Richard Miller: I was reading the work of Raul Hilberg, who wrote about the destruction of the European Jews in the Holocaust: "We've long known that the process of destruction was an undertaking step by step."
I realized that there was a chain of destruction, that what he was talking about could be expressed by links in a chain. Around the world—in more than one society—people do the same things again and again, decade after decade, century after century.
Now this chain of destruction begins with the phase we can call identification in which a group of people is identified as a cause for problems in society. People start to perceive their fellow citizens as bad; they're evil. They used to be worthwhile people, but now all of a sudden for some reason their lives are worthless.
The second link in the chain of destruction is ostracism by which we learn how to hate these people and how to take their jobs away, how to make it harder for them to survive. People lose their place to live. Often they're forced into ghettos where they're physically isolated, separate from the rest of society.
The third link is confiscation. People lose their rights, civil liberties. The laws themselves change so it's made easier for people to be stopped on the street, patted down, searched, and for their property to be confiscated. Now once you start taking people's property away, you can start taking the people themselves away.
And the fourth link is concentration—concentrate them into facilities such as prisons, camps. People lose their rights. They can't vote anymore, have children anymore. Often, their labor is exploited and in a very systematic form.
The final link in the chain of destruction is annihilation. Now this might be indirect, by say, withholding medical care, withholding food, preventing further birth. Or it might be direct, where death is inflicted, where people are deliberately killed.
These steps tend to happen of their own momentum without anybody forcing them to happen.
Researchers have shown that activity in the nucleus accumbens, deep inside the brain, increases during chills. “What’s interesting about this,” says Grahn, “is that it’s what we call a reward structure. So it responds to all sorts of biological rewards like food, or sex or drugs. And the chemical that’s released during musical chills, dopamine, is one that is also acted on by things like cocaine or amphetamine or other intensely pleasurable experiences.”
Placido Domingo: His imagination, his ability to really use both hands, the independence of the right and the left, giving us everything, everything that was possible for every instrument.
Charles Barber: His was charisma beyond any human definition of it. You could not take your eyes off him. You simply could not. It would be like watching Richard Burton; no one else need bother be on stage when Burton was speaking, it was simply pointless. And in fact when I watched Otello — I watched it on a Monday and a Friday at the Met — when I actually saw him work, I began to think it was a bit unfair to Domingo and Ricciarelli and Diaz, because no one was watching them, they were only watching Carlos.
Placido Domingo: One of the unbelievable things that I remember is to see the public at the beginning of Otello. He was conducting and I was about to come to sing the Esultate, I was going from the side of the boxes in Covent Garden and I could see that nobody was paying any attention to the stage. Everybody was looking at Carlos, what he was doing. And that’s really unbelievable. And that was really so special that the people they were captivated, they were really, absolutely hypnotized by what Carlos was doing, and that I will never forget as long as I live, you know.
Peter Jonas: When Carlos arrived, he arrived about a week before the first rehearsal, unlike most conductors, of course he was so nervous, so frightened, as he always was — jittering really — spent the last two or three days of spare time going into the library and with his own material which he had sent ahead of time, checking that the librarians had marked every single bowing exactly as he wanted it, from his master part. And he wanted unequal bowings. These days, when people watch orchestras at the Proms, they’re all bowing the same way. Carlos didn’t like this. He didn’t want the first violins and the second violins to bow all the same way; he wanted the first desk to bow one way, the second desk to bow the other way. So the bowings were all different, which he thought would create a seamless sense of legato. And he was passionate about all little signs, and hieroglyphics in the parts, indicating here ‘smile,’ in the cello parts ‘smile.’
[. . .]
He was always absolutely in panic before a concert. I mean, this happened throughout his career, whether it was an orchestra concert, whether it was an opera performance, he was in panic. He was scrupulously prepared, scrupulously rehearsed, he demanded rehearsal conditions that nobody else had. Even in the opera, players couldn’t change their seat. He was so prepared, over-prepared if you like, but in panic. He would be in the dressing room before a rehearsal, three hours before, before a performance three or four hours before, and would live in the opera house or the orchestra hall and soak up the atmosphere, working himself up into a frenzy of fear, panic and paranoia.”
Charles Barber: But his problem, his frustration, his anxiety, is that no matter how great the orchestra – Berlin, Vienna, Concertgebouw, Chicago, name it – no matter how great the orchestra, none of them, none of them, in any way, met what he had already heard as he studied the score. And this was for him a matter of immense frustration, immense. And so he doubted himself, and so as time went on he conducted less and less and less. And it is not because he was lazy – people sometimes say that and they make jokes or they don’t know what they’re talking about – he worked very hard. It is because, I think, more and more he was less enamored of the profession and less enamored of his gift within it.
Everything? What's the point? I mean I sure as shit don't know. I mean, but, neither does anybody else. Okay, we're all just winging it, you know? I mean the good news is you're feeling stuff. You know? And you got to hold on to that. You do. I mean you get older and you don't feel as much. Your skin gets tougher.
Question by /u/masondog13: What's the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?
Snowden's response: This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.
At the same time, we should remember that governments don't often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, "Data and Goliath"), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.
But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?
Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had--entirely within the law--rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?
Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures.
How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent.
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn't to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where--if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen--we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new--and permanent--basis.
Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.
We haven't had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we'll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they "can" do rather than what they "should" do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.
In such times, we'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to re-balance it toward just ends.
