Philip Tankovich - Entry 5 (Taussig)

     Snowden is probably working hard in his office in Russia. He is probably protected by guys with machine guns smoking cigarettes, or maybe he's not - but it seems to fit just right. Nevertheless, he is creating a worldwide debate that has led me and many others to write about him. Considering that this post in managed by my Google account it will probably be checked by the NSA because it contains "tangible things" that only need to be 'relevant' to the subject of which the NSA wants to pursue. The facade with which they pursue data invites one to think that it is used to prevent terrorism, but in reality all this data collection has relocated the societal fear of terrorism and placed it on the infringement of human rights. We are constantly monitored, almost willingly with our Facebook and Google accounts, giving us all a strange feeling that Big Brother is watching.

The revelation that this article bring to the surface is that there is a mass consciousness that is being fooled of its freedom and truth. We are led to believe that we have privacy, that we are free to live our lives intimately, but in reality we are being constantly monitored through the numerous facets that the government has instilled in private companies such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, etc., making these very companies the puppets of a power hungry nation, namely the USA. All of our information is transferred to the government so they can scour through the filters to find the 'terror suspects' and prevent terrorism. If only they knew that the government itself was suspect number one and produces a much more tangible and personal terrorism for society. Sounds a bit like fascism, don't you think?

Whilst reading the Taussig reading, I at first did not understand why these two readings had been paired together. On the one hand there is the threat to security to millions of people, and in this case, a brutal account of colonialism. These two articles seemed extremely detached, until of course, I understood the notion of the Culture of Terror - for this is their shared ground. In Taussig, we see how the colonists in the Congo had moved their focus away from rubber-collecting and transferred it onto being brutal captivists. The simple idea of toasting champagne to whoever manifested the greatest number of deaths is immediately repulsive and sickening. Nevertheless, this all happened because of the Culture of Terror that the colonists created and sustained during their time in the Congo - focusing on instilling fear into the local Indian population rather than following their original purpose of gathering rubber.

What the NSA is doing seems an awful lot like what the colonists of the Congo did. Of course they do not beat us and kill us, but they do attack us consciously. The NSA has created a culture of terror, under which all Americans (and many others) feel a certain uneasiness knowing that they are constantly being watched. George Orwell only need to add 30 years to his novel to make it a reality, considering that all this data gathering on a mass scale reveals Big Brother's interest. The NSA has created this with the 9/11 attacks and has sustained it for the last 13 years through a series of secret and mysterious ruling (which Taussig claims to be the heart of terror - the unknown).

Ultimately, the greatest revelation comes at the end of the Taussig article when he introduces the theme of the Colonial Mirror. This mirror is the reflection of the colonists - revealing the savagery they use in fear of the Indian's using the same savagery. The mirror reflects back the barbarity of the social relations that the colonists had created and sustained as a form of terror, and this very mirror is still visible today as a Terror Mirror - namely, that in the pursuit to fight terrorism, the NSA itself has become the terror.