By Becky Akers
When a former president of the United States who also ran the CIA enthuses about “Turn,” AMC’s new series on the American Revolution’s spies, it’s a good bet the show dispenses propaganda rather than history. And when another of the CIA’s has-beens lavishes more praise on the program, he confirms its status as propaganda.
“Turn” ought to have hooked me when it debuts Sunday: I’ve published a novel about the Revolution’s most loveable spy, Nathan Hale (“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”) and another about its heroic traitor, Benedict Arnold. But I won’t be watching. My tolerance for exploiting 18th-century patriots to justify the 21st-century surveillance state is almost as low as the NSA’s respect for the Constitution.
And exploitation leavened with outright lies comprises “Turn’s” marketing, just as it does the surveillance-state’s justification. Cablefax.com reports that “Former CIA director [Michael] Hayden described himself as a fan [of ‘Turn’], and yes, his background played a part in that. ‘The American public has an uneasy relationship with its espionage agencies. It shifts back and forth,’ he said. … ‘What this shows is that espionage is as old as the republic. American espionage is baseball and apple pie. It goes back to our roots.'”
Call me touchy, but my “relationship” with “espionage agencies” that spy on me doesn’t “shift back and forth”; it’s consistently all hate. Nor does “American espionage” as Michael Hayden and his fellow spooks practice it “go back to our roots.” And it’s closer to Russian roulette and apfel strudle than “baseball and apple pie.” Finally, comparing the colonists’ tentative, clumsy and extremely limited spying on the powerful British army to the federal government’s 24/7 espionage against us and the rest of the world is viciously mendacious.
For starters, our ancestors fought the Revolution before James Bond made spying cool. The 18th century loathed spies as we do child-molesters or the TSA. We can measure that contempt in the punishment captured spies received: public hanging, in accordance with Deuteronomy 21:23 (“… he that is hanged is accursed of God …”) – a reference that packed enormous punch in an age as biblically literate as the 1700s.
Why did Americans so detest spies? One of Nathan Hale’s friends floridly explained when he tried to talk his buddy out of volunteering for his first – and last – mission behind British lines: “Who respects the character of a spy, assuming the garb of friendship but to betray? The very death assigned him is expressive of the estimation in which he is held. As soldiers, let us … not stain our honor by the sacrifice of integrity. …”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve detected nary a whiff of worry from the NSA about stained honor or sacrificed integrity. Instead, these gung-ho eavesdroppers draw smiley faces in their how-to manuals when intercepting yet more millions of our emails.
Second, Americans fought the Revolution against an overweening, tyrannical, bureaucratic empire. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the grandchildren of those rebels now languish under an overweening, tyrannical, bureaucratic empire – one whose evil King George III could never have begun to match, even on his worst day.
Much has been made of the minuscule taxes that nevertheless drove the colonists to war, but we can extend that to other aspects of the respective governments, too. For example, in the 1770s, Britain was morphing into the bureaucratic nightmare it now is, but its agencies largely supervised the army and navy while leaving civilians in peace. No EPA dictated to landowners, no OSHA bossed employers, no DMV granted or withheld permission for drivers of carriages.
Still, slender as London’s shackles seem to us, American patriots longed to live free. They said so over and over, in letters home, in their journals, in songs around the campfires and in taverns, in their newspapers, schools and churches. They backed those words with deeds, taking arms against soldiers who were as well-equipped, professional and terrifying for their day as U.S. troops are now. What little spying the rebels managed was narrowly directed against an enemy in war, a corrupt empire with its regulations, taxes and control.
But rather than an enemy at war, the surveillance state spies on us, its taxpayers. That makes it the most menacing threat to liberty ever known. American patriots would have vehemently “Turn”-ed against it, never resting until they had abolished each of its execrable agencies, pledging their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to the struggle.
Can we do less?
Becky Akers is the author of two novels, “Halestorm” and “Abducting Arnold.” Both are set during the American Revolution, when Peeping Toms were horsewhipped rather than handsomely paid to spy on citizens.
