(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
«You wanna fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.»
Tony Morrison, Song of Solomon
The orwellske supersurveillance regime is in full swing. The themes have become leitmotifs for our time – totalitarianism, mass surveillance, infringement of freedom of expression and oppressive regulation of people's behaviour. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the book became 1984 a bestseller. Today we should be concerned with how the media shapes us, distorts reality and promotes the unreliable narrative of the technocratic elite. We need free voices now more than ever. And free readers.
Joel Whitney has put together a collection of stories about famous truth-tellers, dissidents, whistle-blowers and other leftists on the run for their intellectual lives in an environment characterized by counterculture. The collection from the independent publisher OR Books is called Flights: Radicals on the Run. It is edited by Whitney, an award-winning writer from Brooklyn, former features editor at Al Jazeera America, and founder and former editor-in-chief of Guernica, who has written for a variety of publications. He has also previously written, among other things Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers (2017)
Flights contains stories of left-wing luminaries, "all of whom were forced to flee their homes and/or friends because of their progressive views": Seymour Hersh, Lorraine Hansberry, Graham Greene, Paul Robeson, Gabriel García Márquez, George and Mary Oppen, Frances Stonor Saunders, Malcolm X, Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, N. Scott Momaday, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. It's quite an assortment of people and things. The book is written at a hip, effortless pace and has a clear sympathy for the refugees' situation. Renegades and rebels. Protests as a way of life. Revolution for fun. Perhaps we haven't reached the vanishing point yet.
Seymour Hersh, Lorraine Hansberry, Graham Greene, Paul Robeson, Gabriel García Márquez, George and Mary Oppen, Frances Stonor Saunders, Malcolm X, Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, N. Scott Momaday and Miguel Ángel Asturias.
They pursued
The first chapter begins with 1952 and Lorraine Hansbury's trials:
“After the brick is thrown through her window, Lorraine runs and ducks. As a result of the lies spread about him and his book, Graham runs, fights back, laughs. Paul runs, ducks, stands up and sings. Gabo is fleeing death threats made on behalf of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, he flees into exile. […] Frances escapes a neoconservative gaslighting – with the notebook hidden while he drinks himself honestly on cheap wine […] But neither she nor Everardo can escape now. We are running away from their horror, their PTSD. We too are running for our lives.”
We run. As Edward Snowden told us in his memoirs Permanent Record (2019), we all have files, we've all done something 'wrong', we can all get stung if the authorities turn against us – editors, writers, artists, researchers. We are all interested in the panopticon known as the Internet and controlled by the merchants of desire and the planters of doubt. 'National security', understood as security for the few.
Seymour Hersh
Whitney begins with a foreword about, among others, Seymour Hersh, whom we fortunately still have with us, after he has received a lot of attention from both the right and the left over the past decade. For example, his counter-narrative in the London Review of Books (LRB) about how the hunt for Osama bin Laden actually took place. The official story was about drones and covert operations, American courage and Navy SEALS, but it was all bullshit, Hersh said. As Whitney writes in the foreword: “Rather than the enormous expense of signals, paramilitary, and HUMINTEL operations that this operation would later justify, Hersh revealed that bin Laden was killed via a more silent process: a walk-in. An informant hoping to earn the big reward walked into the local CIA station as if checking into a hotel.” Or you can believe the description in Zero Dark Thirty: at 2 + 2 = 5.
Hersh followed up by criticizing the Obama administration for declaring that Assad unleashed sarin gas on his own people in 2013. Hersh didn't buy this and explained why in another LRB article, "Whose sarin?". Discrediting the Pulitzer Prize winner's reputation has been a blood sport of sorts ever since. But Hersh continues to run, posting on the website Substack, where, among other things, he regularly tells the truth about Israel's probably intended war against Hamas.
Grahame Green, Angela Davis …
I Flights repeats Graham Greene his disdain for Hollywood's bungling of the film adaptation of his bleak, truth-telling novel classic about CIA intrigue and cunning, The Quiet American (1958), which Greene believed was a "complete parody". Greene's novel was a foreshadowing of the early American missteps in Vietnam, which were later confirmed by the Pentagon Papers. He blamed the CIA, which had a hand in rewriting the film's script.
The paranoia was rampant in the militant counterculture infiltrated by the FBI.
Whitney recounts Angela Davis' escape. He writes: “Professor Angela Davis, who was wanted for a crime she had not committed, was on the run in 1970 and describes her struggle against panic in her nocturnal transmissions from the hiding place: 'To live as a fugitive means to resist hysteria, to distinguish between the creatures of a frightened imagination and the real signs that the enemy is near.'"
The paranoia was prevalent in the militant counterculture infiltrated by the FBI – such as their projects COINTELPRO.
"Angela Davis, who was wanted for a crime she did not commit, was on the run in 1970."
Also Leonard Peltier#'s escape is recounted. About how the FBI infiltrated the American Indigenous Movement (AIM). And how it led to a confrontation at Wounded Knee. And how an FBI agent was shot and killed. And how Peltier became the one they blamed. And Flights tells of the CIA-controlled Latin American Mundo Nuevo, a new world magazine for a new order, which tried to co-opt writers such as Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, in the same way as the Paris Review. Paul Robeson's run. The brick that narrowly avoided the head of Lorraine Hansberry, the author of the screenplay A Raisin in the Sun. CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954. George and Mary run. Malcolm runs and curses. Miguel runs away from the lies being spread about her. Jennifer flees and starves herself.
Big brother sees you
Flights has a nice quote by the American poet George Open (1908–84) who describes man's common phenomenological experience in this world, and it is worth thinking about: "The mystery for me begins where it begins for Aquinas: The individual meets the world, and [...] registers the existence of that which is not him itself, that which is entirely independent of him, can exist without him, as it must have existed before him, as it will exist after him, and is entirely free from nothingness and death.” For Aquinas, this is the intuition of God – of the imperishable.
Whitney reminds us that sometimes we need to run away to find a space where we can remember this shared understanding of our place in the world—when the pressure of controlling power becomes too great.
In Orwell's #1984, Big Brother is omnipresent, like our Internet of Things, which the CIA praises, and which spies on us through all our devices, and which amplifies the data about our lives that is continuously cataloged by social media and shared with 'the government' (not just the US ). It is a completely dark world of white-collar workers under the complete control of elites who compete with each other.
Flights offers a slightly different option. Although still dystopian in its depictions of freedom fighters who refuse to submit to totalitarian regimes, are Flights more akin to the "Keep Hope = Live" vibe of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where a secret society of escaped book lovers meet and survive down by the river Heraclitus, reciting cultural works they love and refuse to forget. Whitney provides an uplifting and lively experience of freedom of expression at its best, full of purpose and meaning, and full of sound and fury – which means everything.
