Katharine Gun Quotes
The world is moving in a completely fascist, corporate direction. It worries me, it should worry us all.
Bright, Martin. "The GCHQ whistleblower." The Observer, Guardian News & Media, 3 Mar. 2004.
This futuristic work attempted to project American life in the year 2000—then 112 years in the future. It is remarkable how many elements he successfully predicted. In this quotation a character in 2000 looks “backward” and correctly describes what occurred well after Bellamy’s death. This prediction describes the early 20th century quite well.
The reason that his quotation is memorable is that it illustrates how rapidly political norms can change. Here in 1872, there was general agreement that imperialism was undesirable. By the turn of the century—only 27 years later, imperialism would be the accepted foreign policy of the United States with only a minority holding to is undesirability such as Mark Twain and his Anti-Imperialist League.
Katharine Teresa Gun (née Harwood) (born 1974) is a British linguist who worked as a translator for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In 2003, she leaked top-secret information to The Observer, concerning a request by the United States for compromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the 2003 Security Council, who were due to vote on a second United Nations resolution on the prospective 2003 invasion of Iraq.
