Written by George Raymond   

The U.S. government, which has illegally and unconstitutionally been monitoring our private communications for years under the justification of “the war on terror,” is outraged that private citizens have finally enabled us to monitor theirs. But, given what the government has actually been doing, compared to what we have been doing, our monitoring of them is much more justified than their monitoring of us.

Because of their decades-long desire to leave citizens transparent to themselves, and leave themselves free to get away with deceiving their citizens, the representatives of the U.S. government lack the ethical substance to choke on their own hypocrisy. Luckily, instead, they will choke on the revelations themselves.

The U.S. government’s ways of subverting democracy and rule of law have been exposed. Its pose of upholding democracy and rule of law, always suspect, has now been discredited. The government’s further pretence that this isn’t true is a patch-job, upheld willingly only by those who think, in error, that they are standing up for America when they stand up for Washington’s right to “control the narrative,” and obscure, when necessary, the underhanded things that “must be done” to “defend our interests.”

The parallel to the culture of impunity in the Soviet Union, and the problems that impunity finally caused, is telling. The point of glasnost was that the institutions of the Soviet zone could no longer function well, because layer after layer of deception had made it impossible for those institutions to deal honestly with the people or with each other. If the institutions were to have any hope of pursuing anyone’s real interests, including, in the not-so-long-term, their own, they needed to stop “cooking the books,” both in the narrow and the broad sense. The layers of deception needed to be peeled away, and embarrassing facts exposed, so that the institutions no longer had any choice but to be honest going forward. Today, with our corporations and government seeking success after success through our much superior dedication to “cooking the books,” we are kidding ourselves if we assert that the deceptions from Washington are any less harmful or habitual.


We cannot leave it up to Washington whether or not to be honest with us. The indications become greater and greater that lies are their standard operating procedure. We still don’t know what their worst lies to us are. They will not tell us themselves. They will gladly tell us of all the laws they have passed that make it illegal to expose their lies. Which is only to say, they have always known how to protect themselves from accountability for deceiving us.
There is no-one at the top in Washington to stand behind glasnost in America, like Gorbachev did for the Soviets, and those who fight for exposure of Washington’s deceptions have to stay loyal to their cause with the nation’s entire governmental system arrayed against them. But remember, when we were British subjects, our resistance to Britain was illegal, for the British government made the law. That did not mean we needed to sit under British law until we were crushed into obedient subjects, or that our resistance to it was immoral. Treason to a rotten system- is it treason? Loyalty to government impunity- is it loyalty? Luckily, we do not need a revolution; what we need is a rededication to a transparent government. We were not vigilant enough to keep the government honest, so now we need a cure. Glasnost is the cure, and if the sycophant media cannot deliver it, "outlaws" will, and they will until we understand the governmental crimes they have alerted us to, and not allow the criminals in power to use the law against them.

If our version of glasnost does not proceed until all the most important liars in the government are exposed and held to the truth, ask yourself: What will that “loyalty” to Washington’s unaccountability for its worst actions leave them free to do in the future? Given what we think our country should stand for, is that “loyalty”?