I enjoyed reading a short little book recently called “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder.  The sub-title of the book is 20 lessons from the 20th century and it explains quite a lot about how, when people don’t stand up against dictators or people who flout their democracy, disaster can often follow quickly for that country. 

It also gives examples such as when e-mails are leaked, like during the 2016 Presidential campaign, and how piercing somebody’s privacy can humiliate them and disrupt their relationships.  The book says, “No-one has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive … words written in one situation make sense only in that context.  The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.”

In short, what he is saying is that there is nobody out there, if all their e-mails are exposed for example, who would look good.  Nobody can survive that type of scrutiny or to put it another way – embarrassment.  People will always write or say things that can tend to embarrass them at a later stage, even on blogs that become dated with time and may reflect an opinion one held but has long since changed, but to take e-mails out of their context is an act of falsification in the first place, never mind of course it is a violation of privacy.  We should all remember that the next time we are gloating over something that has been released somewhere and understand that while we might have a small context from the media or wherever we are seeing those words, that we don’t fully understand why they were written, when they were written or the context to how they were written and the truth is, as the book says, “Words written in one situation make sense only in that context.”