The lights went out. The old palm tree behind the house fell with a crack. But I did not flinch. I was bending over the faintly glowing screen of the tablet, and repeating after the characters in the book:
‘You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “Thou art”. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed – Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford – in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping – and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean…’
The realization that everything written by Orwell is not just a great prophesy, but a truth of life that turned from fiction to reality, pressed on me like a slab of super dense lead. The fact that it was all written about the totalitarian regimes of the last century, rather than my country and my time made me squirm with powerlessness and humiliation.
I had been deceived – and millions, tens and millions of people had been deceived with me. We had been lead into a trap, like fish lead into a net, like herds of sheep and cattle go into a pen where they are cut, castrated, or killed by electrocution to skin them and cut their carcasses for meat.
Anything can be done to us. That was the main thought troubling me. Big Brother has decided everything for us. He is watching and watching our every our move.
And the Baseball player’s words kept spinning in my head: ‘to become a hero you don’t have to join the military and travel to the other side of the world. You can protect your country right here. Remember Joshua – the front line is everywhere.’
02:28 A.M._
“And so then you decided make information about NSA surveillance of internet users public?” the Lawyer asked.
“Yes and no,” Kold replied. “I simply realised that there’s a war going on in the world, an undeclared, quiet but cruel war. It’s a world war and it would be impossible to work out its scope because it has no end. Conflicts of interests of political, religious and economic groups in the end are embarked on a neverending fight of everybody against everybody. Nowadays, there are a number of conflicting sides. There are rich people who are interested only in increasing their wealth. There is the digital generation which doesn’t want to live according to their fathers’ covenants. There are lumpens who demand bread and entertainment and at the same time refuse to work. There are islamists, who are trying to create a World Caliphate. One quiet player, quite strong until recently by historical standards, left the stage and left very suddenly and unexpectedly.”
“Are you talking about communism?” asked the Lawyer.
“Of course. So,” Kold put his fingers to his forehead, “At first I asked who the octopus harms the most. In other words – who is its main enemy, Who should I pass the information to for it to work? But gradually it dawned on me – I mustn’t choose a side, I mustn’t become a player in the big game on the ‘great chess board’, especially because information can get classified and used to harm others. That is how I realised that I have no alias and lost heart – but it was Orwell who returned me courage.
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“I think that one incident can play a colossal role in the life of every man. I mean accidents of history. If you think about it, the whole of history consists of such accidents.
If Frederick Barbarossa hadn’t drowned during the Third Crusade then there wouldn’t have been the Great Arabic caliphate.
If the Scottish king Alexander the Third hadn’t broken his neck when he fell off his horse, Great Britain would not have existed.
If the beauty Thérésa Cabarrus, lover of the Commissioner of the National Convention Jean-Lambert Tallien, hadn’t ended up in prison, then there wouldn’t have been the coup of 9 Thermidor and the insidious tiger-cat Maximilian Robespierre would’ve sent his enemies to the guillotine again.
And if the Mayflower had hit the rocks by Cape Cod, the United States would not have existed, at least not in the way it does now.
Isaac Asimov described it all much better in his book ‘The End of Eternity’. But I am talking about something slightly different – an accident in the life of a particular ordinary man. For example, a man like me.
It happened – yes, it did happen! – after I came back from Europe but before I went to Hawaii. Well, as I said I wasn’t going through the best time in my life. After the story with poor Herr Hagen I was questioning everything so seriously. Am I serving a good cause? So seriously I almost died, as I said before.
I’ll elaborate. I wasn’t doubting the rightfulness of protecting your country; it was the methods I was doubting.
From our early years, all Americans know: the good always act with ‘clean hands’. Batman will never take hostages, Superman will never blackmail anyone, Spiderman will never hit someone from behind, even if it’s his only chance.
Of course adult life and especially espionage and the intelligence service are not made up the adventures of the superheroes in Marvell cartoons, but…
The basic principles and methods of existence, damn them, can’t be so radically different! That’s why what my so-called colleagues in Zurich committed became like some giant crude humvee smashing through the fragile and colorful stained-glass window of my reasons for serving.
Now my soul was showered in their shards but nothing has appeared in their place and I had no idea who to talk to about it. The most logical thing would be to meet up with Baseball player. After all, he was a psychologist and a good one, but something held me back from talking to this man. Perhaps it was the fact that Mr. Jenkins was a true pro and able to dig into the darkness of someone else’s souls. And I, as you’ve already gathered, was wary of the professionalism of my colleagues.
It was a clear. damp September morning. I was on my way to the Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, not far from Baltimore. I was listening to the radio – old Bon Jovi songs were playing and drinking cold coffee from a plastic cup and singing along with John without any enthusiasm: