The trip to the Spy museum was a fascinating experience. The amount of ingenuity and creativity that has been put into the art of espionage over the centuries was amazing. I saw bugs concealed in buttons, guns disguised as carved pipes and walking sticks, and all manner of techniques used by spies to hide in plain sight and exchange information without being seen. Some of the things were so outlandish I hadn’t ever really expected they were used in real life, things I had only ever seen in media like James Bond movies or The X-Files, and always thought were exaggerated. While some of the exhibits, especially the old relics from the cold war and world war II, were really entertaining, it was clear that a profession that governments put so much mental effort into must be a very important one.
I felt that the spy museum tied in well with our class’s recent discussions of Machiavelli and the nation-state. Spies are agents of the state, working for the state’s security above all else, and willing to use rather extreme means to achieve this end. The theory that the state’s physical survival is the undisputed first priority of any ruler connects to the role of spies very obviously. This, in combination with the rather unsettling exhibit on cyber-attacks, makes me wonder how much the ways states use to keep these priorities have changed over time.
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