/p>\n

But back then, in Kerala, we didn\u2019t need the Pentagon papers to make us furious about the Vietnam war. I remember as a very young child speaking at my first school debate, dressed as a Viet Cong woman, in my mother\u2019s printed sarong. I spoke with tutored indignation about the \u201cRunning Dogs of Imperialism\u201d. I played with children called Lenin and Stalin. (There weren\u2019t any little Leons or baby Trotskys around\u2014maybe they\u2019d have been exiled or shot.) Instead of the Pentagon papers, we could have done with some whistle-blowing about the reality of Stalin\u2019s purges or China\u2019s Great Leap Forward and the millions who perished in them. But all that was dismissed by the Communist parties as Western propaganda or explained away as a necessary part of Revolution.<\/p>\n

But despite my reservations and criticism of the various Communist parties in India (my novel The God of Small Things<\/em> was denounced by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala as anti-Communist), I believe that the decimation of the Left (by which I do not mean the defeat of the Soviet Union or the fall of the Berlin Wall) has led us to the embarrassingly foolish place we find ourselves in right now. Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries. Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution, have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market\u2014it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse<\/em> of the Left, has been marginalised and is sought to be eradicated. The debate\u2014even though the protagonists on both sides betrayed everything they claimed to believe in\u2014used to be about social justice, equality, liberty, and redistribution of wealth. All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony\u2014Lifestyle Wars.<\/p>\n

What I wanted to ask Ellsberg and Snowden was, can these be kind<\/em> wars? Considerate<\/em> wars? Good <\/em>wars? Wars that respect human rights?<\/p>\n

The comical understudy for what used to be a conversation about justice is what the New York Times<\/em> recently called \u2018Bill and Melinda Gates\u2019s Pillow Talk\u2019 about \u201cwhat they have learned from giving away $34 billion\u201d, which according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation by the Times<\/em> columnist Nicholas Kristof, has saved the lives of 33 million children from diseases like polio:<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the (Gates) foundation there\u2019s always a lot of pillow talk,\u201d Melinda said. \u201cWe do push hard on each other.\u201d …Bill thought Melinda focused too much on field visits while Melinda thought Bill spent too much times with officials…. They also teach each other, Melinda says. In the case of gender, they\u2019ve followed her lead in investing in contraception, but also they developed new metrics to satisfy Bill. So among their lessons learned from 15 years of philanthropy, one applies to any couple…. Listen to your spouse! (NYT, July 18, 2015).<\/em><\/p>\n

They plan\u2014the article goes on to say without irony\u2014to save 61 million more children\u2019s lives in the next 15 years. (That, going by the same back-of-the-envelope calculation, would cost another $61 billion, at least.) All that money in one boardroom-bed\u2014how do they sleep at night, Bill and Melinda? If you are nice to them and draw up a good project proposal, they may give you a grant so that you can also save the world in your own small way.<\/p>\n

But seriously\u2014what is one couple doing with that much money, which is just a small percentage of the indecent profits they make from the corporation they run? And even that small percentage runs into billions. It\u2019s enough to set the world\u2019s agenda, enough to buy government policy, determine university curricula, fund NGOs and activists. It gives them the power to mould the whole world to their will. Forget the politics, is that even polite? Even if it\u2019s \u201cgood\u201d will? Who\u2019s to decide what\u2019s good and what\u2019s not?<\/p>\n

So that, roughly, is where we are right now, politically speaking.<\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

$34 BN Charity What is one couple doing with that much money, a small percentage of their indecent profits?<\/p><\/div>\n

Coming back to the 3 am phone call\u2014by dawn I was worrying about my air ticket and getting a Russian visa. I learned that I needed a hard copy of a confirmed hotel booking in Moscow, sealed and approved by the Ministry of Something or the Other in Russia. How the hell was I to do that? I had only three days. John\u2019s wizard assistant organised it and couriered it to me. My heart missed a beat when I saw it. The Ritz-Carlton. My last political outing had been some weeks spent walking with Maoist guerrillas and sleeping underneath the stars in the Dandakaranya forest. And this next one was going to be in the Ritz<\/em>? It wasn\u2019t just the money, it was…I don\u2019t know…. I had never imagined the Ritz-Carlton as a base camp\u2014or a venue\u2014for any kind of real politics. (In any case, the Ritz has turned out to be the venue of choice for several Snowden interviews, including John Oliver\u2019s famous conversation with him about \u201cdick pics\u201d.)<\/p>\n

I drove past the long, snaking queues outside the heavily guarded US consulate to get to the Russian embassy. It was empty. There was nobody at the counters marked \u201cpassport\u201d, \u201cvisa forms\u201d, or \u201ccollection\u201d. There was no bell, no way of attracting anybody\u2019s attention. Through a half-open door, I caught an occasional, fleeting glimpse of people moving around in the backroom. No queue whatsoever in the embassy of a country with a history of every imaginable type of queue. Varlam Shalamov describes them so vividly in Kolyma Tales<\/em>, his stories about the labour camp in Kolyma\u2014queues for food, for shoes, for a meagre scrap of clothing\u2014a fight to the death over a piece of stale bread. I remembered a poem about queues by Anna Akhmatova\u2014who unlike many of her peers, had survived the Gulag. Well, sort of:<\/p>\n

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent
\nSeventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad.
\nOnce someone \u2018recognised\u2019 me. Then a woman with
\nbluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had
\nnever heard me called by name before, woke up from
\nthe stupor to which everybody had succumbed and
\nwhispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there):
\n\u201cCan you describe this?\u201d
\nAnd I answered: \u201cYes I can.\u201d
\nThen something that looked like a smile passed
\nover what had once been her face.<\/em><\/p>\n

Akhmatova, her first husband Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam and three other poets were part of Acmeism, a poets\u2019 guild. In 1921, Gumilyov was shot by a firing squad for counter-revolutionary activity. Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 for writing an ode to Stalin that showed signs of satire and was not convincing enough in its praise. He died years later, starved and deranged, in a transit camp in Siberia. His poetry (which survived on scraps of paper hidden in pillow cases and cooking vessels, or committed to memory by people who loved him) was retrieved by his widow and by Anna Akhmatova.<\/p>\n

This is the history of surveillance in the country that has offered asylum to Ed Snowden\u2014wanted by the US government for exposing a surveillance apparatus that makes the operatives of the KGB and the Stassi look like preschool children. If the Snowden story were fiction, a good editor would dismiss its mirrored narrative symmetry as a cheap gimmick.<\/p>\n

A man finally appeared at one of the counters at the Russian emb\u00adassy and accepted my passport and visa form (as well as the sealed, stamped, hard copy of the confirmation of my hotel booking). He asked me to come back the next morning.<\/p>\n

When I got home, I went straight to my bookshelf, looking for a passage I had marked long ago in Arthur Koestler\u2019s Darkness at Noon<\/em>. Comrade N.S. Rubashov, once a high-level officer in the Soviet government, has been arrested for treason. He reminisces in his prison cell:<\/p>\n

All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people, but they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth and in our mouth it sounded like a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked….<\/em><\/p>\n

Read now, it sounds like pillow talk between two old enemies who have fought a long, hard war and can no longer tell each other apart.<\/p>\n

I got my visa the next morning. I was going to Russia.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Arundhati Roy, born Nov 24 1961, is an Indian novelist and political activist best known for her first novel, <\/em>The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She was also awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004. Roy has concentrated on penning down political issues being a critic of neo-imperialism and linked to anti-globalization movements. Roy\u2019s subversive nature has made her accustomed to criticism. \u201cEach time I step out, I hear the snicker-snack of knives being sharpened but that\u2019s good. It keeps me sharp\u201d, she said when interviewed by an Indian magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

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