Usefully Dumb and Usefully Dumber: Naomi Klein and Glenn Greenwald
October 23, 2016
By Tarzie
I can’t think of anyone more qualified to hold forth on the Proper Way to Oppose The Ruling Class than wealthy clerks who work for oligarchs. So we who agonize over how to end capitalism while respecting the privacy rights of people who topple governments and spread fascism should be very grateful that ruling class fascism enablers George Soros and Pierre Omidyar kindly put their respective administrative assistants, Naomi Klein and Glenn Greenwald, at liberty to commingle their brands on whether or not disclosure of John Podesta’s emails is a step too far. Spoiler alert: The answer from both is yes.
What is power, wonders Klein. Who gets to decide when it trumps privacy? Am I powerful? Are you? Isn’t the Podesta hack the kind of thing Snowden was protecting us from? I am reminded of the right-wing harassment of climate change activists. Assange seems personally and politically motivated. He doesn’t care how the stakes for this election are so very high. I know a war resister who’s living in a church in Vancouver. He wants a pardon. He’s not aiming to destroy anything. Unlike Assange, he’s principled.
Well, you know, says Glenn, Snowden said that actually trying to change things directly is sociopathic and narcissistic, regardless of how abhorrent those things are. Which is why he handed his documents off to me for curation. So that people could know only the things I think they should know and talk about them. I think Assange is alone now in thinking there is a better way than this for handling leaks. He’s been shut inside that embassy for years and clearly it’s driving him insane.
And so on.
When do these people agonize in the same proportion over Empire’s “collateral damage” as they do over largely hypothetical imperial functionaries who are injured or embarrassed by an attack on power? Where is their handwringing over the nazis Soros and Omidyar helped bring to power in Ukraine?
Fucking Klein shilled for empire’s terrorist proxies in Libya. The “tide of history” she called them. Clearly her awesomely nuanced view of privacy and power does not afford protection from knife rape to an official enemy’s anus; nor, seemingly does a Honduran indigenous activist’s brain enjoy protection from death squad bullets. At least not enough to place the person responsible for these violations outside contention for the presidency in an election with the highest stakes ever. For all her revoltingly stupid blather about privacy, Klein’s concerns are clearly partisan. The leaks are hurting Hillary who, like her, is on the Soros payroll.
I won’t dignify this swamp by further wallowing in it. Trust that Greenwald and Klein continue to make complete asses of people who think that the Celebrity Left’s main purpose is something more lofty than containment and discipline, or that riff raff like Soros and Omidyar are their patrons for any other reason. This is a matter of simple fucking common sense. It’s sickening that it’s still subject to debate.
