Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ To the conformist and the shapers of the conformist mentality, this must surely sound like a most dangerous and radical doctrine. Have we permitted the lamp of independent thought and individualism to become so dim that were Jefferson to write and live by these words today we would find cause to harass and investigate him? If Americans permit thought-control, business-control and freedom c-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism.

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

I hope we are not witnessing the further development of that infamous line between whites and Blacks, between long-time dissenters and recently awakened ones and Black America. Last week, the trial of George Zimmerman seemed to be competing against the trial of Pvt. Bradley Manning, if you listened to the Pacifica stations or read daily reports from the two trials. Black radio hosts focused exclusively on the Zimmerman trial and the murder of Trayvon Martin. On the other hand, white hosts featured those who are following Manning’s trial.

Both trials say much about the domestic and foreign policies of this United States Empire. Both are linked to each other as extensions from one and the same state of tyranny. It does not matter that Zimmerman acted as a “private” citizen. Hatred and fear surely killed Martin, and as the video Manning released, showing the indifferent if not brutal manner in which military personnel gunned down journalists and further pursued others attempting to assist the journalists, hatred and fear was there too.

We should recognize the pattern of tyranny in the attempt by those supposedly representing justice to vilify (and thus justify) the murder of a 14-year-old Black boy and the prosecution of 22-year-old white whistleblower.

Trayvon Martin was marginalized. Manning is marginalized. There is a connection easy to see if hatred and fear are not allowed to control what we see and hear from the Empire and all its minions, as Dr. King would say, of “shapers of conformist mentality.”

What would Jefferson do today if he remained steadfast to his principles? What would happen to Frederick Douglass, who escaped the plantation where he had been enslaved, and managed to speak out against slavery, and even wrote an “incriminating” autobiography, a first-hand document revealing not only the brutality of his particular masters, but also further exposing the moral bankruptcy of a nation, on the one hand, proclaiming its allegiance to “freedom,” while upholding an ideology of tyranny?

Sojourner Truth, too, escaped the embrace of slavery to travel throughout northern cities denouncing the US practice of terrorism within its freedom-loving borders. In fact, you could argue that Malcolm, King, Cesear Chavez, and any number of dissenters who freed themselves from the “shapers of conformist mentality,” risked everything, including their lives, to expose the wrong doings of the US Empire.

They were courageous whistlebowers.

Edward Snowden, the former technical assistant for the CIA, former analyst for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, follows in this tradition.

At the outset, it should be made clear that Booz Allen is a private contractor, which means, Booz Allen, is a corporation, hired by the US government, specifically, the National Security Agency (NSA), which has as its director a 4-star general, Keith Alexander.

Booz Allen has long and deep ties with the government-

the kinds of ties that contractors pursue and covet. Contractors stand to gain an edge on competitors by hiring people with the most closely held knowledge of the thinking inside agencies they want to serve and the best access to officials inside. That typically means former overnment officials (“Leaks Highlights Key Role of Private Contractors,” Salon.com, June 10, 2013).

One example to consider is that the current head of national intelligence, James Clapper, was once a former executive for Booz Allen. Mike McConnell, Booz Allen’s former vice chairman, “held Clapper’s position under George W. Bush,” according to Salon.

In the meantime, many of the “representatives of the people,” those in Congress, receive big checks from corporations such as General Atomic Aeronautical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Gumman, and Aero Vironment. Drone companies donated to the campaigns of Buck McKeon, R-CA, (124,500), Silvestre Reyes, D-TX, (97,000), Darrell Issa, D-CA, (45,000), Loretta Sanchez, D-CA, (43,000), Gene Green, D-TX, (8,000), Steve Pearce, R-NM, (1,000), and others (“The Drone Makers and Their Friends in Washington,” KPBS.org., April 11, 2013).

Congress is in the service of the corporations.

To make matters worse, members of the Congressional intelligence committee are privy to less and less of the “intelligence” operations conducted by these private contractors. While these representatives for the people in Washington, claiming to be protecting the Constitution of this nation, the civil liberties and well being of its people, and not those of warmongering corporations, are also responsible for ensuring the executive branch does not over reach its powers, creating a dictatorial regime catering to the interests of corporate/military.

We have the progression from the idea of democracy, the goal of freedom from tyranny to tyranny itself. From one presidential administration to the next, we have the consolidation of alliances between the corporations and military under the leadership of a Democrat or Republican. It makes no difference. Tyranny has progressed. We have the progression of tyranny, which always welcomes collaborators to contribute to a representation of “democracy,” chuckling along in the most brutal manner.

The proliferation of government-hired intelligence contracts, of military intelligence units, of the CIA drone campaign, of building construction to surround more secretive spying activity, and of executive signings, should be enough for anyone in fear of tyranny. The US Constitution does not support a dictatorship! That most of this activity is conducted in secret should dispel the mantra of “Change” created a few years ago by corporate PR firms and then echoed by the corporate media. Executive kill lists and an “overseas target list for cyber-attacks” (Greenwald and MacAskill, The Guardian, June 7, 2013) is not an exhibit of the kind of courage displayed by Sojourner Truth or Frederick Douglass.

This is tyranny!

We have a crisis! We have terrorism! While the real crisis is capitalism’s use and infliction of terrorism itself to impose austerity programs globally, two successive presidents, one Republican and the current Democrat, have told us that the crisis is out there. “Terrorists” are out to destroy us and everything we stand for!

There is “an enemy” to combat, “an evil” to suppress which has historically meant  - a peoples’ hearts and minds to win - by hook or crook.

The “shapers of conformity” come in all colors these days. Equal opportunity! The “shapers” - leaders in the proliferation of tyranny-- need to believe they are right and then they are capable of anything, as S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher argue in “Questioning The Banality of Evil,” www.thepychologist.org, (Vol. 21-Part 1, January 2008).

Haslam and Reicher: “Tyrannical leaders only thrive by convincing us that we are in crisis, that we face threat and that we need their strong decisive action to surmount it.” The crisis, the threat comes from an enemy, an “outgroup.” The role of such leaders, as Reicher’s study revealed,

becomes even more dangerous when they tell us that ’we’ are the sum of all virtues so that the defense of virtue requires the destruction of the outgroup that threatens us. These are the condition which allows groups to make genocide normative and to represent mass murder as something honourable.”

The followers in the honourable right to destroy and kill do not so much “suspend their capacity to make informed moral judgments and relinquish responsibility for what they do to those in authority,” as was previously believed. On the contrary, as Haslam and Reicher’s study of the Nazi fascist regime reveals. Participants of that regime “identified strongly with anti-semitism and Nazi ideology.” Their active identification with the regime’s ideology allowed them to justify and condone “the oppression and destruction of others.”

In 2003, when Edward Snowden joined the Special Forces to “help free people from oppression” in Iraq (“Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations,” The Guardian, June 8, 2013), he had no idea that he would be surrounded by those identifying with an ideology of hate and violence. The war was not about freeing Iraqis from tyranny. “Most of the people training us,” Snowden recalls, “seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone.”

Out of Iraq, Snowden joined the CIA and worked, wrote investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, on “IT security.” Eventually, he was stationed in Geneva, Switzerland “responsible for maintaining computer network security.”

“Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world...I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”

The secret operations and disclosures about individuals made him “feel uncomfortable.”

Snowden left the CIA and found employment with Booz Allen Hamilton.

When leaders cry “crisis” and engage the nation in combat, surveillance must thrive. Booz Allen’s business is surveillance. When leaders cry “crisis, crisis,” they need money from bankers, foot soldiers and generals, and they need surveillance. The most dangerous people with the potential to effect the gravest disruption of capitalism is the American people.

Booz Allen makes money by spying on the “enemy,” and given this is a capitalist venture, in the business of making the world safe, it supports and encourages leaders to see the enemy everywhere and anywhere. Military commanders agree with this progressive thinking about war, the enemy, national security.

Corporations such as a Lockheed Martin or a Booz Allen, attentive to the leaders’ call to war, pro-actively and creatively design and develop technology and collect the best (read: believe in the might of the US) computer-savvy “storm troopers” from among the willing, and push to gather “intelligence” from everywhere and from anywhere. Good business is the expansion of business!

Booz Allen’s contribution to the war on terrorism, then, has served its stockholders quite well. The corporation earned $5.9 million from US government contracts.

The 29-year-old Edward Snowden received over $200,000 a year to collect “intelligence” on American citizens (“Leaks Highlights,” Salon). But it turns out that Snowden was not one of the willing, not one of the content-with-status-quo, enslaved on the plantation - for most should be aware, the linguistic expansion of the plantation has made it possible for the US Empire to make people, at home and aboard, accept the concrete presence of tyranny as freedom.

The impressive title and job and income at Booz Allen was not freedom, as Snowden came to realize. He sat at his computer among the ideologues of anti-freedom such as he had in the military and in the CIA. Snowden took a courageous step, removing himself from the chains of the “national security” apparatus, and speaking out to journalist Glenn Greenwald.

When asked by Greenwald if he had given any thought to how the US government would respond to his actions, Snowden had this to say:

...You have to make a determination about what it is that’s important to you. And if living - living unfreely but comfortably is something you’re willing to accept...you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that that’s the world that you helped create and it’s going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that’s applied. (“‘Your Being Watched,’ Edward Snowden Emerges as Source Behind Explosive Revelations of NSA Spying,” -Democracy Now!, June 10, 2013).

Snowden had looked for a leader better than Bush II and, in 2008, supported the election of Barack Obama. He told Greenwald, Obama’s election “gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary.” But, then, like many Americans, he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies” that he thought would be reined in. And then he knew: “You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.”

Dr. King would be proud of Edward Snowden. He is a runaway on the loose and no tyrannical order can stand to have such an individual outside the confines of a prison or coffin. But it is up to us who believe in freedom from the tyrannical arms of a corporate/capitalist/military state to protect him by standing with him.