| Chelsea Manning, Ronan Farrow and Ta-Nehisi Coates on Terror and Bravery |
| Monday, 03 September 2018 13:18 |
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Excerpt: "At the Sydney Opera House's Antidote festival, there were calls for courage, warnings about surveillance and lashings of political gossip."
Chelsea Manning, Ronan Farrow and Ta-Nehisi Coates on Terror and Bravery03 September 18
They were South African author Sisonke Msimang’s words but could well have been the theme for this past weekend’s Antidote, a festival of ideas which focused on solutions that saw Chelsea Manning, Ronan Farrow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maureen Dowd, Msimang and more speaking out on the Sydney Opera House stages. The event was almost overshadowed by the home affairs department’s decision to issue a notice of intention to deny Manning an entry visa on character grounds last week. But her talk went ahead regardless: Manning video-called in from Los Angeles to talk to Australian journalist Peter Greste, and the delighted crowd gave the US whistleblower a standing ovation for her efforts. The event was about more than Manning though: there was calls for courage, fearlessness and activism, warnings about surveillance and lashings of political gossip. Even Captain America got a look in. This is what we learned. Chelsea Manning: you can’t trust the government to be benevolent She’s known for her bravery, but Chelsea Manning believes the enemy within is the one we should be most concerned about. “Whenever I think about the war on terror, I usually view it from the perspective of everyone else and that is, we’re largely being terrorised by our own state.” Via videocall, the data privacy activist – who served seven years in jail for leaking official secrets – described living in the US as like being under a “domestic military occupation”, similar to being imprisoned with constant surveillance and police presence. She said the lines between the military and the police force were blurred – “and those lines keep getting blurrier and blurrier”. When Greste asked whether dangerous times warranted such measures, her response was firm. “No, because it keeps getting used for bad purposes. You can’t trust the government to be benevolent all the time.” Greste agreed: “National security is often a way of silencing critics.” The Australian journalist was imprisoned in Egypt for more than a year on terrorism charges. The interview started off on the wrong foot when Greste, while asking about her decision to leak nearly 750,000 classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, referred to her by her former name. Manning asked him to refrain from “deadnaming” her – for which Greste apologised. Earlier this year, Manning launched an unsuccessful bid for the US Senate. These days, she said, she’s more of an activist than a politician. But when an audience member asked if she thought Greste should become a politician, she was quick to say no. She was clearly emotional as she explained that when she was door-knocking for her campaign, people would open up to her, sharing their inspiring and heartbreaking stories. And they would look to her for answers. And she said, while professional politicians are likely to have a ready response, she couldn’t give them “a bullshit answer” and she didn’t want to pretend she had one. As Manning fought back tears, the crowd rose to their feet, applauding her.
Maureen Dowd: the embarrassing apricot toddler There’s not much Maureen Dowd doesn’t know about US politics after more than 20 years as a New York Times columnist. The Pulitzer prize-winning journalist knows for example that the late John McCain once considered having his neck done, that the Clintons won’t speak to her and that Obama found her irritating. And she knows that Donald Trump is so narcissistic that his advisors scatter mentions of his name within briefings documents to keep him reading. But there are things even she is uncertain about. For one, she wonders what influence Trump will have on the US’s political future, and whether his rise will encourage Americans to dump experienced politicians for flashy celebrities like Kanye West or The Rock. She doesn’t think there will be another Trump though: “I do think Donald Trump is an aberration because nobody can do what he does; it’s a unique amalgam of scary traits that I don’t think can be replicated by all the mini-me’s.” She’s also not sure what the Democrats will do to counter Trump at the 2020 election, and sees little signs of them grooming the next generation. “You see the frustration among younger Democrats where they feel no one is setting them up to be known.” The one thing she does know is that Trump is helping Americans define who they are – because they don’t want to be like him. “He’s kind of having an energising effect because I think it’s causing people to think about the American identity of who we want to be,” she said. “And we don’t want to be this embarrassing apricot toddler.” Sisonke Msimang: being brave is not enough Sisonke Msimang wants us to get angry about stories – or rather, the lack of stories coming from those imprisoned in detention camps on Manus and Nauru. The South African author, now based in Perth, said the power of stories is evident by the Australian government’s efforts to suppress those of the refugees and their attempts to keep the media away from the detention centres. “That ought to trouble us more than it seems to. In a democratic country where the freedom of expression of race is protected vociferously, when we can’t hear the voices of peoples whose rights are enshrined in international law, we don’t complain? This is stunning to me. Only governments who have something to hide behave this way.” In her talk, Msimang reflected on what it takes to be brave, particularly for those without privilege or platform: “I think there are many brave and outspoken people in detention centres and they have and will continue to speak out, but what they teach is that being brave is not enough. Being brave needs to be supported by others, by a groundswell of organising action and resistance, because individual courage in the face of institutional power can never be sufficient unless it’s supported by mass campaigns.” The author compared the ignorance of Australians to these realities to what she describes as the wilful ignorance of white South Africans to the atrocities committed during the apartheid era. “Bravery belongs to all of us, it belongs to those of us who have a vote and who can insist on knowing, because once you know it’s much harder not to act.” Ronan Farrow: trust that inner voice and fight Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow also spoke on the theme of fearlessness, discussing the year he spent working on the explosive Harvey Weinstein revelations – and the self-doubts, roadblocks and naysayers who tried to hold him back. Speaking days after new allegations that NBC had tried to kill the story before he took it to the New Yorker, Farrow said: “People I trusted turned on me, and powerful forces in the media became instruments of suppression – but that’s not the story I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk about something simpler and more personal,” he said. When he was working on the stories, Farrow said, his career was on the rocks. “I was at a low point, and as a result of my tackling those stories as doggedly as I did, that low point got a whole lot lower … I didn’t have the support of my news organisation ... and after I refused to stop reporting the story, I didn’t have a new contract to look forward to. My book publisher dropped me, I found out another news outlet was trying to break the same story and scoop me – and I knew that I was falling behind. I didn’t know if I was ever going to break the Weinstein story and I didn’t know that, if I managed to, that anyone would care.” Farrow said we’re living in a culture that rewards people for “killing the story instead of poking the bear” or “getting paid rather than protesting”, but that although activists and journalists have very different roles, both need to “trust that inner voice and fight”. “Every person who stared down that moment of uncertainty and listened and did the right thing – those are the people we’re counting on to effect change, that are making change in real time.” In the following Q&A with Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor, Farrow said he was hopeful for the future of investigative journalism – and for the future of #MeToo. “We’ve already come far enough that we’re not going to see a complete rolling back of the clock. I think that already it’s a very different environment for someone who is scrabbling with whether to come forward with a difficult allegation. We’re seeing [changes] with how we handle NDAs [non-disclosure agreements], with how companies approach this issue; the training is changing, the understanding is changing. I do think that’s significant ... We still have a long way to go but we have come quite far.” – SH Ta-Nehisi Coates: white supremacy is baked into America Ta-Nehisi Coates knows how to shock an audience. “I like a blue-eyed blond Captain America,” said the author, in response to an audience member’s question about whether the next embodiment of the Marvel superhero should be black. Coates, who has recently started writing the Captain America comics, describes the superhero as the projection of the white American imagination of itself, who is often disappointed in his country. And he said if that person were black, they were unlikely to be shocked or disappointed with what he saw. “[Captain America was] frozen in time at the point that America called its bravest generation and comes back in this time, with all of our ills and all of our problems, and has to reconcile the dream with the actual reality. I like the blond-haired, blue-eyed white Captain America having to do that work. I enjoy putting him through his paces.” In his conversation with ABC host Richard Fidler, the Atlantic correspondent spoke at length about his 2015 book Between the World and Me. “One of my great frustrations is the lead-up to my writing this book was how much of the politics and the talk was about black anger and there is not enough about black fear.” The book is a letter to his teenage son about what Coates knows about the realities of growing up black in a country where, as he describes it, “white supremacy is baked in”. The author also talked about the impact that comics had on him growing up, not least because he didn’t see the superheroes, including Spider Man and the X-Men, as white. Instead they had a blackness to them because they were outsiders. “When I go into this imaginary world, what I know about being black, on some psychological level, I understood that being black was not about my hair [or] skin complexion … it was about the experience of being alien, being outside, being a pariah, being untouchable.” It was a haunting commentary on a country of which Captain America would surely despair. |
o be brave, you have to know so you can act.”