To Vilify Whistleblowing Is An Act Of Treason

People like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange are in no way criminals. They’re political prisoners of a government that knows it will be overthrown if its crimes are exposed. Manning has leaked vital hidden histories of the true nature of U.S. warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, namely the torture and civilian deaths that were involved. Snowden has helped reveal the NSA’s now all-encompassing surveillance on Americans. Assange has informed the public about thousands of abuses of power, including the sabotage of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the collusion between the government and the big banks. Many other journalists and rogue insiders have helped uphold open information in recent years, and the escalated attacks against them are an assault on democracy.

Just a decade ago we didn’t have the president invoking the Espionage Act more than with all previous administrations combined so that he could prosecute leakers. Prior to the chilling transformation that’s taken place under Obama and Trump, not even the leakers of documents like the Downing Street Memo were targeted. We’ve entered a point where the ones who’ve informed us about our government are traitors, while the government officials that have recently carried out genocides and mass spying programs are respected public servants. Where Manning and Assange deserve to be kept in days of psyche-shattering solitary confinement, while war criminals like Barack Obama deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

The creators of this paradigm aren’t traitors to the United States. America has never truly represented democratic values, and to use its image for promoting those values is to romanticize things for romanticism's sake. The authoritarianism of our society is a deeper kind of violation, a betrayal of the values that make us human. A society based on repression and violence destroys its own ability to produce art, or intelligence, or a culture of empathy. This has shown over the last few decades as despots have defunded the arts, turned the public schools and colleges over to corporations, consolidated the media into shallow dispensers of corporate state propaganda, and created a mass culture of hostility toward open thought.

The arrogance and detachment of these despots is turning into their own undoing. The intellectual class that the oligarchy uses to make itself look legitimate, set up in high-level academia and media, has become too insulated to keep being effective. Economists from the elite universities, which became corporate in the 20th century revolution that Chris Hedges calls “The Death of the Liberal Class,” dispense their obligatory support for neoliberal policies to mostly elite audiences. Papers like the New York Times, whose embrace of neoliberalism and neoconservatism was solidified under its recent editor Abe Rosenthal, deliberately appeal to the upper-class populations that mainly make up the Times’ supposedly expansive readership.

As these more sophisticated parts of the ruling class whither, the monstrosity of what they’ve given way to has to be provoking some kind of class uprising. Trump and his cabinet, a collection of half-wits, sadists and criminals with as much wealth as the bottom third of the country, frequently use tax dollars for luxury vacations while attacking the rights of working people. Even as 51% of workers are now making under $30,000 a year and the majority of Americans are found to be regressing to a third world lifestyle, the plutocrats continue spewing classist hate and condescension. Like earlier this year when Jason Chaffetz, a multimillionaire Republican congressman, told the poor that they could afford health care if they didn’t spend the money on iPhones.

With the strengthening of unions, growth in independent journalism, and rise of social movements in recent years, we are using the raw outrage toward things like this to rebuild a long repressed American left. But anger can’t be our only motivator. We need to revolt because we care about having a safe, compassionate world for the people of the future. Those future generations will be able to review and learn from the history of the current era, if we create the open society they’ll need for that.