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There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia.I was born during the Cold War and I don't see it that way. In fact, I think you have it precisely backwards.
I remember being alive when the USSR and East Germany were going concerns, and those countries seemed so horrible -- the USA really was on what any sane person (by my definition) would describe as the right side of that struggle.
Living under constant surveillance, scared to speak out even in private, corruption and bad pretense in place of the rule of law? Those things were horrible, and living under such a regime sounded unimaginably awful.
Fast forward some decades and here comes Snowden. That shit really resonated with me and virtually all friends of my age (39).
America is becoming that kind of place. Most of us had a creepy feeling that was happening after the G. W. Bush debacle, but Snowden proved it.
It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children.
The Cold War resonates, but in exactly the opposite of what you describe. We've got all that shit now: hyper-surveillance, secret and therefore meaningless 'laws', kidnapping, torture, America has fucking gulags now. The difference between us and East Germany is now mainly a matter of scale. But as Snowden showed, we were scaling up pretty fucking fast.
Snowden blew the lid off of it, he exposed the massive scale of it, and then he was literally running for his fucking life like some kind of Jason Bourne figure. He had a massive, ruthless security apparatus chasing him, willing do who knows what, and if they caught him it meant he was going to be tortured in solitary confinement for the rest of his life like Bradley Manning.
Nobody in their right mind would begrudge him from going any fucking place he had to in order to escape that.
And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed.
I was born during the Cold War and I don't see it that way. In fact, I think you have it precisely backwards.
I remember being alive when the USSR and East Germany were going concerns, and those countries seemed so horrible -- the USA really was on what any sane person (by my definition) would describe as the right side of that struggle.
Living under constant surveillance, scared to speak out even in private, corruption and bad pretense in place of the rule of law? Those things were horrible, and living under such a regime sounded unimaginably awful.
Fast forward some decades and here comes Snowden. That shit really resonated with me and virtually all friends of my age (39).
America is becoming that kind of place. Most of us had a creepy feeling that was happening after the G. W. Bush debacle, but Snowden proved it.
It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children.
The Cold War resonates, but in exactly the opposite of what you describe. We've got all that shit now: hyper-surveillance, secret and therefore meaningless 'laws', kidnapping, torture, America has fucking gulags now. The difference between us and East Germany is now mainly a matter of scale. But as Snowden showed, we were scaling up pretty fucking fast.
Snowden blew the lid off of it, he exposed the massive scale of it, and then he was literally running for his fucking life like some kind of Jason Bourne figure. He had a massive, ruthless security apparatus chasing him, willing do who knows what, and if they caught him it meant he was going to be tortured in solitary confinement for the rest of his life like Bradley Manning.
Nobody in their right mind would begrudge him from going any fucking place he had to in order to escape that.
And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed.