The Limits of Journalistic “Infiltration”: Liberal Anti Fascism and the Political Disorientation of the Working Class
The Guardian’s recent undercover investigation by Harry Shukman, which depicts his personal efforts to infiltrate far-right groups, highlights the political emptiness of the liberal middle class. The piece functions more as a performative act, portraying the journalist as a solitary guardian defending “democracy” against an external threat. However, this entire story is built on a fundamentally flawed premise. The far right is not an outsider threatening the mainstream; rather, it is a harmful outgrowth of the very mainstream itself.[1]
As the Socialist Equality Party (UK) stated during the 2024 anti-immigrant riots, the rise of fascist tendencies reflects the core struggles of imperialist politics and capitalist decline. Faced with worsening economic crises, intensifying geopolitical tensions, and growing opposition from the working class, the ruling class increasingly adopts nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarian measures. These are not isolated incidents but intentional ideological strategies of a capitalist system in deepening crisis.
The Guardian’s framing—highlighting Shakman’s personal choice to “fight,” the perceived “encroachment” of the far right, and portraying the political centre as a steady democratic stronghold—only masks the true situation. This is a political myth, and a risky one.
The far right is incubated by the political mainstream, not external to it.
The core message of the SEP’s document is clear: “The far right does not ‘encroach’ on the mainstream; it is incubated by it.” This is not just a rhetorical device but a factual statement. For years, successive Labour and Conservative governments have created the conditions that allow fascist movements to flourish—through austerity, militarism, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and the systematic deterioration of working-class living standards.
Instead of changing this course, Starmer’s Labour government has actually worsened it. It came into power promising to “stop the boats,” deport “illegal” migrants, and uphold the fiscal constraints set by financial markets. Yvette Cooper’s summer police raids on immigrants were not a concession to the far right but a manifestation of their agenda executed from the top down. The fascists did not need to “encroach.” The state was already doing their work.
The liberal press: oscillating between exposure and legitimisation
The Guardian’s role here is fundamental, not accidental. It fluctuates between shocking exposés of the far right and sympathetic broadcasting of the ideas that support it. As noted, the Guardian gave lenient coverage to men imprisoned for setting fire to a hotel with 200 asylum seekers in Rotherham, portraying their “feelings of injustice” as deserving attention.
This isn’t hypocrisy; it’s class politics. The liberal media tries to keep its credibility with the middle class by condemning fascism, while also endorsing anti-immigrant narratives that support Labour and Conservative policies. Both roles benefit the ruling class by redirecting social anger away from capitalism and onto the most vulnerable.
The “infiltration” model: individualising fascism, obscuring capitalism
The undercover journalist method is not only inadequate but also creates political confusion. It portrays fascism as a matter of individual morality—focusing on “particularly nasty individuals,” secret Telegram channels, and covert networks—rather than understanding it as a social problem caused by the crisis of capitalism. It turns a political and social phenomenon rooted in the crisis of the capitalist system into a problem of especially malicious individuals.”
This individualisation aligns closely with the state’s law-and-order approach. Starmer’s response to the 2024 riots—featuring mass arrests, rapid courts, and a new national police force of 6,000—was praised by the liberal media as essential for maintaining “public order.” However, these repressive tactics are actually being set up to target the working class: striking workers, anti-war protesters, and anyone opposing capital’s influence.
The infiltration model, supported by NGOs like Hope Not Hate, suggests that police, courts, and security agencies are allies in combating fascism. However, this is a political trap. The capitalist state does not serve as a safeguard against fascism; instead, it functions as the tool through which the ruling class creates the circumstances for fascism to develop.
HOPE not hate exemplifies what Trotskyism recognises as the core political dead end of liberal anti-fascism. Despite its sincere self-description, it reveals an organisation whose class stance, political approach, and strategic outlook position it not as a remedy to the far-right threat but as a component of the structural issue.
HOPE not hate is not a grassroots group. It is a professional NGO, run by “researchers, educators, community activists and policy experts”—essentially, the upper-middle class. Its funding, charitable status, and strategic focus on “building skills and resilience across communities and civil society organisations” reflect the language of the non-profit sector rather than class activism. The working class doesn’t require middle-class experts to “build its resilience.” It needs an independent political party with a revolutionary socialist agenda.
The organisation’s mission centres on moral concepts such as “hope,” “hate,” “togetherness,” and “unity,” which deliberately conceal the class roots of both fascism and its opposition. Fascism is not merely a psychological flaw or a set of corrupt values. It is “a concentrated expression of imperialist politics and capitalist decay.” The ruling classes foster extreme nationalism and xenophobia to divert social tensions toward the right, support imperialist wars, and undermine the democratic and social rights of workers. An organisation that fails to identify capitalism as the root cause of the far-right threat cannot effectively lead the fight against it.
Defending the state that breeds fascism
HOPE not hate’s self-description reveals a strong commitment to “defend, champion and promote democracy and the rule of law; speaking out against anti-democratic and authoritarian forces and policies.” This statement signifies loyalty to the British capitalist state — the same state whose policies consistently foster conditions for far-right expansion.
This ongoing state, maintained through successive Labour and Conservative governments, has led to imperialist wars, decades of austerity, anti-immigrant nationalism, and the systematic erosion of the working class’s social standing. The far-right riots in Britain in August 2024 occurred less than a month after the Starmer Labour government assumed power on a platform of militarism, austerity, and promises to “stop the boats.” Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a “summer blitz” of police raids on immigrants just days before the violence broke out. The far right thrives on the toxic environment created by the very parties that shape public life.
An anti-fascism committed to defending the state apparatus is politically ineffective. It views fascism merely as an outside threat to a supposedly healthy democracy — a false belief that disarmed the German working class in the 1930s. The working class cannot overcome fascism by simply defending the bourgeois state; it must be ready to dismantle it and establish institutions of workers’ power.
The NGO trap: policing opposition into safe channels
HOPE not hate’s approach — “creating a platform for ordinary people to do the extraordinary,” “supporting the wider sector to have greater impact,” “effective collaboration and sharing of skills” — exemplifies how anti-fascism can shift from a political fight to a structured, grant-supported sector. The organisation channels public frustration over racism and the far right into activities compatible with the capitalist system: community workshops, educational programs, policy advocacy, and “alternative narratives.”
This is not a failure of execution but a function. Such NGOs are tasked with absorbing, containing, and neutralising the social opposition created by capitalism, preventing it from evolving into an independent political threat to the system. HOPE not hate’s researchers may infiltrate far-right groups. Still, the organisation will never advocate for the political mobilisation of the working class against the Labour Party, trade union bureaucracy, or the capitalist state, which are the primary enablers of the far right.
The Searchlight lineage
HOPE not hate originates from Searchlight magazine, a British anti-fascist publication known for its collaboration with intelligence and police agencies, and for its persistent criticism of the revolutionary left. Searchlight established the model of anti-fascism as an intelligence operation focused on the state, viewing fascists as a criminal-psychological issue for authorities to manage rather than a political force to be challenged by the organised working class. HOPE not hate has adapted this approach for the modern NGO landscape—more refined, emphasising community engagement, yet maintaining the same political stance: supporting the state, marginalising revolutionaries, and keeping the working class politically passive.
What genuine anti-fascism requires
The fight against the far right can’t rely solely on ‘togetherness and unity’ across classes. It demands independent political action by the working class—the vast majority—against capitalism. This involves politically breaking away from the Labour Party, whose anti-immigrant nationalism and austerity policies foster far-right growth. It also means establishing rank-and-file committees to challenge the trade union bureaucracy, which collaborates with the state and corporations to suppress class struggle. An international effort is necessary to oppose imperialist wars—such as leaving NATO, ending the Ukraine conflict, and opposing the Gaza genocide—since militarism and fascism are interconnected. The goal is to fight for a socialist program that unites British and immigrant workers against their exploiters, rather than supporting liberal ‘multiculturalism’ that preserves capitalist class relations.
HOPE not hate hinders all these efforts. Its “hope” is that capitalism can become fairer. However, the working class requires a different hope — the revolutionary overthrow of the system that generates fascism. The struggle against the far right is inherently linked to the fight against capitalism. Any effort to treat fascism as an external threat instead of a result of the capitalist system only weakens the working class.
Shukman’s personal bravery is unquestioned. However, his narrative serves a clear political purpose: it replaces the collective struggle of the working class with the actions of a courageous middle-class individual. It fosters illusions about the state, downplays Labour and union roles, and shifts the focus away from the root cause of the problem—the capitalist system itself.
The working class should reject this version of anti-fascism. Its role isn’t to cheer on journalistic infiltrations but to create its own struggle organisations, unite across nations, and fight for a socialist solution to the capitalist crisis that fuels fascism. Only through such a movement can the far right be truly defeated—not just exposed or infiltrated, but rooted out.
[1] A year of hate: what I learned when I went undercover with the far right-www.theguardian.com
One-Way Street and Other Writings -Walter Benjamin-Penguin 17 May 2016 £10.99
“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Walter Benjamin
“Even the Dead Won’t Be Safe”: Walter Benjamin
“Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces”.
Georgi Plekhanov
“A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others”.
Georgi Plekhanov
“A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself.”
Bertolt Brecht
In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]
Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.
Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin’s formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.
As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.
The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]
Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.
The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.
As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, “Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him”.[3]
Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.
Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky
At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.
To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.
Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.
Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, “Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?” This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture’s mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]
Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]
Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.
Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism
Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left’s organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.
Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.
Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky’s writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.
Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.
NOTES
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999)
The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky’s writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne (‘The World Stage’). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.
[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.
[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003
[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html
[5] Theses on the Philosophy of History-
Murder in Notting Hill Paperback – Illustrated, August 31 2011 by Mark Olden Zero Books 205 pages
Mark Olden’s book Murder in Notting Hill is a well-researched and crafted investigation into the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959. Unsurprisingly, the killer was never caught despite being well-known in the area. Olden outs the killer in the book, saying, “After I began investigating the case in 2005, I learned that the killer’s identity was “the worst kept secret in Notting Hill”. Three people identified Digby to me as the man who struck the fatal blow. Two of them had been questioned by the police about the murder; the third was Digby’s stepdaughter, Susie Read. Breagan, who insisted he was innocent, told me that when the police detained him, he was placed in a cell next to Digby, where he was able to iron out a discrepancy in their stories – after which the police released them both.”
Cochrane’s murder is one of the first recorded racially motivated murders in the UK. Olden is an excellent journalist and, among other things worked at the BBC. While there, he worked on the BBC programme Who Killed My Brother? Broadcast in 2006, Which examined the Cochrane Murder. Much of the book is influenced by that programme.
While working at the BBC, he gained access to material that a layperson could only dream of. Olden supplemented his research with a significant number of interviews. Many of the people interviewed were speaking publically for the first time. They give a real sense of what it was like to live in Notting Hill in 1959.
As part of his research for the book, Olden spent significant time at the National Archive in Kew, London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found out that the Labour government and police were more interested in suppressing political opposition to the fascists and containing the riots in London and Nottingham than solving a murder.
Olden points out that there are remarkable similarities between the way that Kelso’s death was investigated and the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. On April 22, 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks were attacked by five racist white youths in Eltham, southeast London. Stephen was stabbed to death. It was only in 2012 that two men were convicted of Lawrence’s murder after a long and bitter campaign by his parents. It was only a small measure of justice. Cochrane never did get justice. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
During his time at the National Archives in London, it would be fair to say that Olden would have been astonished to find that the National Archives authorities would thwart his attempts to establish the truth behind the Cochrane murder by refusing to release papers about the murder until 2044/54 on spurious grounds it ‘could put at risk certain law-enforcement matters, including preventing or detecting crime, arresting or prosecuting offenders and the proper administration of justice’. It was all the more galling because the man named by Olden as the probable murderer was dead, but still, a state-led cover-up was in place.
Only after a bitter and long campaign by members of Cochrane’s surviving family and their lawyers did the Metropolitan police permit the National Archives to release the files that were originally to be opened in 2054. Even a cursory look at the new files showed that this was a premeditated murder by outright fascists. It would be naïve to think that after all this time, the police will bring the family justice that can only be achieved by the mobilisation of the one force that can achieve justice, and that is the working class black and white.
While Olden’s book cannot be faulted as a piece of journalism, Olden has no explanation as to what social, economic and political conditions gave rise to the growth of Fascism in London and Nottingham at the time and also how the fascists could be opposed and defeated. The only class that could have opposed the racists and fascists was the working class. However, Olden believes that the white working class was either passive or racist.
But as Cliff Slaughter explains so well in his article Race Riots: the Socialist Answer,[1]“So long as we look only at the surface of social life, so long as we try to deal with each question separately as it arises, we shall continue to find ourselves bewildered by events like the race riots. But they are no nine days’ wonder. Every worker in the country must clearly understand this. Only if we can trace the social roots of racial conflict shall we be able to weed them out and, with them, those who profit from it. The starting point for the working class must be unity and solidarity against the employers and their political representatives—in the first place, the Tory Party. All the problems the working class now faces—growing unemployment, the housing shortage, rent increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions, and, above all, the threat of an H-bomb war—can be solved only by the unity and determined action of the working class. It is no accident that the steady growth of unemployment over the last year has been accompanied by an insidiously growing campaign around the slogan ‘Keep Britain-White’.
Slaughter goes on to explain the nature of fascism: “Fascism is a movement financed by big business which seeks support from the ‘middle classes’ and the most backward workers. Fascism’s real aim is to provide a mass basis for the smashing of workers’ organisations by a State machine which permits no democratic rights and rules with the whip and the torture chamber. To succeed, fascism must detach from the working class discontented elements who can be persuaded that something other than big business is their real enemy. This is why the fascists have recently returned to one of their favourite themes—racialism. Fascists were prominent in the Notting Hill riots and will cash in wherever they can on anti-coloured feelings. They will try to create a mob ready to use violence and to attack any scapegoat rather than the workers’ real enemy.”
Murder in Notting Hill is a good book. As a piece of investigative journalism, it is second to none. On the question of fascism, workers and youth need to look elsewhere to understand its rise and how to defeat it. As the great Marxist revolutionary and writer Leon Trotsky wrote, “Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”[2]
[1] Race Riots: the Socialist Answer, Labour Review, Vol. 3 No. 5, December 1958, pages 134-137.
[2] Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
Review: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden – 352 pages- Macmillan-(17 Sept. 2019)“It is hard to think of a greater stamp of authenticity than the US government filing a lawsuit claiming your book is so truthful that it was literally against the law to write,”
Edward Snowden
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”― George Orwell, 1984
The ink on Edward Snowden’s new book had barely dried when the US government sought to block the proceeds of his memoir Permanent Record.
The US Department of Justice filed suit on Tuesday against Edward Snowden and his publisher Macmillan. The aim of this vindictive move was to stop Snowden receiving any money made from the publication of his new book. US Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger stated, “This lawsuit will ensure that Edward Snowden receives no monetary benefits from breaching the trust placed in him.” Snowden’s publisher Macmillan is also being sued “solely to ensure that no funds are transferred to Snowden, or at his direction, while the court resolves the United States’ claims.”
Snowden who has over four million Twitter followers is widely respected for his whistleblowing act and in some quarters is regarded as a hero said the book was written not for monetary gain but in order to set the record straight regarding his release of data that showed the US government had systematically and secretly tapped the internet records of every single person on the planet. In doing so successive, US government had violated constitutional rights on a massive scale.
As Snowden intimates in the book, the surveillance apparatus exposed has no real parallel in history. Companies like Verizon, Google and Yahoo helped the US government collect billions of emails, phone calls, texts, videoconference and webcam recordings.
One writer said that it “allows the surveillance agencies to draw social and political profiles of every person in the US and hundreds of millions of people beyond America’s borders”.
The book itself contains no “secrets” it still nonetheless takes the breath away at the extent of spying the US government undertook. While not implying in the book Snowden has uncovered through a series of leaks “the very advanced framework of a police state, both illegal and unconstitutional. The National Security Agency (NSA) and the US spy network are engaged in the collection of virtually all communications and the assembling of vast databases for the purpose of monitoring the personal, social and political activities of the entire population”.
As Snowden graphically puts it in an interview “All of your private records, all of your private communications, all of your transactions, all of your associations, who you talk to, who you love, what you buy, what you read—all of those things can be seized and held by the government and then searched later for any reason, hardly, without any justification, without any real oversight, without any real accountability for those who do wrong”.
On a human level, this point was hit home in the book when Snowden was spying on someone and was watching his target through his computer. The target had his son on his knee all the while Snowden was spying on him.
As Snowden notes he could “actually see you write sentences and then backspace over your mistakes and then change the words and then kind of pause and think about what you wanted to say and then change it. Moreover, it is this extraordinary intrusion not just into your communications, your finished messages but your actual drafting process, into the way you think.”
One overarching aim of the lawsuit is to try to deter people from buying the book and discussing content such as the one above but as As Edward Snowden tweeted “Yesterday, the government sued the publisher of #PermanentRecord for—not kidding—printing it without giving the CIA and NSA a chance to erase details of their classified crimes from the manuscript. Today, it is the best-selling book in the world.”
Snowden’s book is a cross between a novel, spy story and biography, and this makes it a cracking read. Reading the book, one is struck by a certain degree of irony. Although carrying out one of the most audacious revolutionary acts this century Snowden’s early life would appear to have been the inspiration for the film The Truman Show.
Snowden grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. His family was all involved in the military or federal government in some capacity. Snowden himself becoming a trusted CIA employee and NSA intelligence contractor.
There is a lot to admire about Snowden. On a personal level, the fact that he was prepared to sacrifice everything to expose illegal US government spying shows he was a man of courage and principle. On a more broader level, Snowden was radicalised by the multiple wars carried out by the US government during his most formative years. In this sense Snowden is not alone.
The life experience of the 30-year-old Snowden reflects that of an entire generation. “The disaffection with and growing opposition to the existing social and political set-up reflected in the evolution of Snowden’s views is not simply an individual process, but part of a change involving millions of his generation. It is this fact that accounts for the extraordinary level of anger and fear within the state apparatus that has been generated by his actions”.
From reading his book, his whistleblowing was as much an act against the massive invasion of privacy as it was against a quarter-century of wars. It would appear that Snowden very consciously fought to oppose these wars in the one way that was open to him and that was whistleblowing.
Kevin Reed supports this sentiment adding“ millions of workers and young people are entering political struggle today—facing a crisis that will challenge and shake up their views about the nature of the US military, the two-party system, the unions, bourgeois nationalism, etc.—Snowden’s book provides an insight into the internal process by which one young intelligence worker came to act, on the basis of principles, against the entire military-intelligence establishment of the American government”.[1]
There is much to like about this book. While Snowden had a reasonable idea what would happen after he released his files nothing really prepared him for how fundamental his life would change. Once the files were released he planned to go to one of few countries that he would feel safe in that being Ecuador.
To do so, he had to fly via Russia while in the air Snowden’s passport was revoked by the US Department of State. Snowden lived at the airport in Russia for 40 days after which he was given asylum by the Russian government.
One striking aspect of the book is the degree of confidence Snowden has shown in his actions. There is not a moment of doubt despite the years of threats and calumny by the US government. His courage and principled stand is not just a reflection of his personal courage but because he knows he has widespread support.
As Glenn Greenwaldy states “Snowden seemed to derive a sense of strength from having made this decision. He exuded an extraordinary equanimity when talking about what the US government might do to him. The sight of this twenty-nine-year-old young man responding this way to the threat of decades, or life, in a super-max prison—a prospect that, by design, would scare almost anyone into paralysis—was deeply inspiring. And his courage was contagious: Laura and I vowed to each other repeatedly and to Snowden that every action we would take and every decision we would make from that point forward would honour his choice.” [2]
It would be pointless to hope this book gets a wide readership as it is already selling bucketloads throughout the world. It is hoped that the new generation of workers and students reading the book act upon his courageous and selfless action. In his book, he is refreshingly frank about the emotional crisis his whistleblowing caused to his family and partner Lindsay. While had to abandon his girlfriend without any warning it is comforting to know that their relationship was as strong as his principles.
Further Reading
A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016 Paperback – 27 Jul 2016-by David North (Author)- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quarter-Century-War-Hegemony-990-2016/dp/1893638693
[1] US Justice Department sues Edward Snowden to block proceeds of memoirKevin Reed-23 September 2019- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/23/snow-s23.html[2]No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance StateBy Glenn Greenwaldy-(p51)
A Trumpet of Sedition 