Free Things that Can and Cannot Be Said by John; Arundhati; Cusack Roy

“ Every nation-state, by supposition, tends toward the imperial: that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, treasuries, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the to p . . .
    Still it should be said that of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion. We agree, conditionally but instinctively, with those who denounce the hideous social arrangements which make war inevitable and human want omnipresent; which foster corporate selfishness, pander to appetites and disorder, waste the earth. ”
    â€” Daniel Berrigan , from The Nightmare of God: The Book of Revelation, 1983
    Things That Can and Cannot Be Said

    One morning as I scanned the news—horror in the  Middle East, Russia and America facing off in Ukraine— I thought of Edward Snowden and wondered how he was holding up in Moscow. I began to imagine a conversation between him and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War). And then, interestingly, in my imagination a third person made her way into the room—the writer Arundhati Roy. It occurred to me that trying to get the three of them together would be a fine thing to do.
    I had heard Roy speak in Chicago, and had met her several times . 1 One gets the feeling very quickly and comes to the rapid conclusion that with her there are no preformatted assumptions or givens. Through our conversations I became very aware that what gets lost, or goes unsaid, in most of the debates around surveillance and whistleblowing is a perspective and context from outside the United States and Europe. The debates around them have gradually centered on corporate overreach and the privacy rights of US citizens.
    The philosopher/theosophist Rudolf Steiner says that any perception or truth that is isolated and removed from its larger context ceases to be true:
    When any single thought emerges in consciousness, I cannot rest until this is brought into harmony with the remainder. Such an isolated concept is entirely unendurable. I am simply conscious that there exists an inwardly sustained harmony among all thoughts. . . . Therefore every such isolation is an abnormality, an untruth. When we have arrived at that state of mind in which our whole thought world bears the character of complete inner harmony, we gain thereby the satisfaction for which our mind is striving. We feel that we are in possession of the truth. 2
    In other words, every isolated idea that doesn’t relate to others yet is taken as true (as a kind of niche truth) is not just bad politics, it is somehow also fundamentally untrue . . . To me, Arundhati Roy’s writing and thinking strives for such unity of thought. And for her, like for Steiner, reason comes from the heart.

    I knew Dan and Ed because we all worked together on the Freedom of the Press Foundation. 3 And I knew Roy admired both of them greatly, but she was disconcerted by the photograph of Ed cradling the American flag in his arms that had appeared on the cover of Wired. 4 On the other hand, she was impressed by what he had said in the interview—in particular that one of the factors that pushed him into doing what he did was the NSA (National Security Agency)’s sharing real-time data of Palestinians in the United States with the Israeli government. She thought what Dan and Ed had done were tremendous acts of courage, though as far as I could tell, her own politics were more in sync with Julian Assange’s. “Snowden is the thoughtful, courageous saint of liberal reform,” she once said to me. “And Julian Assange is a sort of radical, feral prophet who has been prowling this wilderness since he was sixteen years old.”
    I had recorded many of our conversations, Roy’s and mine—for no reason other than that they were so intense that I felt I needed