Bourgeois State Is Dismantling Bourgeois Democracy, Reveals Snowden
By Farooque Chowdhury
11 March, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Edward Snowden explains working of the NSA, the global surveillance system the US operates, and the GCHQ of the UK, ally of the Empire: It’s dangerous. Mass surveillance violates our rights, risks our safety, and threatens our way of life.
He made the observation in a written testimony to the European Union (EU), capital’s biggest integration project in Europe, and that claims to be sentinel of democracy. The sentinel claims to be standing for a democratic way of life.
A new twist in related incident further exposes the reality. The NSA was blocked by US District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco from carrying out plans on March 12, 2014 to begin destroying phone records collected for surveillance after San Francisco-based internet privacy and civil liberties organization The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued those were relevant to lawsuits claiming the practice was unconstitutional.
Judge Jeffrey White ordered the agency on March 11, 2014 to retain the records and scheduled a hearing for March 19 on whether those can be destroyed. The NSA had planned to dispose of the records following a March 7 ruling by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington.
The internet privacy and civil liberties group asked for a temporary restraining order saying the records may be used as evidence in its lawsuits challenging NSA surveillance and are covered under preservation orders in those cases.
NSA is prohibited from destroying “any telephone metadata or ‘call detail’ records,” said White.
The court incident shows important aspects related to concepts of liberty and surveillance.
On the other hand, Snowden writes:
“The suspicionless surveillance programs of the NSA, GCHQ, and so many others … endanger a number of basic rights which, in aggregate, constitute the foundation of liberal societies.”
He specifies a particular case:
“The first principle any inquiry must take into account is that despite extraordinary political pressure to do so, no western government has been able to present evidence showing that such programs are necessary. In the United States, the heads of our spying services once claimed that 54 terrorist attacks had been stopped by mass surveillance, but two independent White House reviews with access to the classified evidence on which this claim was founded concluded it was untrue, as did a Federal Court.”
The claim defending mass surveillance is nullified, and bourgeois lie is exposed.
Snowden further says:
“There are indications of a growing disinterest among governments for ensuring intelligence activities are justified, proportionate, and above all accountable. We should be concerned about the precedent our actions set.”
Snowden emphasizes the fact that all readers now know:
“I am telling you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private communications of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen. I swear under penalty of perjury that this is true. These are not the capabilities in which free societies invest. Mass surveillance violates our rights, risks our safety, and threatens our way of life. If even the US government, after determining mass surveillance is unlawful and unnecessary, continues to operate to engage in mass surveillance, we have a problem.
Raising the question of rights of citizens Snowden says:
“[T]he international norms of tomorrow are being constructed today, right now, by the work of bodies like this committee. If liberal states decide that the convenience of spies is more valuable than the rights of their citizens, the inevitable result will be states that are both less liberal and less safe.”
Snowden assumes:
“[The] surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually makes us less safe. By squandering precious, limited resources on ‘collecting it all’, we end up with more analysts trying to make sense of harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real leads. I believe investing in mass surveillance at the expense of traditional, proven methods can cost lives, and history has shown my concerns are justified”
Snowden urges:
“If you want to help me, help me by helping everyone: declare that the indiscriminate, bulk collection of private data by governments is a violation of our rights and must end. What happens to me as a person is less important than what happens to our common rights.”
The fact that Snowden has exposed once again exposes working of bourgeois state machine, which is always in conflict with the ruled majority. This type of state machine can never safeguard a society based on justice as the two stand opposed to each other, as interests of the two are always contradictory.
From ordinary citizens to charities to members of legislative assembly, actually it turns out the assembly, to trade negotiations to state-persons, Dilma or Markel, is not spared by the spying system. A question comes: Why a state employs its energy and resources to a blanket-surveillance, a surveillance that spares none but faces failures in some cases?
Then, it appears, the state machine’s survival depends on surveillance of everything all around as the omnipotent surveillance has access to lives and activities of billions in the world, even to these sentences being composed and to the mails to be sent hours later.
Then, it appears, the state machine’s survival is not dependent on its other parts of ruling mechanism and arrangements. Isn’t it decay in the statecraft?
Then, what’s the reason of this decay? Why a state has to depend on all encompassing surveillance at home and abroad? Doesn’t state thus pit itself against the ruled, whose consent is required to legitimize its rule, an act that devours its legitimacy? Is there an all encompassing enemy among the people in a democracy? It’s actually dismantling of the very concepts upon which bourgeois democracy claims to stand: liberty and freedom.
The dismantling is being done by bourgeois state itself. Thus bourgeois state exposes the liberty and freedom that it professes is the liberty and freedom of rule only, that wisdom for safeguarding ruling machine is best found in surveillance machine not in the collective wisdom of citizenry, that a few persons can haunt a powerful state machine and compel the machine to haunt billions in the name of haunting those few, a contradiction within the system itself.
Thus a “strange” weakness is revealed: A few persons can threaten all powerful imperial powers in the historical period the world capital feels most powerful and has trampled the entire world and the few persons can compel the powers to discard all masks of lofty concepts it propagates, and even pervading of privacy of citizens turn essential for the survival of the imperial powers. Even the officials entrusted with the task of global surveillance and the officials engaged with securing imperial powers are not beyond surveillance. Seemingly, but not actually, a strange fact.
Earlier, Snowden warned: No elementary school student of today will ever know privacy, and will grow up in a police state that envelopes their lives in total. They will never hold a private thought, never share a private communication, never wake to a place where they are not on someone's video screen.
Is this the operation style of state Orwell imagined?
It’s not a harebrain act of imperial powers. It’s an act being carried out during a period of decay in bourgeois governance and democracy and a confirmation of limits of bourgeois state power.
The emerging reality supplements to findings by David Wise and Thomas B Ross that they said in their 1964 revealing book The Invisible Government:
“There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible.
“The first is the government that citizens read about in their newspapers and children study about in their civics books. The second is the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War.
“The second, invisible government gathers intelligence, conducts espionage, and plans and executes secret operations all over the globe.”
These – the dismantling, the decay – are rooted in the economy as John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney write at the preface of their 187 page-book, an output of research done throughout their careers and discussions they had for more than thirty years, The Endless Crisis: “The world economy as a whole is undergoing a period of slowdown. The growth rates for the United States, Europe, and Japan at the center of the system have been sliding for decades. … Stagnation is the word that economists use for this phenomenon.”
This economic reality commands political realities although a part of mainstream scholars put economy and politics separately, a mistaken practice. Today’s democracy in capitalist world carries results of this stagnation.
Despite these signs of decay and shameless exposures of democracy being practiced by imperial powers the “strange thing” is repeatedly being done by a part of Third and Fourth Worlds scholars while they carry on their assigned acts of preparing background for imperial intervention: Base their propaganda material on imperial propaganda reports. Thus they gradually erode their credibility and expose identity. It’s incapacity of these scholars as they have to propagate imperial propaganda reports donning a leftish cloak.
But what shall ordinary citizens do? Arundhati Roy suggests in her An ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire:
“Our strategy should be not only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness …
“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
“Remember this: We are many and they are few.”
Farooque Chowdhury is Dhaka-based freelancer.
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