{"id":6905,"date":"2013-07-09T08:33:16","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T08:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=6905"},"modified":"2013-07-09T08:55:02","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T08:55:02","slug":"snowden-the-modern-romantic-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=6905","title":{"rendered":"Snowden, the modern romantic hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"romantic\"<\/a>by Rike Bosman<\/p>\n

Snowden may have broken the law, but so did the Founding Fathers of America when they issued that famous declaration 237 years ago.<\/p>\n

They did so in defiance of a powerful empire, just as Snowden has done. The world became a better place because they chose to defy the laws of their time, and Snowden’s idealistic act may leave us better off too.<\/p>\n

One suspects that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of those revolutionaries would have been thrilled.<\/p>\n

Five hundred years ago, Snowden would have sought cover in a church. In the middle ages, the romantic hero, seeking sanctuary from charges of treason, would have thrown himself on God’s mercy. Once across the holy threshold, he would have been untouchable by earthly justice.<\/p>\n

God is a lot less powerful these days, sadly. If there is no higher law, Snowden needs a lawless zone instead, like an airport or an embassy. His best hope is not heaven, but the Grey Area.<\/p>\n

Why are Snowden and Assange such fascinating figures? They are postmodern outlaws who have given up the comforts of an ordinarily life to save our freedoms. They are compelling because their predicament is both dreadful and very romantic.<\/p>\n

Snowden has made the tenuous nature of our laws and nations and conventions explicit. Borders, and international laws have become arbitrary since he has blown the whistle. The political map is just a picture with lines drawn on it now, and it depends on the backing of a very powerful force.<\/p>\n

How powerful? As we watch Snowden’s challenge, we also see the real grasp of that power unfolding.<\/p>\n

Snowden flew into terminal F at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport from Hong Kong on 23 June, shortly after his passport was revoked by the US authorities.<\/p>\n

Terminal F is described by a reviewer on airlinequality.com as an “awful prison”, but it is at least connected by a mile-long walkway to terminals D and E, which are said to be better appointed. Enterprising journalists who have flown into Sheremetyevo in the hope of finding Snowden have so far failed to do so. This may be because of a relatively unusual feature of the airport, the airside wing of the Novotel hotel, where passengers in transit without Russian visas are permitted to stay.<\/p>\n

Some have speculated that the fugitive could be holed up in one of the hotel’s spartan rooms, awaiting the call from a friendly nation to leap on the next plane out of Moscow and return to a slightly more normal life. An AP reporter who spent a night there in search of Snowden called every room he could, to no avail; his efforts to seek him out in person were thwarted by the security guard stationed outside his door. He could be in the hotel, yes. But he could be in the airport’s detention quarters, so infamous that they once featured in the UNHCR’s guide to the problems facing the world’s refugees; he could be paying $20 an hour for a spot in a VIP lounge; he could be browsing the duty-free matryoshkas, somehow unseen by the world’s press; he could be somewhere else altogether. For the time being, at least, he is out of reach.<\/p>\n

The uncertainty over Snowden’s whereabouts only makes the question of what his life might be like at the moment more tantalising. The airport is maybe the quintessential example of what have been called “non-places”, the grey places.<\/p>\n

The modern airport is based on the assumption that everyone’s from somewhere else, and it becomes, therefore, an anthology of generic spaces \u2013 the shopping mall, the food court, the hotel lobby \u2013 which bear the same relationship to life.<\/p>\n

The Iranian exile Mehran Karimi Nasseri, found himself in the no-man’s-land of the departure lounge at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport for fully 18 years. There was also Ram Charan, a successful business consultant who lived entirely on planes and in hotels until the age of 67, and whose only concession to normality was a weekly parcel of dirty laundry sent to an office in the US.<\/p>\n

Uniquely modern fugitives, they are taking refuge in uniquely modern spaces. It’s not a coincidence that Snowden is a man of the internet, a space like the airport terminal or the embassy where the conventional rules don’t apply; a space of all nations, and of none; the beginning of a journey into the unknown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Rike Bosman Snowden may have broken the law, but so did the Founding Fathers of America when they issued that famous declaration 237 years ago. They did so in defiance of a powerful empire, just as Snowden has done. The world became a better place because they chose to defy the laws of their … Continue reading “Snowden, the modern romantic hero”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[782,1295],"tags":[3053,3819,3818,3817],"class_list":["post-6905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-in-depth-coverage","tag-ed-snowden","tag-founding-fathers","tag-fugitive","tag-romatic-hero"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/romantic.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6905"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6908,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6905\/revisions\/6908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}