New Reality

In a recent article in Foreign Policy, entitled “Meet the Seven Men Obama Considers Enemies of the State,” the author examines seven cases from recent years in which U.S. government employees have fallen under criminal prosecution for violating laws relating to the treatment of classified information. The list includes the much-talked-about Snowden.

The author of the article, Elias Groll, makes a very important observation in relation to Barack Obama’s actions as president of the United States. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama particularly stressed that, as president, he would protect people exposing any corrupt practices from that part of the government. However, he has aggressively pursued those who reveal government secrets to the public and he has used the Espionage Act of 1917 in order to penalize officials who allow secret information to be leaked. He has done this more often than all other U.S. presidents combined.

Of course, we could criticize Obama for degeneration for having promised electors one thing and done the opposite, but, in my view, that would be too superficial. It’s obviously difficult to surprise anyone with the fact that presidential candidates promise electors many things that, once they become president, they do not do – everyone’s become used to that. What’s much more worthy of discussion is the fact that employees of serious government organizations – such as the CIA, the United States Department of State, and the National Security Agency – have all started to divulge confidential information which puts the U.S. in a very unfavorable light. What’s more, this is often done without considering the possibility of falling under criminal prosecution by angry government officials, who must react aggressively toward a leak to keep at least something confidential to the citizens of the U.S. and the rest of the world. Obama seems like just such an official, whatever he may promise during elections.

One possible reason seems to be the transformation of American society under the influence of the information revolution, which has manifested itself more and more in recent years. Every survey of public opinion is absorbed by the media and flourishes in all forms and colors in blogs, news portals, and traditional media, such as radios, newspapers, and television. For more and more U.S. citizens, a feeling of complicity with the media and the possibility to interact with it not as a user but as a provider of information are becoming more important than their responsibilities toward their government. We can only feel sorry for the government officials involved in state secrets who know that their computer contains enough secrets that would knock you off your feet and that, were they to be discovered, the secrets would make them first-class stars in the gigantic space that is the media, a space populated by hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Clearly, some officials cannot handle the nerves, and their patriotism gives way before the possibility of basking in fame.

Another important factor is the blurring of traditional values, which has been ongoing for the last few decades. In a society where gay marriages, loud and wild gay parades, and lesbian couples adopting children constitute the norm, who would be interested in that outdated, patriarchal patriotism? People think it’s only in the government’s interest anyway, and why should we respect this moss-covered value from the time when sodomy was punished by an article in the penal code. Something similar happened in the last years of the Roman Empire, in which serving one’s country began to be considered unprofitable and distracting from idle amusements, including those considered dubious from the point of view of traditional morals.

The intensity and ever-growing publicity for the importance of civic society is another factor which influences the tendency of government officials to violate their loyalty to the government and abandon their responsibilities. Various nongovernmental organizations, including those belonging to the media, declare themselves the measure of conscience and the arbitrators in resolving debatable issues. It is not surprising that officials declare that violating confidentiality represents an attempt to raise a debate on whether a particular piece of information is confidential, but then leave the verdict for nongovernmental structures, which are authoritarian in the eyes of the average American.

The constant and obtrusive publicity of the “true democracy in the United States” also undoubtedly plays a part for the rest of the world in terms of America’s soft power. Government officials, constantly showered with a torrent of praise for the values of true democracy on account of their responsibilities, constitute a rather beautiful picture compared to what is actually happening within the depths of the American government, and they are shocked by how much one is different from the other. This is what makes the strong impulse to share the American government’s dirty secrets possible—the desire to make U.S. government institutions conform to their own publicity.

These factors as a whole constitute a new reality, in which even avowed liberals, like Obama, are forced to set records of criminal prosecutions in the name of truth. Since America is a large empire, it ends up managing many dark affairs around the world. The main question now is the following: How do you keep resorting to the same imperial practices when you can no longer trust your own government officials? That’s something to rack your brain over. Of course, you cannot hire people who have a disposition toward fame, moralism, and ambitious behavior, and are consequently capable of revealing a government secret. But how exactly do you determine whether someone has the disposition towards those qualities? And, as a result, will the government miss out on hiring the ambitious, genuine, and talented people who would achieve a lot for the successes of the American empire?

What’s good for you and me, living beyond the frames of the American empire, is that the unreliability of their own officials will now force the American government to think twice or thrice about how the United States will look in the case of an information leak before embarking on a new venture. We can hope that, as a result, the world will see less of these grave American considerations of new ventures, as well as less global espionage, discrediting competitors, invasions, and the like, on the part of the United States.