Anzac Day 2011

Anzac Day 2011

 

Carnage incomparable, and human squander

  

On this Anzac Day:

If there is one thing that can be said of war it is that it is a massive betrayal of Humanity
It is a monstrous failure of human imagination, vision, ingenuity and intelligence.

It is an unconscionably, and intentionally, blind refusal to allow any other possibility.

It is a willingness of the old and corrupt to inflict permanent damage on the young and innocent for the sake of what?

Impermanent, pathological and ugly ideology.

Whatever justifications and rationalisations may be made, war is the coward’s way.

War is the easy choice of the cheat, the sneak, the corrupt and the fake.

Or the delectable first choice of the bloodthirsty and the brutally mad.

All this can be said of the political “leaders” who lead their regiments from behind, who conduct their precious wars safely from behind a desk (under which they are probably fondling a small but hopeful erection) in a place far away from flying bullets.

It cannot be said of those whom we honour on this Anzac Day. For whatever other reasons they went to fight, they have also gone to fight to protect us and we are grateful. And we are sorry for the pain, the damage and the horror that they became because they could not forget. As we should not.

Peter Cundall has a new CD out and it’s not about gardening.

An iconic Australian unleashes the raw emotion of the world’s greatest war poetry. Australia’s beloved gardener shows a very different side as he reads anti-war poetry. With orchestral music accompanying the readings, this is a rare insight into ex-Gunner Peter Cundall’s life in war.

Here’s a taste. You can buy the CD anywhere, including ABC Shops. [Update: availability uncertain]

 

 

And here is the full Sassoon poem:

 

Aftermath – Siegfried Sassoon

 

 

 

Have you forgotten yet?…

For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same,—and War’s a bloody game….
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack,—
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll never forget.

 

 

Here is Dylan Thomas reading of one of our favourite anti-war poems (if there could be such a thing):

 

Naming of Parts – Henry Reed

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

 

 

And this is perhaps the great Wilfred Owen’s most harrowing poem:

 

Mental Cases

 

 

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, – but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

– These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable, and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
– Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
– Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

 

  

 Lest we forget fail to get the lessons of the pointlessness, the tragedy and the inhumanity of war.

 

Especially on Anzac Day.

Women in Uniform

Women in Uniform

Women Are Too Emotional

P oor old dill-brain Barnaby Rubble comically suggested today on Insiders that perhaps he was a bit old-fashioned about women in uniform. 

“  I just couldn’t get my head around shooting a woman. Maybe that makes me a bit old-fashioned and I imagine other people get themselves in the same position. Nor would I like to see a lady shot.

It’s not a joke, Joyce. Leopold Bloom’s Day is over, gone. You are a dinosaur.

What these men – politicians and brass – just don’t get is that they don’t own women. Women are not “their” women. They do not own them.

Their personal opinions and sensitivities simply don’t enter the equation. They are irrelevant. It is not up to them to decide for women what women in uniform (or not) may or may not do, or whether they should be “permitted” to serve in the front line.

Men never did own women.

They just got away with pretending to — for a long, long time. Some men, sadly, in many cultures still get away with it by intimidation. As do almost all men in some cultures. 

Why are women supposedly [they’re not, actually] so bad at maths? Because Barney keeps telling them that “this is six inches”.

Of course any person who wants to be in the front line has to be competent.

But some pundits are saying they need to be “psychologically capable” as well. (Ah, the old, “women are too emotional” ploy.)

Which apparently means that at the officer level  – as allegedly demonstrated by several young officer trainees – they have to be emotionally mature enough to think it’s a real hoot to broadcast their sexual conquests on Skype at whatever cost to the victim.

Sadly, of all the (voluntarily) military people Sir Roger has met many seem to be immature, ignorant, reckless dickheads who clearly fail to understand that they really are being readied to put themselves in the way of a bullet or an IED.

Get over it Joyce.

If anyone – woman or man or anywhere in between – chooses to travel to distant, exotic lands, meet interesting and different people, and kill them, then that is their choice, whatever your difficulty ‘getting your head around shooting a woman’ (I can’t believe he actually said that).

Sir Roger asked himself:

“Am I really willing to call Joyce “a total, ignorant fuckwit and neanderthal sexist” concerning just about anything but particularly about women in uniform, you know, directly, to his face, as it were?”

“And yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Assange – Wanted: Dead or Dead

Assange – Wanted: Dead or Dead

 

“Why wasn’t Assange garroted years ago?”

 

Sir Roger had thought that there was a limited number of people who had urged or advocated the murder/assassination/execution of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.

Two people had stood out particularly – Canadian Professor Tom (“Obama should put out a contract”) Flanagan and US Army Lt-Col. Ralph (“Assange should be killed”) Peters.

Now he discovers there is a small website where you can find a much larger number of people involved in what looks to Sir Roger a lot like incitement to murder.

It’s “People OK With Murdering Assange“.

So it’s the usual suspects except it’s not all FoxNews or crackpot Republicans (but I repeat myself).

Australian terrorism law defines a terrorist act as

“an action done or a threat made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause including the intention of intimidating the public or a section of the public and where the action causes serious physical harm to a person or causes a person’s death, or endangers a person’s life.”

Advocating a terrorist act means directly or indirectly counselling the doing of a terrorist act, or directly or indirectly providing instruction on the doing of the terrorist act.

The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as

“…the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”.

The UN General Assembly resolved (non-bindingly) that

…Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them…

So in general…

…surveying the various academic definitions of terrorism, Vallis concluded that:

  • “Most of the formal definitions of terrorism have some common characteristics:

    a fundamental motive to make political/societal changes;

  • the use of violence or illegal force; attacks on civilian targets by “nonstate”/”Subnational actors”;

  • and the goal of affecting society. This finding is reflected in Blee’s listing of three components of terrorism:

1. Acts or threats of violence;

2. The communication of fear to an audience beyond the immediate victim, and;

3. Political, economic, or religious aims by the perpetrator(s).”

See if you can discern the vaguest hint of any sentiment or intent described in the definitions above, in any of the following statements made in the American media.

 

BOB BECKEL – FOX News commentator

“A dead man can’t leak stuff…This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

Reading this over very carefully, one is wondering whether a person can be a traitor to a country of which he is not a citizen and wondering, too, whether it’s actually possible for one individual to break absolutely every law of a country with 50 states and numerous territories, and indeed how a Fox News “analyst” could have completely examined the facts of Assange’s life in relation to every single law of the United States – civil, criminal and corporate – and come to his conclusion so swiftly.

One is left only in awe of such an intellect. And yet one struggles to grasp the logic of a person who is “not for” the death penalty nevertheless advocating the intentional punishment of a person with death by gunfire. But perhaps one is indeed dwarfed by genius and can never hope to comprehend the product of such an advanced intelligence.

  

ERIC BOLLING – FOX News commentator

“[Assange] should be underground — six feet underground. … He should be put in jail or worse, hanged in a public forum.”

 

 JOHN HAWKINS – townhall.com

“5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange

[ … ]

” … there’s no reason that the CIA can’t kill him. Moreover, ask yourself a simple question: If Julian Assange is shot in the head tomorrow or if his car is blown up when he turns the key, what message do you think that would send … ?”

Sounds a lot like advice – instruction, even – on how to carry out an act, do you think?

 

RUSH LIMBAUGH

“Back in the old days when men were men and countries were countries, this guy would die of lead poisoning from a bullet in the brain.”

Just wondering … does this bring a flutter of recognition? Why does Sir Roger have flashes of Dallas? Tucson?

RUSH LIMBAUGH

“(laughing) Ah, folks, even Greg Palkot of Fox News interviewed Assange, which means that Roger Ailes knows where he is. Ailes knows where Assange is. Give Ailes the order and there is no Assange, I’ll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it.”

 

WILLIAM KRISTOL Chairman, New Citizenship Project 1997 to 2005, co-founder Project for the New American Century (PNAC), board member of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel.

“Why can’t we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are?”

You gotta love the political sophistication of the guy who fought so hard to get the “Coalition” into Iraq to root out those pesky weapons of mass destruction at the cost of only several hundred thousand lives.

 

G. GORDON LIDDY – Former White House Adviser

“This fellow Anwar al-Awlaki – a joint U.S. citizen hiding out in Yemen – is on a ‘kill list’ [for inciting terrorism against the U.S.]. Mr. Assange should be put on the same list.”

Sir Roger is musing whether Mr Liddy would therefore logically agree that all people whose statements and actions coincide with the generally agreed definitions of advocating terrorist acts ought to be on the same list? But no, Sir Roger fears that Liddy and the others in this list would subscribe to the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

 

JOHAN GOLDBERG – Editor-at-large of National Review Online

“I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead? …Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago? It’s a serious question.

Is it also a serious suggestion?

 

 DONALD DOUGLAS – Right-wing blogger

“I won’t think twice if Julian Assange meets the cold blade of an assassin, and apparently a significant number of others don’t care for the guy.”

Sir Roger wonders if Mr Douglas realises that a prerequisite of thinking twice is to have thought once.

 

 MARC SCHENKER “Vancouver American Politics Examiner” whatever that means

“So if you look at Peters’ call to have Assange killed analytically, it makes a lot of sound sense, and he probably even has a legal footing to stand on.

What might it mean to kill someone ‘analytically’? Would that mean having a pedant bore them to death, Sir Roger wondered pedantically. What might it mean legally for Schenker to be making the suggestion – to who knows which unstable or merely fanatical mind – that a person who followed his exhortations and actually killed Assange would meet with legal approval?

The question is, when it is clear that all of these people are advocating and urging an illegal and potentially terrorist act and, whether or not the act is done they could be charged with offences under US federal and state laws, why has no action been taken or warning given by any legal or political official in the US, or any representations been made by anyone in Australia?

Sir Roger is left after all this with the most disturbing mental image of a mass of men, of advancing age and declining virility, greying hair, bloated bellies, wrinkling skin, sitting in a circle, their pants around their knees, trying to excite their various and reluctant erections, jerking as fast and hard as they possibly can to the pornography of death in a mutual masturbation society.

“God damn, Earl! Ah hain’t bin so hard since the last time we burnt a cross and linched a nigger! Ah think ah might be a-cummin’!”

 

But that’s Sir Roger’s mind for you.

 

You Can’t Handle the Truth!

You Can’t Handle the Truth!

 

… This was a lie and we could not let them publish it …

 

We keep thinking of Jack Nicholson‘s character’s justification for the secrecy that governments and their institutions maintain over their citizens – that is to say, their owners, their employers, the “sovereign people”:

You want The Truth?
You can’t handle The Truth!

It’s the only possible explanation.

Governments and their functionaries can only be thinking that their citizens – who are the actual authority of the State – are incapable of dealing with reality and need to be cotton-wooled, treated like mushrooms if you like, kept in the dark and fed bullshit, to play with their toys and live their fantasy lives while the powerful look after the real games like big boys, as such people have been doing since long before Machiavelli shone his own light on their games.

 

Rep Ron Paul tweets:

“ Re: Wikileaks- In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.

Daniel Ellsberg (re)tweets:

“ For less than $3 you can buy a copy of the Pentagon Papers from Amazon yet they won’t host Wikileaks.”

Here’s what Hillary Clinton said on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square:

“ A China that has made enormous progress economically, and that is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership, should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal.

 

This anniversary provides an opportunity for Chinese authorities to release from prison all those still serving sentences in connection with the events surrounding June 4, 1989. We urge China to cease the harassment of participants in the demonstrations and begin dialogue with the family members of victims, including the Tiananmen Mothers. China can honor the memory of that day by moving to give the rule of law, protection of internationally-recognized human rights, and democratic development the same priority as it has given to economic reform.

 

But wait! There’s more! Speaking at the Newseum in January this year she said a lot of fine things about freedom of speech and the internet, and how while it was a great organ of free speech and for good in the world, there were those who were trying to stifle it.

“ On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.

This challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to the Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.

[ … ]

As I speak to you today, government censors are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

[ … ]

As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools.

[ … ]

Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

And much, much more hypocrisy like this on the foreignpolicy.com website

Clinton should take a good hard look at herself and take a leaf from her own book.

So to help Clinton, let’s repeat Nicaraguan Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, Nelba Blandon’s, statement:

“ They accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.

Glenn Greenwald, in his column in Salon disputes The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart’s assertion that there’s nothing new here (and I apologise for reproducing the entire list but please read the whole excellent article).

“ If there’s Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other “journalist” claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:

 

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

 

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA’s kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

 

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA’s torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch today about this: “The day Barack Obama Lied to me”);

 

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War “investigation”;

 

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

 

(6) “American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world” about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post’s own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

 

(7) the U.S.’s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal — a coup — but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

 

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

 

(9) Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

 

That’s just a sampling.

The sadness of this is that it was The Washington Post that stood up so steadfastly and courageously for freedom of speech and truth, supporting Woodward and Bernstein and the independence of the Press against the secrecy and lies and machinations of Washington’s most powerful in the Watergate scandal – from which, of course, “Cablegate” inherits its name.

Meanwhile, where is GetUp on the shocking treatment by the Australian government of Assange, an Australian innocent of any Australian crime but nevertheless pre-emptively accused by both Gillard and McClelland of criminal or at least illegal activity. McClelland:

“ From Australia’s point of view we think there are potentially a number of criminal laws that could have been breached by …… the release of this information.”

For goodness’ sake even Rudd and John Howard agree Assange is not at fault.

“ Mr Rudd appears to be in agreement with former prime minister John Howard, who earlier today said Mr Assange had not done anything wrong by publishing cables that contained ‘frank commentary’.”

The Guardian has a live blog of developments which you can follow including a large amount of support for Assange and the leaking of the (previously) secret documents.

 

 

Jefferson Says

Jefferson Says

President Kennedy told a gathering of Nobel Prize winners at the White House,

"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

This post was first published ten years ago. Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, was writing 200 or more years ago. His words were wise and prophetic. Especially today, particularly at this time when tyranny seems more than ever before to be threatening the democracy of the United States.

 

We the People

 

Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States, a man of the Enlightenment, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most influential Founding Fathers, who envisioned America as the force behind a great “Empire of Liberty”.

Sir Roger knows that his loyal readers are impatient to hear what the great Jefferson, Father of the American experiment and of whom all Americans are so rightly proud [except Glenn Beck] would have said about the Wikileaks matter.

Here is what he did say:

“ Information is the currency of democracy.

[ … ]

If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves.

[ … ]

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

[ … ]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

[ … ]

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Just so.

Sir Roger also notes that the Constitution of the United States begins with the words:

“We the People … do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America”.

Not 'we the politicians', or 'we the Executive Branch', or 'we the diplomats', or 'we the oil companies', or 'we the bureaucrats', or 'we the bankers', or even 'we the military'.

“We the People…ordain”.

Nothing could make clearer the source of all authority in the United States — as it is in every other democracy in the world —  and any authority arrogated otherwise is illegitimate.

 

Wikileaks Cablegate and Hunter S. Thompson

Wikileaks Cablegate and Hunter S. Thompson

 

Hunter S. Thompson said it, and he wasn’t a traitor:

“ America…just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

It needs to be amended to say “… used car salesmen and soccer moms …”

The first thing to say about the WikileaksCablegate” is:

There are no surprises.
We all knew it.
We know they are liars.
We always have known.

It’s like that person who finally works up the courage to make an embarrassing confession, a clean breast of it, and haltingly admits that they have been living a lie, that they’ve been pretending to be one thing but hiding who they really are and what they’re really like. And all their friends say, “Well, duh. Everyone knew that! Tell us something we don’t know.”

We know that all governments spy and have no respect for conventions and even treaties when it doesn’t suit them.

We know what China is like, we know how toxic the Russians are, and how ruthless and ignorant the Chinese government is. We have always known what a dick Berlusconi is and what a wanker Sarkozy is, what an arrogant dork Rudd is, and in one way or another how fucked up almost every country, in the fact the whole world, is if you look at it in certain lights.

So there are no real surprises and the world isn’t about to change.

What has changed, and what all the fuss is really about, is two things:

First, the US Government has lost the most precious protection of a professional liar, plausible deniability.

Second, it’s not true simply that knowledge is power but that secret information is power and the US Government’s secrets are not secret any more.

The US government (amongst others) is exposed, the klieg lights are on and they have nowhere to turn, nowhere to go, no escape hatch to fall through in their embarrassment.

So they are making the ridiculous assertion that they have been wronged by being exposed spying on their friends and lying to their own people. They have been backed into a corner and we see the honesty of their snarling teeth.

But how did we know what we know?

It’s no thanks to governments, politicians or bureaucrats, or especially to FoI legislation. It’s not even really thanks to journalists who have known most of this but don’t report most of it, too.

If anything it’s thanks to TV and movie writers. Apparently there’s more truth than we thought in those spy thrillers we imagined were a bit fanciful and exaggerated.

What’s becoming clear is that the Enlightenment was an illusion. We’ve always thought that since the Divine Right of Kings went down the chute and representative democracy took hold, L’êtat is no longer moi and is now The People. There is after all, we have been fooled into believing, no other source of power or authority but The People. No special dispensation from a god, nor from a king.

Under our western-tradition democratic systems – as enshrined in laws and constitutions; as publicly and pompously promoted even by any number of unbearably bloated, unethical, pathologically untruthful power-hungry politicians and money-hungry plutocrats – it is we, we naïvely believed, who own the State and all its power and authority.

Politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, police and other functionaries (we simple-mindedly thought) are our servants who owe their allegiance to us, as their employers and paymasters. We, we childishly assumed, as the actual owners of the information gathered by our governments, have a right to know that information.

Gullible fools!

In reality the world is governed by political elites, dynastic families and people with carefully nurtured personal and professional connections. The world is ruled by people who have an immovable and deep-as-hell belief in their own privilege and entitlement.

The world is ruled by corporations and vested interests. Probably the biggest vested interests are the world’s militaries and the corporations who rely on them. Reportedly a Pentagon spokesman complained, about news film of Iraqi soldiers killed by helicopter gunfire,

“ If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.”

We, the people, are nauseatingly patronised by narrow minded, morally shallow, easily-bribed, power-mad, status-hungry, greedy people.

Clinton’s, and others’, position seems to be similar to that of Nelba Blandon, Nicaraguan Interior Ministry Director of Censorship:

“ They accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.”

Wikileaks’ action is a broadside against an astonishingly powerful and impermeable machine. The intention is in keeping with the professed values of the Enlightenment which are publicly supported by all western-tradition democracies. But the true beliefs of the powerful are on open display around the world with calls for the assassination of Assange, who Republican Senator Mitch McConnell calls a “high-tech terrorist” [get a bloody grip!], the Swedes redefining rape to include the inadvertent breaking of a condom during consensual sex, and any number of politicians, including the awful Gillard woman, calling the publication of the leaks “criminal” and “illegal” when they simply are not. There is plenty of very senior legal opinion explaining in detail why Wikileaks has not done anything illegal>

But Gillard is fawning over the US – who have, by the way, broken international law and convention, undeniably and undenied – to traduce, and to remove protection from, Assange, an Australian national, in just the same way that Howard did with David Hicks.

And so “Australia” in time-honoured fashion is on its knees once again, begging please to suck America’s cock even though we know America despises us (as it does everyone) while telling us (as it tells everyone) it loves us and we’re the only one.

In the meantime the attempts to shut down Wikileaks have suffered from the Streisand Effect and there are now many mirror sites. The current site is available at http://twitter.ch On Twitter Wikileaks is posting news updates at http://twitter.com/#wikileaks You can find more information about the reaction to the leaks at the Wikileaks Facebook page.

So goodnight. Sir Roger leaves you for now with this piece of advice for Hillary Clinton from the Poet of the Enlightenment, Robbie Burns:

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!

UPDATE: Wikileaks posts “Sarah Palin says Julian should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden — so he should be safe for at least a decade.”

At the ABC’s Drum website Kellie Tranter says,

“ Yet a concerted program of personal vilification and an international manhunt continues. After all, hell hath no fury like bruised, frustrated Capitol Hill and Wall Street egos. Do political leaders really believe that Assange is the only person on the planet who wants governments to be open, transparent and accountable? Do they think he’s the only person who understands that our governments are almost pathologically incapable of telling the truth, or that they authorise the commission of despicable acts in our names behind hypocritical calls to freedom and democracy?

As of now (6/12, 7pm AEDT) there are 355 Wikileaks mirror sites, so best of luck with shutting them all down. Or up.

 

 

Update:

Republican 2008 Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that “anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.” Surely this is criminal incitement to murder given that he has not been charged anywhere in connection with Cablegate and in fact has not broken any laws. Similarly, Mastercard has cut off Wikileaks’ services because it says Wikileaks has been engaging in “illegal activity”. Of course there is no legal basis for Mastercard’s assertion. There is clearly a little pressure and a little leaning on American companies by some powerful people. And, says the Guardian, in Canada ‘ “police are investigating whether there is evidence to proceed against a former adviser to the [Canadian] Prime Minister after he called for Assange to be killed. Tom Flanagan, now a professor at the University of Calgary, suggested on television last week that Assange “should be assassinated, actually”. 

The nature and fierceness of responses by these people throws its own light on the workings of the world and the people who work it.

 


 

Addendum:

While the Wikileaks saga is fascinating and enlightening, and while the case for “the more the merrier” certainly can be made, and that we have a right to the information about our own countries, and that politicians should tell the truth, perhaps we should also take a deep breath, stand back for a moment and ask ourselves whether we are ready for the kind of world in which nothing is secret and politicians are honest.

The emergence of such a world would see a seismic convulsion into confusion and discomfort and therefore perhaps calamity. Somalia anyone?

Are we big enough, grown-up enough, cohesive enough as a community, to manage it? Or have we been cradled and protected from the real world too long, so long that our muscles have become atrophied and we can’t stand up? Are we responsible enough as societies, or are we baby-booming tit-suckers who just want to sit in our playpens with an iPad while mummy sings soothing lullabies and cooks our pre-digested dinner?