Snitch Culture
by - Written: Dec 10 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: --
Cons: Print so small as to be illegible to those with poor vision
The Bottom Line: SNITCH CULTURE is not for the paranoid or for those who see life through rose-colored glasses, but will scare the living daylights out of you.
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| Kidnykid's Full Review: |
SNITCH CULTURE is about exactly what its title suggests - that we have indeed become a culture full of snitches.
Before I go any further, I need to make the same distinction Jim Redden, the author of SNITCH CULTURE, makes. He does not deride an honorable and worthy activity called whistleblowing, the activity of a citizen living on the right side of the law who reports illicit or illegal activities to the appropriate authorities in the hope that those authorities will intervene to the fullest extent of the law. Generally, whistleblowers literally "blow the whistle" only on their own turf - perhaps their bosses are embezzlers, or they were almost forced to engage in illicit activities, or whatever, but the point is that they are honest citizens reporting dishonest or illegal behavior that they have seen or almost been forced to participate in. Redden rightly derides the fact that many whistleblowers lose their jobs in the erroneous belief that they are the snitches causing disunity (their only choice presumably being to allow the illicit activity to go on while they look the other way).
What Redden dislikes is that people are often given incentives to act in a genuinely disloyal fashion. Literate baby-boomer readers of this review are aware of the FBI's spy activity on noted "subversives" such as John Lennon and others who dared to disagree with the then-conservative American government of Richard Nixon and his cronies. Those on J. Edgar Hoover's list of people to be spied upon were basically in similar straits - the worst one could accuse Martin Luther King, Jr. of, for example, was a lack of faithfulness to his marriage vows. (While he is dealing with his Maker about this problem, it is hardly considered a crime worthy of the FBI director's personal attention!)
The problem is that this mentality is continuing to this day. We have all heard of what has happened with zero-tolerance policies in public schools after the Columbine attack; it wasn't unusual to hear of children getting punished severely for bringing relatively-harmless disposable eating utensils to school, or for playing "cops and robbers" with their fingers during recess. Redden talks about youngsters who get punished just as severely for including references to death in works of fiction produced for English assignments and other schoolwork.
Included is a chapter on the snitch work private agencies are doing. According to Redden, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have rather extensive snitch networks, and are not hesitant to use those networks to obtain information. He even states that their snitch networks routinely provide them with information which the organizations then share with the FBI and other government agencies. (These government agencies had been looking for a way to get around the post-Watergate restrictions on their own spy activities, so they decided to sign agreements with agencies such as the ADL and the SPLC with this covert purpose in mind.)
These are just some samples of what Redden talks about in SNITCH CULTURE. He believes strongly that the use of "snitches" (as opposed to whistleblowers) is highly dangerous for American society, as we can never be sure of our privacy. For all we know, we might be married or otherwise related to a snitch in our immediate families, someone assigned to spy on us and to deliver the results of that spying to school or work authorities. We are likely not even doing anything illegal when this occurs, either; if we do something legal and ethical that is not something the authorities like, the snitch squeals on us and bingo! We find ourselves in deep legal trouble, often trouble so deep we can never fully extricate ourselves from it. Think, also, of the damage to our reputations; if we so much as look sternly at our children behind closed doors, we might find ourselves the victims of an accusation of abuse, and if enough people find out about the accusation, no amount of proof of innocence will ever fully satisfy some people, who will continue to feel (rightly or wrongly) that we are guilty of the accusation of abuse.
Put plainly, this is not a book for the already paranoid. If you have problems with believing - despite the evidence - that people are spying on you for no good reason, you'll be sickened even further by reading SNITCH CULTURE. Those who most need this sort of book - the sort of people who believe that everyone's basically good and that the incidents described in SNITCH CULTURE never really happened (again, despite ample evidence to the contrary most of the time) - will probably not like it either because it will disturb their most precious notions of reality. (You know the type - people who simply do not want to be confused with the facts as they stand, but who would prefer to believe blatant lies that confirm the way they see the world.)
Another problem I noted while reading this book is that the font used when printing this book is very small. If you are visually impaired, you will have a very difficult time reading it without magnifying equipment. For a book like this, which needs to get to a fairly wide audience to present disturbing facts, this is a major fault. It precludes a significant percentage of the population from reading SNITCH CULTURE.
If you are willing to face disturbing facts and are not paranoid, however, SNITCH CULTURE is a must-read. If you aren't paranoid before you start reading it, you will be paranoid (at least a little bit) after you are finished with the case-history section at the end of the book. It is published by the alternative Feral House, and it is likely available either on-line or through their printed catalogue.
Recommended:
Yes
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