Link: The Casualties of Cacophony – New Essay
The Casualties of Cacophony
As those of you who read my post on Can’t You Read yesterday already know, I recently purchased the new Edward Snowden biography and I’ve been reading it during smoke breaks for the past three days.
After hearing from numerous reviewers that the book contained “no new information” my primary motive here was personal enjoyment but even just the act of buying the book itself was telling me a story I wasn’t listening to and wouldn’t understand until this weekend. I’ll explain:
On the day the Permanent Record was released in the country I’m staying in right now, I went out to my local bookstore to purchase it with tampered expectations and yet still, a certain amount of hopeful expectation.
Now before I continue further here I should mention that Americans who do not travel abroad are largely unaware of the tremendous amount of influence U.S. political media and ideological thought have over the (largely) white majority of the West in general and most Five Eyes countries in particular. Furthermore this influence is typically divided along the exact same “culture war” political lines that exist in the United States, although the degree to which they incite passions often varies from region to region – the average Canadian “conservative” cannot afford to be as rabid about opposing gun control laws as the average American “conservative” because culturally the idealized tradition of gun ownership does not exist there – but the idea, even without its systemic reinforcement, does.
I mention this because my local bookstore can be said to have a distinctly Americanized “liberal” set of sensibilities and ideas; although they would likely object to that statement as all Canadians vociferously object when you compare them to Americans. This is reflected in the “balanced” book selections on the shelf (which overwhelmingly consists of mainstream liberal, or conservative writers/thinkers and or Canadian authors) and in the sensibilities of the staff, management, and ownership I’ve encountered while shopping there; all of which were (as far as I can tell) fundamentally identical to those of your average white American Democrat.
I don’t say any of these things to disparage them; the shop is a small, single-proprietor business and it’s hardly surprising to anyone who understands class dynamics that a petite-bourgeoisie bookstore in a rural “conservative area” isn’t going to be a hotbed of left wing thought or ideology.
Yet despite all of this, I found myself somewhat shocked when the clerk behind the counter informed me that the stored hadn’t ordered any copies of Ed Snowden’s new biography – so much so that I did a double take. I asked again, if only to confirm that it wasn’t a question of U.S. Government censorship or the fact that I was in a country that wasn’t home so the release dates had changed – no, they simply hadn’t ordered it.
For my part I assumed that was a careless mistake, after all even mainstream liberals had celebrated Snowden as a heroic whistleblower when the results of his revelations were appearing in corporate “liberal” news publications like the Washington Post and The Guardian. At that point (and while still not connecting the dots) I asked the store to order me a copy and helpfully suggested that they might want to order several copies for their shelf as this was the first time to my knowledge that Snowden would be presenting his own thoughts about one of the more important scandals and abuses of government power in our lifetime.
Then I innocently went on my way and back to my busy life for a week until the book finally arrived. As it turned out (and at my insistence) they’d ordered two copies, one of which was mine.
This decision would continue to baffle me for several long hours after I left the bookstore and indeed, none of it would start to make sense until I actually started reading Snowden’s book – and with that act, found that the flood of memory about the NSA mass surveillance leaks and the political circus surrounding it, came rushing back to my mind like a raging river of madness and deceit.
There is, especially for the scholar, something altogether terrifying about reading something that you already knew and realizing, as you’re in the very act of reading it, that you had for all intents and purposes forgotten something important that you were never supposed to forget. After all you can’t rightly analyze society without analyzing the history that helped shape that society, and you certainly can’t analyze history that you don’t even remember.
This creeping and altogether horrifying feeling of morally inexcusable “forgetting” became my constant companion as I reviewed Snowden’s work, in his own words, while reading Permanent Record. I’m not just talking about the NSA spying and online data collection programs either; those I readily remembered, although I can’t necessarily say the same for the public at large around me. As Snowden recounted James Clapper lying under oath to Congress, the (now all but completely deposed) wave of Democratic Socialist governments that opposed American internet surveillance and even the U.S. government’s efforts to trap the author in Moscow so he wouldn’t fly to Ecuador, I slowly realized what I’d forgotten.
I’d forgotten the sheer breadth and open brazenness of the Pig Empire’s war on not just privacy, but the truth. A war conducted not just against the whistleblowers and those rare few souls in the media who would seek to help them expose abuses, violations and atrocities conducted by our governments and the ruling classes of our societies, but also on each of us, on our own feelings, our own memories and dare I say it, our own psychological well-being. A war we are all losing as I write this to you today.
To understand what I mean by that however we’re going to have to go back to the bookstore and answer the question I should have been asking the day I tried to buy a copy of Permanent Record I the first place. That question is of course “what changed?” If only six years ago, Edward Snowden was a hero in liberal media (The Guardian U.S., the Washington Post) for exposing mass surveillance and abuses by the NSA and various arms of U.S. intelligence, why was I getting a weird side-eye for even asking about the book in an ostensibly “liberal” bookstore – especially in Canada?
While I won’t claim to be psychic, I think it’s fair to say that what have largely changed are mainstream liberal attitudes towards leaks, whistleblowers and the larger American national security state. Somewhere in the culture war-fueled anger about losing the 2016 U.S election, among stories of malignant foreign hackers, Hillary’s leaked emails, the Russianization of Wikileaks, the demonization of Julian Assange, the lionization of Barack Obama and a new fascist president’s ongoing war with “true liberal patriots” in his own FBI and CIA, the original signal had been lost. More accurately, the past on some deep and purely emotional level in the larger liberal zeitgeist had been replaced with a new communal understanding that my alienation from mainstream liberal thought had prevented me from recognizing until now. The word ‘replaced’ rather than ‘forgotten’ is important here because due to social pressures and the normal human tendency to forget our own embarrassing mistakes, the memory of Snowden’s time as a brave hero in the liberal reckoning is at best extremely hazy and more often than not, completely gone from the minds of most observers.
To the clerk behind the counter I wasn’t asking for a biography about a heroic whistleblower, but instead a bound volume of lies written by a traitor whose very existence represented a threat to their now-entrenched image of the iconic and canonized last liberal President (Barack Obama) and whose “decision” to hide from “justice” in the now thoroughly hated Russia proved where his true allegiances had always lain. Besides, even if in some unlikely event Snowden was innocent and Obama had gone after the wrong guy – leakers and traitors represent a grave threat to our beloved intelligence agents who are, as you all know from hours of repetition on Rachel Maddow, the only thing standing between everything you love about America and the sinister iron grip of Vladimir Putin.
From the mainstream liberal perspective I might as well have been asking them to fetch me a copy of the latest work by Lee Harvey Oswald at that point. Nothing about Snowden or his earth-shattering leaks had changed, but because the larger feelings about Snowden had been altered, both the leaked information and the author himself were now perceived in a new and wholly less favorable light.
In the often quoted but rarely understood science-fiction novel about authoritarian states entitled 1984, author George Orwell’s central character Winston chillingly observes that “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”
What Orwell meant by this is that the powers of the day control our understanding of, perceptions about and feelings towards the past and in doing so can have a tremendous amount of influence on our actions in the future. Of course in his novel the Ingsoc government had absolute control to write and re-write the historical record of society but the author was also engaging a metaphor that cast light on the nature of this truism in even a “liberal democratic” nation like Britain in the late 1940’s. It is not enough to simply acknowledge that “history is written by the victors” but one must also be aware that the writing and analysis of our society’s historical record (which is often conducted in real time by the news media) is largely conducted by upper class writers who are ultimately employed in the service of some aspect of establishment power or another – whether we’re talking about mainstream corporate media companies, the American government itself or the elite educational institutions that churn out historians, journalists and the general class of television punditry.
At this point you might find yourself protesting that despite their upper class backgrounds, the media, publishing houses and academic institutions don’t work for the government and in some broader sense that’s true, but in terms of the facts on the ground in the war against truth, it’s also hopelessly naïve. Setting aside the obvious reality that corporate media and elite educational institutes are themselves part of what any sane person would identify as “establishment power” the fact is that the American government does actively seek to influence the records of our past, both in real time and in its own files.
We know from revelations like “Operation Mockingbird” and the periodic unmasking of intelligence agency employees in the public eye that at least some of “the news” is directly written by folks with very clear ties to U.S. intelligence. From incidents like the Valerie Plame Affair, we know that the government sometimes purposely leaks top secret information to the media for its own nefarious purposes. We know that official government sources and interpretations of events are almost invariably broadcast unaltered and without serious challenge in mainstream media outlets – how many stories in the past month have you read that contained information from “a senior administration source” or “an undisclosed official at the State Department?” I’ll bet it’s happened significantly more times than you’ll remember.
This reinforcement of the establishment line even filters all the way down to your local news, where police department summaries of “officer involved shootings” are routinely broadcast as if they were the established facts of the case with few, if any questions asked about whether or not the department might be somehow motivated to lie about why some cop shot someone in broad daylight, again.
Not sinister enough for you? Okay, how about the Bush administration’s decision to retroactively classify thousands upon thousands of government documents and legal opinions that had already been released to the public, thereby effectively erasing America’s own arguments against the illegal activities the administration engaged in – like mass surveillance, extraordinary rendition (read: kidnapping) and the now rarely-mentioned and almost forgotten CIA torture program? Sort of puts the now infamous Karl Rove quote “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” into a new and terrifying perspective, doesn’t it?
Please keep in mind that these are only the direct ways the state, virtually any Pig Empire state, influences the media and thereby our collective real-time record of history; there are quite literally a myriad a indirect ways the state influences the media you consume as well. A good example might be simple access to the information a journalist needs to write stories; if a news outlet is consistently critical of the government and skeptical of the claims made by its officials, how long do you think they’ll keep getting off the record statements, leaks and interviews from people aligned with that government? How about the right-leaning billionaires who own modern media companies, do you think they align with the interests and power of the government? Well they probably should in America at least – thanks to the magic of corporate lobbying and Citizens United they own most of the politicians who work in that government after all. Once you realize that Jeff Bezos owns both the Washington Post and Amazon, the latter of which currently has the cloud computing contract for the CIA, the idea that you can separate establishment power in the state, from establishment power in the private sector (even in private media) starts to look more than just a little bit obtuse.
Of course as Michael Parenti discussed at length in his still spectacular 1986 work “Inventing Reality: the Politics of the Mass Media” not even a corporate news outlet can lie away some stories without irreparably damaging their credibility. Presented with the opportunity for a scoop, irrefutable evidence and public outcry bolstered by outrage among even the average “liberal” voter the corporate media was forced to turn against their own political allies and go along for the ride on the “Edward Snowden is the greatest hero of our time” train – although not without fastidiously printing government lies and denials as if they were fact in the very same articles that proved Snowden’s accusations.
Over time however and under the relentless crushing weight of op-ed after op-ed, an edit here, an omission there, one tiny smear and suggestive bit of framing at a time and the story starts to change. You can’t actually alter history but by subtly washing Snowden’s story in the ongoing smears against Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers while casually omitting the subject or context of the author’s still mindbogglingly important revelations, you can start to change feelings about the past and the rest is basically a self-reinforcing cycle with a highly predictable outcome.
Memories of complex technical information about online surveillance fade, and the constantly reinforced feeling that leakers and whistleblowers are harming our brave and decidedly “anti-Trump” intelligence agencies in their battle against the dastardly Russian menace and Vladimir Putin, takes their place – until one day, just over six years after Edward Snowden risked his life and freedom to blow the whistle on an ever growing American police state, some clerk at a small town liberal bookstore is eyeing you up as a potential terrorist when you ask about purchasing the Snowden biography in broad daylight.
Understood in that light, perhaps the most alarming thing about Orwell’s quote as spoken by Winston in 1984 is the fact that the author didn’t know about and had no way of conceiving of the internet. Here after all is an environment where editing the record of the past is as easy as pulling down one article and publishing a new one under the same URL as before – and if you don’t think that is happening online, even in stories published by major news corporations you simply haven’t been paying very much attention.
Nor could Orwell have imagined that between social media, the comments section and twenty-four hour cable news programming, we would create a media environment that intrinsically favors outrageous or controversial lies over “boring” and nuanced truths. He could not have predicted that eventually the average American media consumer would become so bombarded with marketing, propaganda and contradictory information that all too often the facts of current events would be lost, replaced only by a wave of vague and hard to pin down emotions that in turn color the observer’s future observations – even observations about the now forgotten facts themselves.
One man however did see it coming and long before the internet existed in its present form – Canadian professor and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. Combining his study of the effects advertising had on society with some alarmingly prescient observations about the fundamental ways “electronic media” was altering man’s relationship with the world, McLuhan predicted a society totally immersed in a cocoon of endless media content which served more to inspire feelings and emotions than to inform – an idea partially captured in his most famous phrase “the medium is the message.” In the case of ongoing Snowden coverage in the mainstream media, the contents of the stories themselves (and indeed, the author’s act of heroism on behalf of global society) have clearly taken a backseat in favor of defending the national security state and establishment power as a whole over time.
Although this probably isn’t what McLuhan ultimately meant by his famous phrase one can certainly say with a certain amount of bitter irony that in the Snowden story at least, the medium has indeed become the message – the problem is that the medium, corporate liberal media that directly influences mainstream liberal attitudes and opinions, doesn’t like the message our intrepid whistleblower delivered and now after years of subtle propaganda, neither do most of the people consuming that media.
Perhaps the saddest part of it all is that reading “Permanent Record” makes it clear that Snowden himself has almost no idea that this massive cultural shift in attitude towards him has even occurred. Frankly, how could he? Trapped in exile, he didn’t directly experience the slow and often subtle media reconstruction of public confidence in the national security state over these past six years. Having been purposely shut out by both the American government and the mainstream media, Snowden was unable to participate effectively in the ongoing discussion around whistleblowers and the demonization of leaks. In far away Moscow it may not have even occurred to him that hostile feelings towards Julian Assange on behalf of newly-anointed liberal saint Hillary Clinton would poison the liberal discourse towards all other “leakers” like himself.
In some ways the war against truth as it pertains to Edward Snowden has already been won by the national security state. Sure the author’s leaks promoted some legal restrictions on the NSA’s power but even Snowden openly admits that this isn’t nearly enough to effectively stop government mass surveillance. Indeed, Snowden himself and a few of the more famous journalists who told his story are really the only triggers that jog the public memory left in this story. The author exists as a living reminder that freedom and democracy are a sham in a post-internet world and that’s why he will never be pardoned and never be allowed to return home so long as this establishment remains in power – not just the government, but the whole corrupt oligarchy and all of its elite corpse merchants.
All wars, even propaganda wars, have causalities.
– nina illingworth
