tomdispatch | Close your eyes for a moment, think about recent events, and you could easily believe yourself in a Seinfeldian Bizarro World [5].
Now, open them and, for a second, everything looks almost familiar...
and then you notice that a dissident is fleeing a harsh and draconian
power, known for its global surveillance practices [6], use of torture, assassination campaigns [7], and secret prisons [8],
and has found a haven in a heartless world in... hmmm... Russia. That
dissident, of course, is Edward Snowden, just granted a year’s temporary asylum [9]
in Russia, a.k.a. the defender of human rights and freedom 2013, and so
has been released from a Washington-imposed imprisonment in Moscow’s
international air terminal and the threat of far worse [10].
Now,
close your eyes, open them again, and for just a moment, doesn’t the
world look a little more orderly? After all, a draconian imperial power
has taken one of its own dissidents, who wanted to reveal the truth
about its cruel war practices and global diplomatic maneuverings, thrown
him in prison without charges, abused and mistreated him, brought him
before a drumhead military court and, on essentially trumped up charges
of “espionage,” convicted him [11]
of just what its leaders wanted to convict him of. That power, of
course, must be Russia and all’s right with the world... oops, I mean,
that’s U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning [12] and the “evil empire” that mistreated him is... gulp... the United States.
Think
about it for a moment: if Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a place of asylum
for American dissidents and the U.S. is doing a reasonable job of
imitating aspects of the old USSR, we are on Bizarro Earth, aren't we?
Today, former State Department whistleblower [13] Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People [14],
considers how America’s distant wars have come home and how, under that
pressure, this country is morphing into something unrecognizable.
Worse yet, it’s quite possible that we’re only at the beginning of that
transformation. To give but a small example of what the future might
hold, psychiatrist and author [15] Jonathan Shay, famous for his work with traumatized Vietnam veterans, suggested in Daedalus [16] in 2011 that no one knows what it means for similarly traumatized employees of our Warrior corporations [17],
the rent-a-gun “veterans” of our recent war zones to come home to no
health care and no support system. And he offered an eerie, if
provocative, comparison to the footloose German veterans of World War I
who, in the 1920s, joined the Freikorps [18] and played their part in the radicalization and then Nazification of that country.
“I
am not saying,” he wrote, “that I know that the Weimar Republic would
still exist today, with all that implies about a different course to
history, if Germany had had Vet Centers and VA Mental Health Clinics.
But historians generally agree that the Freikorps contributed to the
weakening of the new German political fabric in the immediate aftermath
of World War I.” His is a chilling reminder that, wherever we are now,
it might just be a rest stop on some bizarro road to hell. -Tom
