The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

by Sarah Kendzior

  Countless think tanks have issued statements like this from The National Democracy Institute: "Democracy cannot truly deliver for all of its citizens if half of the population remains underrepresented in the political arena."

  This argument has been refuted, both with countries (dictatorial Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan have the highest representation of women in parliament) and with people (Thatcher, Palin). But in the end, it does not matter whether you believe that being female makes you particularly diplomatic, or empathetic, or kind.

  It matters whether you believe women are as capable of the job as men, whether you believe capable women deserve the job as much as capable men, and whether you act on this belief or let the ratio rest.

  US foreign policy needs greater diversity of skill, ideas and experience. This means not only including more women, but working against the economic barriers that deter many talented young people - male and female - from entering the field.

  If you need convincing that foreign policy needs new blood, look at the state of the world around you. The strongest argument against the status quo is the status quo itself.

  --Originally published March 20, 2014

  Snowden and the paranoid state

  "Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid," Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity's Rainbow, "but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations."

  On June 23, 2013, Edward Snowden left China, a repressive state with a vast surveillance system, to fly to Russia, a repressive state with an even vaster surveillance system, in order to escape America, where he had worked for a surveillance system so vast he claims it gave him "the power to change people's fates".

  In proclaiming his ability to change the fates of others, Snowden lost control of his own. He was lambasted as the instigator of international conspiracies and praised as the source of their revelation. He was at once a hero and a traitor, a pawn and a king, a courageous whistle-blower with the means to bring down nations and a naive narcissist, little millennial lost . He inspired debate and inspired even more debate over whether to debate him.

  What are people looking for when they look at Snowden? They are looking for answers about how much states and corporations know about their personal lives, but more than that, they are looking for a sense that answers are possible. They are looking for knowledge untainted by corruption, as Snowden continues his world tour of corrupt regimes. They are looking for state agendas explained by someone without an agenda of his or her own. They are looking, and they are not finding what they seek.

  Snowden’s legacy

  Satisfactory explanations require trust in the person explaining. In the long term, Snowden will be seen as a symptom of a breakdown in political trust, not a cause. His legacy is paranoia - the paranoia of the individual about the paranoia of the state that spurs the paranoia of the public. This is not to say that paranoia is always unjustified. But it has become a weltanschauung instead of a reaction.

  It matters, of course, whether the allegations of mass surveillance and data-collecting made by Snowden and Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald are true, but this is not what determines how the allegations are received. Suspicion of surveillance can be as poisonous to a functioning democracy as surveillance itself. Not knowing the extent of surveillance - of whom, by whom, to what end - heightens anxiety over the distance between the powerful and the public, an anxiety that was in place long before Snowden emerged.

  Between the state and the citizen, we have the media, whose biases and careerism thicken the fog. With Snowden, every revelation has a refutation, but the citizen is left to evaluate the state of their nation on their trust in the individual reporting it.

  Months into the scandal, it has become clear the Snowden beat tends toward the tautological. If a writer believes - or finds it advantageous to proclaim - that NSA employees respect the citizen's right to privacy and the legal codes that protect him or her, then Snowden's claims are unfounded exaggerations. If a writer believes - or finds it advantageous to proclaim - that NSA employees are prone to abuse the system they have created, and that the government will lie to protect its creation, then Snowden's claims are evidence of systemic abuse.

  "Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts," wrote William S Burroughs. And sometimes paranoia is the broken belief that having the facts is possible.

  When anxiety attacks

  American political paranoia has a long history, perhaps most famously summed up in Richard Hofstadter's study of the "paranoid style in American politics", in which he described how a small minority employed theories that were "overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression", often gaining power in the process.

  Hofstadter's study was published in 1965, thirty years before the popularization of an international communications system that potentially gives every citizen the ability to debunk fatuous claims and distribute reliable evidence. The internet would seem an antidote to conspiracy theories and state secrecy, but it has only amplified both.

  Paranoia is aggression masked as defense. It was paranoia (and hubris, and greed) that caused the run-up to the Iraq War; it is paranoia that leads to thousands of innocent Muslims being profiled in New York; it is paranoia that led to Trayvon Martin being shot to death on the street. In Congress, paranoia is less a style than a sickness, employed less with flourish than with fear. Paranoia is the refusal to recognize others except filtered through ourselves - and how do Americans see themselves? Afraid, afraid, afraid.

  Digital transparency changes politics, but also reinforces what aspects of politics seem resistant to change. When WikiLeaks released its cables two years ago, they did not impart shocking new information so much as confirm people's worst suspicions.

  One of the most disconcerting aspects of a massive spy system is how little all that information does to remedy corruption and incompetence. Big Brother is not scary just because he knows so much, but because he is capable of so little.

  Snowden came of age in a paranoid era. The Bush administration was marked by twin delusions: 1) hysteria over terrorism, abetted by an insistence on defining reality contrary to evidence; 2) self-congratulation on triumphs never achieved, highlighted in Hurricane Katrina's "heck of a job", Iraq's "mission accomplished", and the bubble economy.

  Obama ran as an alternative not only to Bush policies, but to the Bush mindset, offering "hope and change" as antidote to delusion and intransigence. He inherited the Bush administration's problems at the same time social media networks like Facebook gave powerful people new means of exploring the data of our lives - of exploring our lives as data.

  The fear that the government was inventing justifications to persecute citizens turned into a fear that they were justifying persecution by manipulating data that we did, in fact, produce. We create the trail, but they determine where it originates and leads. This is the anxiety that propels Snowden's revelations.

  A culture of paranoia

  But the deeper fear, the real sadness, is that ordinary people are insignificant to the government, and that those in power are indifferent to our fate. You do not need a database to watch Americans suffer.

  The Obama administration espouses moving rhetoric about some of our biggest problems - unemployment, violence and inequality - but has had little success in solving them. Their frenetic pursuit of Snowden is remote from ordinary life. Citizens only feel the repercussions in paranoia, a grasp at self-importance despite all evidence to the contrary.

  On July 31, journalist Michele Catalano became convinced that a Google search for "pressure cooker" and "backpacks" had caused a "joint terrorism task force" to pay a visit to her home. In reality, it was not a terrorism task force but the local Long Island police. They did not come because a cadre of distant observers had access to her internet search history but because her husband's former employer had asked them to investigate activity he had conducted on his work computer. As Gawker's Adrien Chen
writes , "The actually scary part of Catalano's story - the creepy correlation of Google history in some distant control room - started, and ended, in her imagination."

  Fixing the NSA scandal will involve far more than reforming the NSA. It means changing America's paranoid political culture, which means reviving trust in our leaders, which means finding leaders deserving of trust. It means that people in positions of power - in government and in corporations like Facebook and Google - need to come clean with what they know and why they want to know it. Our privacy settings, literally and figuratively, need to stop shifting. Our privacy expectations need to stop being dictated by those who read our mail.

  Until then, paranoia will rule. "Power is impenetrable", wrote Elias Canetti, in his 1960 study of paranoia in politics. "The man who has it sees through other men, but does not allow them to see through him."

  Edward Snowden proclaimed he could see through everybody. And then he said he was on our side. That is the novelty of this whole affair. He saw through us and we watched him run.

  Originally published August 5, 2013

  Iraq and the reinvention of reality

  The worst thing about the Iraq war was not that people got away with lying. It was that they did not - and it did not matter.

  The 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq was a week of media culpa. Every day a new journalist or pundit came forward to atone for supporting a war predicated on disinformation. "I was excitable and over-reacted," wrote blogger Andrew Sullivan, explaining why he once argued that no "serious person" doubts Saddam Hussein's intent to use WMDs with his co-conspirator al-Qaeda. "I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense," wrote journalist David Ignatius, noting that, in retrospect, it did not.

  The media's failure to question the fallacies of the Bush administration has long been derided - as The Nation's Greg Mitchell noted, they have been apologizing for years. But while it is right to criticize the media, it is wrong to hold them completely accountable. Plenty of people got Iraq wrong, but plenty of people - experts and ordinary citizens - got it right. The problem was that it made no difference.

  "Without evidence, confidence cannot arise," Hans Blix declared to the United Nations in the run up to the war. He was wrong: confidence, like evidence, could be created. The warnings of Blix, Anthony Zinni, Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal columnists called out as fifth columnists and the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world changed nothing. When revelation hit, it was with a sense of helplessness that defined the decade to come. Confidence, like evidence, could be destroyed.

  The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived. "I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me," wrote Bush speechwriter David Frum.

  That was the message of the Iraq war: There is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth.

  The flavor of our time

  In 2002, Ron Suskind, a reporter for the New York Times, met with an unnamed aide to George W Bush who accused Suskind of being part of the "reality-based community". The aide meant it as an insult: this was not the way the world worked anymore.

  "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," said the aide, later alleged to be Bush adviser Karl Rove. "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.''

  In one sense, this quote seams of a piece with its era - with the entry of truthiness into the dictionary, with the rise of whole industries, like reality TV, built on choreographed sincerity. But while we may associate the "creation of reality" with a wildly hubristic administration, it remains the flavour of our time, a manipulation that moves from crisis to crisis.

  Ten years after the Iraq war, we continue to live in an era of hysterical panic about invented catastrophes and false reassurances about real catastrophes. We laugh bitterly at the "Mission Accomplished" sign raised nearly a decade before the war ended, but the Bush administration did accomplish something. They accomplished the mission of persuading everyday Americans that the unthinkable is normal.

  We see remnants of this created reality in the financial crisis - the ongoing "great recession" that, like preemptive war, has transformed what Americans will accept. It is normal for criminal financiers to receive record bonuses in an age marked by austerity, it is normal for professionals to work years unpaid in the hope of someday landing a job, it is normal for one year of college to cost more than the average median income. This is normal, they say - but if Iraq should have taught us anything, it is how easily and brazenly "normal" can be redefined.

  Iraq showed us that the consequences for gross negligence were less than anyone had imagined. This gaping disconnect between people and power, and the public's resignation to adjusting to injustices rather than challenging them, has shaped the post-war era. If Iraq was launched on the illusion of invincibility, the financial crisis is abetted by the acceptance of powerlessness.

  We lost accountability

  On March 18, 2013, Tomas Young, a soldier who was paralyzed fighting in the Iraq war, published a letter from his deathbed:

  "I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr Bush and Mr Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done.

  You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans -my fellow veterans - whose future you stole."

  Tomas Young is 33. When he was 21, he decided to protect the country he loved by enlisting in the armed forces. Like his fellow soldiers, he came of age in an era marked by a socio-economic gulf between the people who agitate for wars and the people who fight them. Like his fellow soldiers, he returned home to a country that denies veterans adequate health services or financial support. Because it is a recession, because times are tough. Because this is normal.

  After September 11, 2001, President Bush drew criticism for calling on Americans to go shopping rather than relinquish comforts in a time of war. Young's generation was not told to sacrifice - instead, they were the sacrifice. They paid the price with their lost opportunities, with their lost voice, with their defaulted investment in their nation.

  We lost more in Iraq than a war. We lost accountability and faith in our institutions, and most of all, we lost the outrage that accompanies that loss, because we came to expect it and accept it as normal. This quiet acquiescence is, in the end, as damaging as any lie we were told.

  --Originally published March 24, 2013

  Where following the law is radical

  In May 2005, the government of Uzbekistan fired on a massive protest in the city of Andijon, killing over 700 of its own citizens. Within weeks, a joke began to circulate on Uzbek internet forums. It went something like this:

  Q: Can an Uzbek participate in a demonstration in Uzbekistan?

  A: Yes, but only once.

  While meant to mock the brutality of the government of Islam Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan since its Soviet days, the joke is also a pointed jab at Uzbekistan's legal system. In Uzbekistan, citizens are arrested, tortured and even killed for carrying out acts permitted by law. Uzbekistan advertises itself as a democracy, and has a constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression and the protection of human rights.
When citizens act on their constitutional rights by criticizing officials or organizing non-violent protests, the government is quick to arrest them.

  Uzbekistan is one of many states in Central Asia where the rule of law has eroded. This is not to say that these states are unstable: the cruel irony of illegality in Central Asia is that it is a stabilizing force. In Uzbekistan corruption at the state level is so pervasive that contesting state crimes is extremely difficult; corruption at the local level is so rampant that it has led to apathy among citizens, who are often unaware of their rights. But the existence of those rights raises an interesting question: what if people retained their faith in law after they lost their faith in government? What if citizens took the law at its word?

  In 2010, a group of Uzbek lawyers created a website attempting to do just that. Adolat ("Justice" in Uzbek) was established with the goal of raising legal literacy among Uzbek citizens and, in doing so, improving the rule of law in Uzbekistan. Adolat is not asking that laws be changed, only that they be followed by state officials as well as citizens.

  Justice as radical subversion?

  Adolat's founders are adamant that they are not a opposition group and that they have no interest in upending the existing constitutional system - in fact, they have featured President Karimov's statements on the importance of the law on their website. Despite its apolitical agenda, Adolat has been banned. In Uzbekistan, showing people how to follow the law constitutes an act of radical subversion.

  It is no mystery why Uzbeks are forbidden to read Adolat. The website asks Uzbek citizens to buy into a delusion: that they live in a just society where laws are something other than words on a piece of paper. By pretending that laws have meaning, they implore the government to give them meaning - a step which the Karimov regime seems unwilling to take. Adolat's legal experts encourage discussion of civic issues and answer questions submitted by readers. (Sample query: "Where can I complain about abuse by the police?") A lawyer who works for Adolat told me that the goal is not to "give fish" but to teach Uzbeks to "fish for themselves". He believes a regular reader of the site should by now be well-versed in writing an official complaint.