I recently moved to a new apartment in Brooklyn. In the basement of the building, next to the elevator, there is a mysterious and remarkable book case. I don’t know who curates this book case, or if it’s crowd-sourced from a bunch of literary geniuses that happen to live in my building, but the selection is like a revisionist take on a Great Books syllabus.
I picked up a gray, serious-looking book called The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The back cover, instead of the usual blurbs and puffery, has this:
“For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately” - The author
It is an exposition and devastating moral indictment of the USSR and the Gulags, or secret prison camps, that it had to keep full of fearful and oppressed citizens in order to survive. I am only at the end of the first section, but Solzhenitsyn has already brought home for me the crushing insanity of a government determined to keep its citizenry in a constant state of paranoia and fear of arrest.
The most frightening section has been a simple explanation of the law known as Article 58 of the criminal code. The article is in that part of the code dealing with “crimes against the state” and as Solzhenitsyn puts it, “…there is no step, thought, action or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.”
Importantly, the next sentence is this: “The article itself could not be worded in such broad terms, but it proved possible to interpret it this broadly.”
That disconnect between words (or meaning) and interpretation was the tool that the Soviet secret police used to terrorize millions of people. And, unfortunately, it made me think about some recent Obama administration defenses of the War on Terror.
Let’s look at Solzhenitsyn’s take on the Soviet law first. Section 10 (out of 14) of Article 58 outlaws:
“Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subversion or weakening of the Soviet power… and, equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content”
About this, Solzhenitsyn writes:
1) “The scope of ‘agitation containing an appeal’ was enlarged to include face-to-face conversation between friends or even between husband and wife, or a private letter.”
2) “The word ‘appeal’ could mean personal advice. And we say ‘could mean’ because, in fact, it did.”
3) “‘Subverting and weakening’ could include any idea which did not coincide with or rise to the level of intensity of the ideas expressed in the newspaper on any particular day.”
4) “The term ‘preparation of literary materials’ covered every letter, note or private diary , even when only the original document existed.”
He concludes: “Thus happily expanded, what thought was there, whether merely in the mind, spoken aloud, or jotted down, which was not covered by Section 10?”
Chilling.
Now, even the written words of Section 10 are unimaginable (for now, I hope) in American law and so I am decidedly not suggesting that thought crime exists in America. But that strange mindset (rhetorical move or willful distortion or whatever you want the call it) that allows “agitation” to mean conversation is uncomfortably familiar to me.
Take this, from the White Paper laying out the Department of Justice’s legal reasoning behind drone strikes on American citizens abroad. First, the memo restricts drone strikes by (among other ways) requiring the target to be posing an imminent threat to the U.S. Then, this:
First, the condition that an operational leader present an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.
As far as I know, that is precisely what imminent means. This was the maneuver that theoretically justified the death-by-droning of a 16 year-old American citizen sitting in an outdoor restaurant with his friends, simply because he was the son of an accused al Qaeda leader.
This, if true, is even more disturbing – from a CNET article that made waves and was adamantly but inconclusively denied by intelligence officials:
A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a specific American citizen.
If you can convince yourself that universal data collection doesn’t “target” anyone for surveillance, then you can convince yourself that private conversations are a crime against the state. I’ll let you use your imagination from there so that I don’t end up in the NSA’s gulag.