Reading Circle 35 ‚Permanent Record‘ by Edward Snowden

Speziell zur Sendung am
Dienstag, den 04. Februar 2020:

Edward Snowden: ‚Permanent Record‘ (2019)

George, Tom, Sandra and Andrew discuss Edward Snowden’s extraordinarily courageous book ‚Permanent Record‘, a most revealing autobiography, published in 2019. What led him to be the most outspoken whistleblower ever?

We discuss his childhood, upbringing, his sense of patriotism, his schooling, how he became a highly skilled Internet systems engineer … and how he was indoctrinated: obliged to lie, conceal, dissemble and dissimulate. But then, feeling the integrity of his soul was being compromised, he broke with the System and went public about how the US government was exercising mass surveillance. What mattered to Snowden, he writes, was not himself, but rather the subversion of American democracy.

He writes: „Authoritarian states are typically not governments of laws, but governments of leaders, who demand loyalty from their subjects and are hostile to dissent.“

Leaders like those two cunning, corrupt confidence-tricksters, those clownish con-men….Trump and Johnson?

„Liberal-democratic states, by contrast, make no or few such demands, but depend almost solely on each citizen voluntarily assuming the responsibility of protecting the freedoms of everyone else around them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexuality or gender.“

Music played: