Edward Snowden and the barbarians

Over the last week, as I've knocked about some of my old haunts on holiday, I've had a number of Kiwis - friends and relatives and more casual acquaintances, all of them thoughtful, self-consciously civilised people - commiserate with me over the barbarism of my adopted homeland of Tonga. "Isn't it terrible how the king there controls everything?" one friend asked. "Do you ever worry about being eaten?" a relative inquired, not entirely in jest. I have seen eyes glazing over, as I try to explain that Tonga had a modern, democratic constitution ensuring free access to land by the year 1875, and that it was antipodeans, not tropical Polynesians, who were still sailing slave ships across the Pacific and  making alliances with headhunters a mere century and a half ago.

Every so often an event arrives which highlights, in neon flashing lights, the hypocrisy inherent in the claims of Western nations like New Zealand to embody civilised values. The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were two such events; the current persecution of American whistleblower Edward Snowden is another.

After revealing that his government was spying illegally on its own citizens and on much of the rest of world, Snowden has been convicted of treason and espionage in the Western mass media, and harried from one country to another, as government after government proves itself too cowardly to offer him sanctuary. It is hard to read about Snowden's travails without thinking of the pursuit of Leon Trotsky from one nation to another in the 1930s, as European governments frightened by his message made life impossible for him. Trotsky eventually found a haven in Latin America, and the same continent may come to Snowden's rescue today.

I'm pleased that Snowden hasn't turned up in New Zealand, because this country's role as a footsoldier for American imperialism in Afghanistan, Sinai and the Pacific and its absurd persecution of the absurd Kim Dotcom suggest he would not get a friendly reception.

Here's a piece I wrote a couple of years ago about the hypocrisy of the civilised West in the face of barbarism. I left it out of my last book of poems because it seemed too self-righteous and cliched, but I'm posting it now as an utterly ineffectual show of solidarity with Edward Snowden.

The Barbarians

Barbarism can never triumph over civilisation: 
barbarians are inferior to civilised men and women.
The conquerors cannot be barbarians, then,
despite their high fires of books
and the wire round the transit camps.
We must be the barbarians.

It is true that we resemble civilised men and women,
relaxing on the sidewalk of a potholed street,
warming our spare hands on chipped cups of tea,
enjoying our lunchbreak, enjoying the break in the rain,
sharing our rations of cigarettes, our rations of gossip.

Each of us remembers the day the guns grew hoarse,
the day the whole town had to stand to attention,
the day Olaf forgot to close his shop,
refused to stand outside, on the dirty kerb,
while the conquerors called their roll,
the day that Olaf got dragged out of his bakery,
away from his half-kneaded sculptures –
his half-finished masterpieces,
the busts of loaves and croissants arranged on steel trays –
the day Olaf’s knees hit the kerb together
and the fists went into his mouth like bread.

Each of us remembers Olaf in a different way.
One of us scribbles poems –
witty satires, and tub-thumping polemics -
and publishes them in his drawer.

One of us keeps his grandfather’s pistol in a shoebox,
under the bed in the spare room upstairs.
One of us turns tadpoles into frogs,
in the bathtub he is forbidden to fill.
One of us drafts orders for new consignments of boots.
One of us supervises a thesis on Nietszche.

We lean forward in our chairs
and watch a train push out of the barricaded station,
past the emptied zoo, toward the city wall.
We note the pine windows but wave anyway.

Perhaps Olaf is crouching in the third carriage,
in the warm crowded dark,
pushing his fat face against the wood.
Perhaps he is a squinting through a crack in the pine,
through a sliver his big fists made.

If Olaf glimpsed us for a second
we would look like cheerful, civilised men and women,
relaxing on the sidewalk of a potholed street,
warming our spare hands on chipped cups of tea,
enjoying our lunchbreak, enjoying the break in the rain,
sharing our rations of cigarettes, our rations of gossip,
our rations of happiness,
knowing that his train will not stop again here.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]