Edward Snowden’s Girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, Moved to Moscow to Live with Him
▻https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/10/narrative-destroyed-edward-snowdens-girlfriend-lindsay-mills-moved-moscow
Vital to the U.S. government and its assorted loyalists in the commentariat is to depict whistleblowers as destined to live miserable lives. That’s the key to their attempt to deter unwanted disclosure: the message that doing so will result in the full-scale destruction of one’s life. That’s what explains the grotesquely severe mistreatment and 35-year prison term for Chelsea Manning, as well as the repeated, gleeful predictions that Snowden will “end up like Kim Philby,” the British defector to the Soviet Union who, it is claimed, died a premature death from alcoholism, solitude and all-around deprivation.
The reality is that none of that has ever applied to Edward Snowden. Particularly when compared to what he expected his life to be upon deciding to embark on the whistleblowing path — decades of imprisonment in the harsh American penal state, if not worse — his post-Hong Kong life has been fulfilling and rewarding. He speaks, and writes, and is interviewed, and has become an important voice in the global debate he triggered.