OpEds | Thomas Gaist, WSWS
ANNOTATED VERSION
Editor’s Note: We are happy to see the WSWS.ORG site weigh in with their take on the recent Oliver/Snowden program. This is certainly a show that deserves scrutiny and further reflection. While we agree with much of the author’s class analysis, we are not so sure about his complete dismissal of Oliver as a bilious and insidious media figure ultimately bent solely on defending the imperial establishment and its shady tools of oppression. Overall, it seemed to us that Oliver was performing a clumsy tightwire act in which he appeared to denounce on one hand the proliferating surveillance machinery in place, while also cancelling the effect of his own denunciation by trivializing it through callow jokes and—we admit—a fair amount of regurgitation of the main accusatory lines against Snowden. That Snowden kept his composure and patiently and cogently answered all the questions and pseudo questions lobbed at him by his host only confirms his caliber as an intelligent critic of US foreign policy and activist for genuine democracy.
The above is not to offer a general defence of Oliver, whose brand of frenetic, frat humour is frequently not exactly palatable to us, and who has already shown several times arrogant ignorance and a clear disposition to replicate Washington’s hostility toward Third World figures, Russia, etc., but to suggest that a more nuanced approach may be necessary in his case. For, on many occasions Oliver has used his comedy pulpit to raise important issues, treating them with the kind of in-depth, dogged attention that his precursors and godfathers in this kind of faux comedy journalist schtick—Stewart and Colbert—never approached.
The reality is not exactly very heroic. Like almost all mainstream comedians and satirists (the latter sounds like an oxymoron in the current climate of acute self-censorship) making 7 or even 8-figure salaries, Oliver is clearly uncomfortable and nervous when getting close to the unwritten boundaries of “permitted speech” in America’s public space. Thus he treads gingerly on anything that might discomfit the Masters of the Universe, on whom his own burgeoning career depends. In this category, as readers will probably agree, few things are more flammable these days than the concerted effort of the global plutocracy, led by its American branch, to defend its interests by any means necessary, including unceasing wars and the elimination of whatever is left of real democracy, including genuine media criticism.
Fact is, as the abrupt dismissal of the legendary TV icon Phil Donahue proved in 2002, for his strong opposition(1) to the Iraq War, when it comes to its endemic foreign criminality, systemic ills, and myriad domestic abuses, the empire knows how to silence critics.
Furthermore, although there’s plenty of room for doubt, at this point we don’t know how “random” the appalling Times Square interviews actually were, or if they were redacted for effect, but ordinary Americans seldom disappoint when it comes to showing their Olympic ignorance, confusion, and indifference about important topics. Indeed, the almost total effective depoliticization of the American population, reinforced 24/7 by the establishment media machinery, a veritable Orwellian entity, is one of the great nefarious achievements of the US ruling class, and the phenomenon is not young. It is also extremely difficult to neutralize, as many of us who labor in this field can testify. In this discussion, since we don’t buy the automatic, knee-jerk workerist, PC Marxist position any more than the liberal one, we found one of the commenters —libbyliberal—particularly lucid in expressing our own views (we reproduce the original thread almost entirely). Here’s some of what libbyliberal said:
“Oliver is walking a razor’s edge in clown shoes, and in a corporate-sponsored role where he can fall off or jump the shark to the dark side…
I don’t know Oliver’s shows, but on the merits of this one I celebrate what he did. I have been trying to play leftist gadfly at a website that had many low information participants. Opening minds is TOUGH … let alone changing them…I work with very intelligent or potentially intelligent people at my job. Most of them know NOTHING about what is happening in the world and are chillingly indifferent and defensive about being so. They have totally bought into the lesser evilism meme, and Blue Team cronyism for the most part rules. Messengers are not welcomed.
By the way, I do blame the willfully ignorant ostrich-stance Americans and I also blame the mainstream propaganda corporate run media for giving us a government saturated with corruption. I used to think the books of Vonnegut and Heller and Bradbury were exaggerated for satire. No longer. Orwell must be spinning in his grave.”
—Patrice Greanville
Thomas Gaist
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]omedy host John Oliver conducted an interview with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow recently that was broadcast Sunday on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” In the process, Oliver exposed his solidarity with the American state and its vast, illegal spying operations. He took the opportunity of the conversation to come out harshly against Snowden’s decision to leak large quantities of NSA documents.
Pushing for a confession that his actions were potentially “harmful,” the British-born Oliver demanded to know whether Snowden had personally read every single document contained in the files that the former NSA employee transferred to journalists beginning in the summer of 2013.
“I have evaluated all of the documents that are in the archive. I do understand what I turned over,” Snowden replied.
“There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents. Because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents, the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” Oliver retorted sarcastically. He went on, “You have to own that. You’re giving documents with information that could be harmful.”
Oliver repeated the favored arguments of the Obama administration and intelligence establishment to the effect that the preservation of “national security” required the elimination of civil liberties, such as Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary searches and seizures.
“We all want perfect privacy and perfect safety, but those two things cannot coexist,” Oliver said, comparing the NSA spy programs to a “Badass pet falcon,” which he asserted could not live together with “an adorable pet vole named Herbert.”
Oliver’s attack on Snowden reached extraordinary and insulting heights. At one point, he interrupted the internationally respected whistleblower for sounding too much like “the IT guy from work… Please don’t teach me anything. I don’t want to learn. You smell like canned soup,” Oliver said to the courageous defender of democratic rights, who has now endured nearly two years of persecution and exile.
Oliver’s hostility towards Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is an expression of his staunch support, almost universally shared among well-to-do strata in American society, for the continuation of the US government’s surveillance programs.
In a couple of brief asides, Oliver half-heartedly suggested that minor reforms to the system of authoritarian shadow courts and antidemocratic laws erected to legitimize the spying might be necessary. But the development and permanent maintenance of mass surveillance programs by the US government went unquestioned.
If nothing else, the Snowden interview should help clear matters up for those who still had illusions about Oliver, Jon Stewart and their ilk. Behind their sophomoric antics, designed to dupe more naïve elements looking for something genuinely antiestablishment, lies a run-of-the-mill, conformist outlook, in keeping with the lavish material rewards they receive. (Oliver made an estimated $2,000,000 in 2013.)
In one of a few moments when he adopted a serious tone, Oliver cited the failure of the New York Times to fully redact one of the NSA slides, an oversight he claimed was a “f***-up” that exposed a US intelligence operation against al Qaeda in Mosul, Iraq.
In another, he warned viewers that WikiLeaks’ Assange was “even less careful than Snowden” about the material he was leaking. He mocked Assange, who remains trapped inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London as a result of his efforts to expose US war crimes, comparing him to “a sandwich bag full of biscuit dough wearing a Stevie Nicks wig.”
Pointing to video clips of street interviewees who showed increased concern over surveillance after Oliver referred to reports that NSA agents view nude pictures sent by targets via email and text message, the comedy host contended that Americans’ interest in the matter does not extend beyond such matters.
From here, Oliver arrived at the notion that the failure of even minimal reform of the surveillance operations to gain traction results from the fact that ordinary Americans can only be convinced to think about politics through appeals of the most backward kind. “Domestic surveillance, Americans give some of a sh** about. Foreign surveillance, American don’t give any sh** about,” Oliver said.
When Snowden noted that such abuses are “seen as no big deal in the culture of the NSA,” and that agency employees “see naked pictures all the time,” Oliver issued another absurd slander against the US population. “This is the most visible line in the sand for people. ‘Can they see my dick?’” Oliver said.
If wide sections of the population lack accurate knowledge about recent developments in government spying, it is the outcome of the systematic and deliberate efforts to conceal the truth by the corporate media to which Oliver belongs.
Snowden made patient efforts to work around Oliver’s willful ignorance and class arrogance, seeking to explain that along with the “dick pictures” obsessed over by Oliver, the NSA is collecting every other form of data on the planet, from US and non-US individuals alike, in open violation of the US Bill of Rights and international law.
“If you have your email somewhere like Gmail, hosted on a server overseas or transferred overseas or [if it] at anytime crosses outside the borders of the United States, your junk ends up in the database,” Snowden commented. “Google moves data internationally and NSA catches copies during this process, through PRISM, with Google’s involvement. All the major companies, Yahoo, Facebook, the US government deputizes them to be its surveillance sheriffs,” he added.
Oliver is not engaging in political satire, of which there is a long and proud tradition, in any meaningful sense of the word. Genuine satire attacks the powerful, exposing their lies and hypocrisy. Oliver, on the other hand, instinctively aligns himself with the US ruling elite and its historically unprecedented surveillance apparatus, one of the foundations of a police-state dictatorship. Sunday’s installment of Last Week was an exercise in pro-NSA propaganda and cultural degradation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[box] Thomas Gaist is an editorial writer for the wsws.org site, organ of the Social Equality Party. [/box]
(1) The repulsive, blustering opportunist and endlessly self-promoting egomaniac Chris Matthews was instrumental in the dismissal of Phil Donahue. Anyone who has followed this windbag’s career knows it. In fact, we’re being too kind to him. Matthews incarnates the kind of media critter that makes imperial propaganda possible. For that alone, he and his ilk deserve to be tried as witting accomplices in high war crimes, as promulgated by the Nuremberg Tribunal in the closing chapter of WW2. As the Wiki notes:
In July 2002, Phil Donahue returned to television after seven years of retirement to host a show called Donahue on MSNBC. On February 25, 2003, MSNBC canceled the show, citing his opposition to the imminent invasion of Iraq by the United States military. Donahue was the highest rated show on MSNBC at the time it was canceled, managing to beat Chris Matthews‘ MSNBC show Hardball in the ratings.[18] But Matthews was a big proponent of the Iraq invasion and he cultivated a good relationship with MSNBC’s management before Donahue came to the network. He played a crucial role in procuring the firing of Donahue and “saw himself as MSNBC’s biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue’s show.”[19] In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.
Soon after the show’s cancellation, an internal MSNBC memo was leaked to the press stating that Donahue should be fired because he opposed the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq and that he would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.”[20] Donahue commented in 2007 that the management of MSNBC, owned by General Electric and Microsoft, required that “we have two conservative (guests) for every liberal. I was counted as two liberals.”[21] READ MORE
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