Robert Colls, who recently wrote a book on the author, sighs, “Orwell, you should be living at this hour”:
A medium ranking, 30 something year old man works on programmes concerned with gathering global information and using it in the interests of the state. Although he is an agency insider and enjoys the modest state privileges that derive from that, he comes to the conclusion that ‘The People’, in whose name he does these things, are not its beneficiaries but its victims, and that for all its talk of freedom and truth the state is intent on deceiving them. The man wants to admit his rebellious thoughts and reveal the deception but knows that by doing so he is going to make the rest of his life difficult, not to say short, and there will be no going back. He does it all the same. He has no accomplices, except his girlfriend. The world has yet to decide what will happen to him.
I am of course talking about Edward Snowden, who worked for the American National Security Agency before tipping its secrets last summer. But I could have been talking about Winston Smith, hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston, like Snowden, works in state security. Winston, like Snowden, acts alone. In spite of his name, Winston, like Snowden, is no action hero. … Here’s my point: Winston Smith and Edward Snowden are ordinary guys. You might say geeky-ordinary. But they had access to what we do not have access to, and came to believe that the job they were doing was not ordinary but extraordinary, and was not only wrong it was pointless.
Colls notes ironically that “Orwell spent his life loathing intellectuals and state technicians like Edward Snowden”:
He was sure they would betray the people. Well, Orwell did not always get it right and in this particular matter there can be no doubt that – as the cliché goes – if he was alive today the greatest political commentator of the 20th century would be supporting the young American. For Edward Snowden recognized two great Orwellian truths; first that liberty depends on millions of private lives kept private. As a fully paid-up non-deceived realist, Orwell would have argued the difficult case as to the point at which state secrecy should end and private life begin. Second, Snowden recognized that the War on Terror is no war and the quicker we drop the impossible abstraction of it all the better. Far better that we stick to what is ordinary: ordinary law, ordinary war, ordinary security, ordinary guys.
(Photo of demonstration against PRISM in Berlin, June 19, 2013, by Flickr user ubiquit23)
The Dish 