History – U.S. – 21st Century – Page 6 – education and deconstruction.com

The Snowden Files

The Book of the Week is “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man” by Luke Harding, published in 2014. This ebook eloquently describes how Edward Snowden became a whistleblower, and the immediate consequences of his actions.

President Barack Obama vowed to curtail intrusive collection of personal data from and on the American people during 2008. A set of policies passed after 9/11, the Patriot Act, originally allowed certain kinds of spying. The goal was to root out terrorists. Instead of curbing the program, Obama authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States government to become an all-out global spying operation. By 2009, it was collecting metadata from millions of American and English citizens, as well as numerous global government officials, through phone records and email. It teamed up with GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s governmental branch that handles intelligence, and later, elicited customer data from the major U.S. tech companies Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. The NSA and GCHQ “…secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre-optic cables that ringed the world.”

However admirable the intentions of government officials might be– thinking they are seeking out evil and preventing incidents of terrorism, their actions are misguided. They might contend that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, so therefore, the program is working. This erroneous reasoning is like the stupid joke: A man is sitting outside on a city street waving around an odd contraption. Someone walks by and asks him what it is. The man tells them it’s an elephant repellent. He is asked how he knows it’s working. He says, “It must be working. Do you see any elephants around here?”

This blogger believes that the privacy violations– arguably unconstitutional– are a secondary reason why the nature of the NSA’s actions are so dangerous. One major aspect that makes the spying so dangerous is that comprehensive searches can be done on electronic-records literally at the speed of light.

Excuse the cliche, but “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Abuse of power is inevitable. For instance, there have been incidents involving the TSA. Throughout history, only bad publicity generated by whistleblowers who have made serious sacrifices– their livelihoods and/or their lives– has stemmed the tide of the evildoing. The same is true with this NSA/GCHQ situation. This ebook likened the spying to the East German Stasi prior to the fall of Communism. This blogger thinks eventually, absent a whistleblower, there would have emerged an individual with the mentality of Stalin or the late U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fortunately, Snowden found a way to act on the conviction of his beliefs in a mature, if illegal, way. He communicated with the right individuals at The Guardian, “… the third largest newspaper website in the world.”

A minor side effect of the collection of massive amounts of data, even if only a fraction of it is looked at– is that mistakes of honest ineptitude will be made. Lives have been greatly inconvenienced at best, due to the erroneous data in credit records, and those whose names have been mistakenly placed on a “no-fly” list, among various other cluster screw-ups of record-keeping entities.

Read the book to learn of the different media cultures in the U.S. and U.K., and the details of this suspenseful saga.

Of Spies and Spokesmen

The Book of the Week is “Of Spies and Spokesmen” by Nicholas Daniloff, published in 2008. This long memoir covers the author’s journalism career, which started in the late 1950’s at the London bureau of the newly formed wire service, United Press International.

Daniloff’s father was of Russian descent, and it was suggested to him that Russian expertise might be in demand in the future. He switched to the Moscow bureau, where he covered the Cold War. This blogger was a bit annoyed by the redundancy of two historical incidents recounted in this book: the U-2 Incident and Soviet leader Khrushchev’s ouster.

Daniloff wrote about various ethical issues of his profession and problems he encountered due to the stark cultural differences between the then-Soviet Union and the United States. The former’s media were entirely controlled by the government. In the early 1960’s, the two major press organizations were Izvestia and Pravda, meaning “news” and “truth.” This blogger has read elsewhere that the joke was that the News contained no truth, and the Truth contained no news. The author found this to be largely correct, as he witnessed a myriad of controversial incidents involving other journalists who had to be let go by their employers– the Soviet authorities accused them of injudicious language in their writings or relationships with certain Russians who were their news sources, or of being spies. “In those Cold War days, Soviet national newspapers seemed to delight in attacking Western correspondents and portraying them as hopeless drunks who behaved in boorish fashion.”

In the late 1960’s, the author became a White House correspondent. He then returned to the Soviet Union. Read the book to learn of: the oppressive environment under which citizens and expatriates suffered in the former Soviet Union, the ways the KGB tried to bait the author and the ordeal he underwent due to that environment, how Soviet-American relations changed through the decades of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, and the policies of the American government concerning source disclosure and specificity of new stories when officials supply information to journalists.

Not Quite Paradise

The Book of the Week is “Not Quite Paradise” by Adele Barker, published in 2010. This is a personal account of an author and university instructor who went to Sri Lanka to teach literature. After her teaching stint in 2001, she returned to observe and write about the conditions of devastation the people suffered in the December 2004 tsunami.

When she first started teaching at the International School at the University of Ceylon in Kandy in the Peradeniya countryside, Barker learned about all the days the university was closed due to holidays, “…election days, election violence days, the religious holidays of four different religions, and university-induced holidays.”

Barker’s American mindset caused her to be stressed by the rat and ant infestation in her rented house, the leaking roof and tropical diseases. “TV has not been possible since the day the monkeys ripped off the antenna from the roof.” She also held the belief that the hobbies she adopted (French language learning and ladies’ football [soccer]) were terribly (British) colonialist, and that bothered her.

The scene at the bank is this: “People conduct their transactions by simply pushing forward en masse to the tellers’ windows.” There is no respect for personal space as there is in the U.S. Someone explained to Barker that in previous years, people got fed up with waiting in line when they were told there was no more of the product– such as garlic– for which they had been waiting hours. Currently, they display orderly patience only in religious rituals.

Nevertheless, “The relief of not being battered by the ongoing emotional sagas of American teenage pop queens and the latest sex scandals that pass for news in the mainstream American press is enormous.”

The presence of four different religions in Sri Lanka has produced civil war on and off through centuries. The author characterizes the country thusly: “Singing geckoes and curries, children in their whites merged with soldiers in body bags and posters of kids in Tiger uniform with their throats slashed.” (As an aside, “Tiger” does not refer to a sports team, but rather, the Tamil Tigers, a mostly Hindu ethnic group.)

Barker writes that in recent decades, the Sri Lankan economy and education system have been adversely affected by various historical circumstances (which has given rise to cultural stereotypes), including but not limited to: colonialism, ethnic conflict and a major natural disaster (the tsunami), that simply perpetuate a vicious cycle.

In 1948, Ceylon (later to be renamed Sri Lanka) became independent from the British Raj. It was then that ethnic strife began. The author met someone who said, “We’re not Sri Lankan anymore. We’re Tamil or Sinhalese or Moor.”

Only two of the three then-national languages (Sinhalese, Tamil and English) continued to be taught in schools. When English was removed from the curriculum, students became less worldly, especially the less wealthy, less privileged ones whose families, unluckily were not listed in the metaphorical “Social Register” in Colombo (the capital of the country). In 1958, a law was passed to make Sinhalese the sole national language. This did not sit well with the Tamil Tigers.

Generations later, the lucky elites continued to obtain lucrative jobs with merely an eighth-grade education. The lower classes have received no guarantee of a bright future, even after completing four years of university education. Therefore, in the 1970’s and 1980’s the latter found Marxism and Trotskyism appealing.

Starting in 1971, the lower classes incited violence, burning tires, jeeps and human beings. Some even attended the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow. A political faction was founded (the JVP), which fought against the Sri Lankan army and common people. There have been student protests, riots and murder raids, with Buddhist monks in the mix, who are not always innocent.

The year 1983 saw a recurrence of the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tiger rebels. The latter began a separatist movement in 1976, claiming that Sri Lanka is their homeland.

Through the decades, political elections have also prompted bloodshed. “The grenade explosions started days before an election.” Sadly, as in many countries of the world, Sri Lanka is a land of natural beauty, but the behavior of some of its citizens has been ugly.

Anyway, education-wise, high school students are required to take two sets of standardized tests, the “O Levels” and “A Levels” in six subjects. The former are taken in what would be equivalent to tenth grade in America, and the latter are college entrance exams. Failure of exams means a future consigned to a low-level job, like selling clothing or other items to tourists in the marketplace.

The Sri Lankan economy was fueled largely by tourism, which basically disappeared due to ethnic violence in the 1990’s, and 9/11. This gave rise to the cultural stereotype that the Sinhalese are indolent. They failed their exams and there are no jobs for them. They might or might not be lazy. They might simply be culturally disadvantaged underachievers.

Read the book to learn about elephants, details of the fighting, why so many Sri Lankans unnecessarily died in the tsunami, and what the author experienced on her return trip in 2005.

Audition

The Book of the Week is “Audition” by Barbara Walters, published in 2008. This is Walters’ autobiography, a detailed account of her personal and professional life. She had a long, illustrious career in TV News. She started out as a behind-the-scenes writer for the “Today Show” on NBC in the early 1960’s, when there was still a lot of discrimination against women. Nevertheless, her hard work at, talent and suitability for her job, over the course of decades, afforded her the opportunity to interview countless famous people; some, multiple times.

There were occasions when Walters received special treatment by her interviewees. In the spring of 1977, she was personally driven for six hours around the Bay of Pigs vicinity by none other than Fidel Castro. Later that year, she witnessed multiple Middle Eastern politicians gather all in one place when Egypt’s Anwar Sadat made (momentary) peace with Israel’s Menachim Begin. ABC interrupted a college football game with the “breaking news.” Viewers telephoned the network to express their displeasure, and after seven minutes of complaining, the viewers got their game back.

Walters was lucky to have helped pioneer the art of the TV interview and enjoyed its best years. She asked hard-hitting, sometimes personal questions that hosts do not ask anymore. She writes that nowadays, TV ratings rise with guests who are attention whores or criminals– whose stories are tabloid articles. Political leaders or celebrities with substance have become a rarity. “We really seem to care only if they are outrageous and call our president a devil or declare that the Holocaust never existed. Stand up and scream and we will interview you, or be reasonable and unheard.” Fortunately, the internet has become a source of intelligent discussion in some quarters– a source that is not under pressure to generate ratings.