“The meeting between these two living symbols of American conscience was historic. It needed to happen. Seeing Ed and Dan together, trading stories, exchanging notes, was both heart-warming and deeply inspiring, and the conversation with Roy and the two former President’s Men was extraordinary,” John Cusack writes in Things That Can and Cannot be Said , his and Arundhati Roy’s account of a historic meeting in Moscow with Dan Ellsberg (who released the Pentagon Papers in the ’70s) and Edward Snowden (the United States National Security Agency whistle-blower).
The conversation touches upon, among other things, Ellsberg and Snowden’s respective journeys from insiders to dissidents, mass surveillance, Ellsberg’s days at the Pentagon under Robert McNamara and America’s gradual transformation into a police state. Equally interesting are Cusack and Roy’s accounts of the meeting — their reactions to the plushness of the Ritz Carlton lobby, the metaphorical import of its physical proximity to the Kremlin, and their reactions to watching Snowden and Ellsberg interact with each other.
While the Moscow meeting is the focus of the book, a description of the preparation for the meeting and journey to Moscow is woven into essays and conversations (mostly between Roy and Cusack) on living in a world managed by the global political elite, the hegemony of the US and its allies, the failures of communism and capitalism and the marginalisation of the “discourse of the Left”. The conversations are a beginning, a stirring of the pot. They leave you with some uncomfortable truths and many unknowns. The prose is often beautiful and the narrative interesting.
On the negative side, one could be forgiven for thinking that Cusack and Roy have an air of self-righteousness, but the importance and honesty of their discussions is powerful enough to get past this sense.
I email John Cusack through his publisher to ask him a few questions on these conversations. My first set of questions is returned because they are “too complex” and would entail him writing another book. The interview below is Take #2.
Can you identify a specific moment when you started getting involved in the issues of mass surveillance and control, or was this gradual?
There has been a sharp erosion of US rights in the last 15 years, with leaps in technology and the blowback against all sorts of state terrorism around the world. The attacks on 9/11 meant, in the US, there was a gold rush for war profiteers and weapons makers and it spawned sprawling new [counter] terror agencies. Fear is big business — as long as history begins in the year 2001, the money never stops. You don’t need a fortune-teller to read your palm or a soothsayer to oraculate… You don’t need the weatherman to know what storm was coming.
While mass surveillance, nuclear arsenals, and outrageously rich foundations built on corporate profits provide great cause for concern, isn’t the world we live in better than the situation we’ve had in the last few hundred years of overt imperialism and an extremely bloody 20th century? Aren’t we moving in a promising direction?
Promising direction? Not for the old empires — and the people that must suffer under them. Refugee crises stoke nationalism — there’s horror in the Middle East, Russia and America are facing off with each other — and Arundhati [Roy] has written about Modi’s India. When the results of the Indian election of 2014 came out, she texted me to say, ‘Fascists in a landslide. The phantoms are real.’ What you see is what you get.
There is an idea in the book that even the language we use is skewed in favour of hegemonic regimes. Is Hollywood doing enough about changing this language?
Pass
In the book, you and Roy talk about living in a managed society, a society managed by the global political elite and the international security establishment led by the US. The need for a ‘new imagination’ is asserted, based on the fact that both communism and capitalism result or will result in failure. But isn’t this ‘new imagination’ the beginning of the next version of a managed world?
No, of course not. I think that’s a kind of semantic evasion of the idea, but it may be predisposed for people who believe they have a soul. This book has more questions than solutions, and as Arundhati said during our conversations with Snowden and Ellsberg, ‘I don’t have the Big Idea. I don’t even have the arrogance to have the Big Idea.’ So, maybe no big new ideas or old big ideas… maybe we need some even older ideas. And, as Arundhati says, the physics of resisting power — our refusal to obey —is as old as the physics of accumulating power.
Hillary Clinton and Julian Assange are not exactly the best of friends; and Trump recently asked the Russians to spy on Hillary Clinton. Are you hopeful for the US given the two presidential candidate choices you have before you?
Pass
The recent lethal encounters between the police and black people in the US: Do you think this is the beginning of the ‘intra-country war’ Daniel Ellsberg refers to in your conversation?
I think we are seeing the police becoming more and more militarised in the US — we go into it in the book.
Do you believe that surveillance with regulation and checks and balances is necessary (such as spying on potential and known terrorists) or do you want the surveillance programmes completely disbanded?
Surveillance is abuse, according to the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. I would refer to The Snowden Principle, the piece I wrote about Snowden, here. ‘The fire that inspired Snowden to take unimaginable risks is fundamentally about fostering an informed and engaged public. The Constitution embraces that idea. Mr. Snowden says his motivation was to expose crimes, spark a debate, and let the public know of secret policies he could not in good conscience ignore.
The questions Snowden poses will not go away. How long do they expect rational people to accept using the word “terror” to justify and excuse the ever-expanding executive and state power? Why are so many in our government and press and intellectual class so afraid of an informed public? Why are they so afraid of a Free Press and the people’s right to know?’
Do you see a longer term role for yourself, once this book is published, as a voice against mass surveillance and control?
I don’t know but I know I will stand in solidarity with those who resist.
In hindsight, are there any other people you’d have liked to see at your meeting in Moscow?
No, it was perfect the way it was.
( Things That Can and Cannot be Said by Juggernaut will be available in all bookshops and its app.)
