Secreters, Leakers and Whistleblowers on the Lam from The Man
by John Kendall Hawkins
"You wanna fly, you gotta give up the sh*t that weighs you down."
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
To anyone paying attention -- to anyone fully awoke -- the Orwellian super-surveillance regime is fully underway. The themes have become leitmotifs for our time -- totalitarianism, mass surveillance, violations of freedom of expression, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviors within society. The world is in a perpetual state of war and is divided into three regions: Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania. Citizens of the 'heroic' region, Oceania, are forced to believe that 2+2=5. Cinema-goers must give-it-up for a Two-Minute Hate of dissidents shown on the screen before they can proceed with watching Big Brother's favorite RomCom.
After Donald Trump was elected in 2016 Nineteen Eighty-Four became a NYT bestseller. We were aware that we are in dangerous times. But before we could think about how dangerous it was, a pandemic happened that highlighted three regions of the world and their response to that viral outbreak. Now, we are concerned largely with outbreaks of viral media shaping us, distorting reality, pushing the unreliable narrative of the technocratic elite. The Covid-19 origin story is still in dispute, undermining the integrity of science and how it is reported.
We need freed voices now more than ever. And freeable readers.
Joel Whitney has put together a collection of stories about famous truth tellers, dissidents, whistleblowers, and other assorted Lefties on the run for their intellectual lives amidst a milieu of counter-counterculture. The collection from independent publisher OR Books is called Flights: Radicals on the Run. It is edited by Whitney, who is an award-winning writer from Brooklyn, was a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor-in-chief at Guernica, and whose work has appeared in many publications. His previous work has included Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers (2017), also published by OR Books.
Flights includes stories of Lefty luminaries, "all forced to flee homes and/or friends because of their progressive stance," and the volume includes: Seymour Hersh, Lorraine Hansberry, Graham Greene, Paul Robeson, Gabriel Garca Ma'rquez, George & Mary Oppen, Frances Stonor Saunders, Malcolm X, Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, N. Scott Momaday, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. That's quite an assortment of characters and causes. The book is written in a hip, effortless pace, and is clearly sympathetic to the plights of the flights. Renegades and Rebels. Protests as a lifestyle. Revolution for the hell of it. Perhaps we haven't reached the Vanishing Point yet.
Whitney gets the beat moving in the brief intermission between the preface and the first chapter that begins with 1952 and the trials and tribulations of Lorraine Hansbury:
After the brick is flung through her window, Lorraine is running, ducking. As a result of the lies spread about him and his book, Graham is running, punching back, laughing. From a mob, Paul is running, ducking, standing, singing. From death threats made on behalf of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, Gabo is running, fleeing into exile"From a gaslighting neocon, Frances is running-- with her notebook hidden as he drinks himself honest on cheap wine"But neither she, nor Everardo, can run now. From their horror, their PTSD, we are running. We, too, are running for their lives.
We are running. As Ed Snowden told us in his distribution-interrupted memoir, Permanent Record (2019), we all have dossiers, we've all done something 'wrong,' we all can be made to pay if the government turns on us -- editors, writers, artists, scientists -- we are all people of interest to the panopticon known as the Internet, controlled by the merchants of desire and planters of doubt. 'National Security,' seen as the security of the few.
Whitney starts off with a preface that features the runnings of Seymour Hersh, who we are lucky to still have amongst us, having taken savage blows from the Right and Left over the last decade or so, beginning with his counter-account in the London Review of Books of how the Osama bin Laden story actually went down. The official story was drones and black ops and American courage, and Navy SEALS, but that was bunk, said Hersh. As Whitney puts it in the preface,
Or you could believe the depiction in Zero Dark Thirty: 2+2=5.Instead of the massive expenditure in signals, paramilitary and HUMINTEL that this operation would later go on to justify, Hersh revealed that bin Laden's assassination came via a quieter process: a walk-in. An informant hoping to earn the ample reward for the liquidation of the US-backed eminence gris of terror, walked into the local CIA station, surprise!, as if checking into a hotel.
Then Hersh followed that up with calling out the Obama administration on its proclamation that Assad released Sarin gas on his own people back in 2013. Hersh wasn't buying and explained why in another LRB piece, "Whose sarin?" Discrediting the Pulitzer Prize-winner's reputation has been a kind of bloodsport ever since. But Hersh keeps running, posting at his Substack site, where, among other topics, he regularly tells the truth about Israel's likely intentional war with Hamas. What are we to do with these self-loathing Jews? Make 'em run.
In Flights, Graham Greene makes a reprise of his disdain for the way Hollywood flubbed the 1958 adaptation of his grim, truth-telling classic novel of CIA intrigue and subterfuge, The Quiet American, which Greene saw as a "a complete travesty." Greene's novel presaged the early American failures of policy in Viet Nam, later validated as factual by the release of the Pentagon Papers. He blamed the CIA, which had a hand in re-writing the film's screenplay.
Whitney tells of Angela Davis's flight. He writes,
Wanted for a crime she did not commit, Professor Angela Davis went on the run in 1970, describing the struggle against panic in her nightly safehouse transfers: "Living as a fugitive means resisting hysteria, distinguishing between the creations of a frightened imagination and the real signs that the enemy is near." In her quest "to elude him, outsmart him," she recalled,"Thousands of my ancestors had waited, as I had . . . for nightfall to cover their steps . . ."
Paranoia was rife among the militant counterculture infiltrated by the FBI, as in COINTELPRO.
Leonard Peltier's run is retold. And how the feds infiltrated the American Indian Movement (AIM). And how it led to a confrontation at Wounded Knee. And how an FBI agent was shot dead. And how Peltier came to be the one they blamed. But Bob Dylan never wrote a song for him. And Flights tells of the CIA-run Latin American magazine, Mundo Nuevo, a new world magazine for a new order, trying to co-opt writers like Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garca Ma'rquez, as happened with the Paris Review. Paul Robeson's run. The brick that just missed the head of Lorraine Hansberry, writer of the screenplay, A Raisin in the Sun. The CIA's coup in Guatemala in 1954. George and Mary are running. Malcolm is running, cursing. Miguel is running from lies spread about her. Jennifer is running, starving herself".
Flights has a nice quote from George Oppen that describes the common phenomenological experience of humans in this world that is worth pondering:
The mystery for me begins where it begins for Aquinas: The individual encounters the world, and . . . . registers the existence of what is not himself, what is totally independent of him, can exist without him, as it must have existed before him, as it will exist after him, and is totally free of nothingness and death (which is, for Aquinas, the intuition of God. It is at any rate the intuition of the indestructible).
Whitney reminds us that sometimes (even often these days) we must run to find a space where we can remember this common seed understanding of our place in the world when the pressures of controlling power are not shaping us.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Big Brother is all-pervasive, all-invasive, like our Internet of Things, touted by the CIA, and which spies on us through all our appliances, and which augments the data about our lives continuously cataloged by social media and Amazon and shared with 'the government' (not just the USA's). It is an entirely dark world of functionaries under the full control of elites in competition with one another. Flights offers a slightly different alternative. While still dystopic in its depictions of freedom fighters refusing to knuckle under to totalitarianism, Flights is more akin to keep-hope=alive vibe of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which sees a secret society of escaped book-lovers meeting and surviving down by the river Heraklitus, reciting works of culture they love and refuse to forget. Whitney provides an uplifting and spirited experience of free expression at its best -- full of purpose, and full of sound and fury signifying everything.
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