photo: Truthout.org
Why so many whistleblowers? Why the Tom Drakes? Why the Edward Snowdens and others? And why the persecution, unprecedented persecution by the administration?
The answer to those questions is a huge answer. And the answer is the national security state which we’ve become and the interminable war that we wage as that state.
So Snowden is not the disease. We don’t have traitors or whistleblowers blooming all over because they are some sort of malady. The disease is war. We’ve been at war now and with no end in sight for over a dozen years, the longest in our history.
War breeds tyranny. War breeds people who want to prosecute and persecute those who reveal that tyranny. So what we have is the government becoming more draconian –clearly understandable. It always does in a period of war. And as it becomes more draconian, more and more whistleblowers coming. And we’re going to see more. I would predict we’re going to see a Snowden every six months. We’re going to see whistleblowers every month. And we’re going to see the government getting increasingly draconian in going after them.
This is a symptom of the state of our country, which is a country in the arms of a media that is completely complacent, is owned indeed by the corporate-ocracy that runs this country and of a government that can’t get out of the hands of the military-industrial-intelligence-congressional–you name it; it is so comprehensive and so widespread today that one can’t even get away with calling it what Eisenhower called it in 1961. It’s a product of what we’ve become, which is a state that lives for war.
Read the rest here.
Excerpted under fair use from “Snowden: Symptom or Disease” on the Real News Network.
