A few days ago, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot authored an article in Commentary entitled “The Traitor’s Triumph” in which Boot accused NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of being a traitor for revealing the NSA’s illegal and unconstitutional super-secret surveillance scheme to the American people and to the people of the world.
Boot’s article raises one of the great debates of our time: Who is a patriot and who is a traitor. In fact, it’s a debate that has taken place throughout history.
Boot writes that by revealing the NSA’s super-secret surveillance scheme, Snowden betrayed his country. But Boot makes a common mistake. He conflates the federal government and the country. Actually, the federal government and the country are two separate and distinct entities.
One of the best examples of this phenomenon is the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the country from the federal government, something that obviously wouldn’t make any sense if the federal government and the country were one and the same.
That raises an important question: What is the role of the citizen (including a government official) when his government engages in wrongdoing? Does he have a moral duty to support the government regardless of what it is doing? Or does he have a moral duty to stand for what is right even if that means taking a firm stand against his own government?
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were faced with that choice. Contrary to popular opinion, those men were not courageous and patriotic Americans when they signed the Declaration. That’s because they weren’t Americans. They were British citizens. By signing the Declaration, they were taking a firm stand against the wrongdoing of their own government.
Of course, their government considered them to be traitors, the same thing that Boot accuses Snowden of being. The British government took the same position as Boot does — that the citizen who betrays his government betrays his country.
The Founding Fathers, however, believed as Snowden does: that when one’s government engages in wrongdoing, it is the moral duty of the citizen to stand for what’s right and against the wrongdoing of his own government.
This issue also arose in World War II, when a group of students took a firm stand against their own government and even exhorted their fellow citizens to refuse to support the troops notwithstanding the fact that the country was involved in a major war. Those students were called the White Rose and they were taking a firm stand against their own government — the Nazi government.
No doubt that Boot would say, “Jacob, I would consider those students to be patriots because they were standing against Nazism and against America’s WWII enemy.”
But Boot would be missing the point. The point is that the German government took the position that it is the duty of the citizen to support his government and the troops, especially during wartime. The White Rose’s position was that it is the duty of the citizen to make an independent appraisal of what the government is doing, and if the government is engaged in wrongdoing, it is the duty of the citizen to take a firm stand against it.
Take a look at this video, specifically beginning at 8:30. It is an excerpt from the fantastic movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. It depicts the “trial” of brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl for treason for daring to take a firm stand against their own government. The reason I place the word “trial” in quotation marks is because actually it was a kangaroo proceeding before a special tribunal that Hitler had established to try terrorism and treason cases after the terrorist attack on the Reichstag. Since the regular German courts had acquitted some of the defendants in that terrorist attack, Hitler and his minions decided that it would be better to have terrorism and treason cases come before a special tribunal, where the verdict would not be in doubt.
As you watch that excerpt, ask yourself whether the reaction of the judges on a military tribunal at Gitmo would be any different if Edward Snowden were to be brought before them. Indeed, ask yourself whether the mindset of many U.S. federal judges toward Snowden would be any different than the mindset that Freisler had toward the Scholl siblings. My hunch is that Boot would be salivating at the prospect that a military tribunal at Gitmo or a federal judge here in the United States would be treating Snowden the same way that Freisler treated Hans and Sophie Scholl.
Now, ask yourself: If a government official in Nazi Germany violated his oath of secrecy to the German national-security establishment by revealing to a group of Jews that the Gestapo was coming to get them, would he be a traitor or a patriot?
In conflating the federal government and the country, Boot, like so many other conservatives and neoconservatives, cannot bring himself to see that the national-security branch of the federal government is founded on the same totalitarian principles as those that form the foundation of all totalitarian regimes.
But that’s precisely what happened after World War II. In the name of fighting a “cold war” against America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union, the totalitarian apparatus known as the “national-security state” was grafted onto America’s original governmental structure. In the process, it not only became the most powerful branch of the federal government, it also began engaging in the dark actions that are normally associated with totalitarian regimes — e.g., medical experimentation on unsuspecting Americans, secretly bringing former Nazi officials into the U.S. government, regime-change operations, coups, kidnappings, assassinations, torture, partnerships with criminal organizations and brutal tyrannical regimes, and, of course, super-secret surveillance schemes.
Who is the patriot and who is the traitor — the person who takes the position “My government, right or wrong” or the person who has the courage to say, “I will stand with my government when it is right and will stand against it when it’s wrong”?
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a no-brainer.
