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 Wikileaks “Cablegate” 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?
