I watched with considerable interest the events of yesterday evening as they unfolded. It was certainly exciting from a nerdy point of view as technology was unleashed on a large scale in support of a point of principle. It is even more interesting to see this morning that avaaz.org have taken up the baton in support of WikiLeaks. As the issue rumbles on I suspect that the typical over the top response of usual suspects will cause more and more people to side with WikiLeaks.
The question at the heart of all this is whether a government or a state, as the supposed representative of its citizens, has the right to act in whatever way it sees fit to protect what it sees as the interests of it’s people. For me the answer is no and I come to this conclusion on the basis of a number of realities vis a vie the political process.
Firstly, it is in the nature of democracy that a government does not represent it’s citizens, it simply represents those who supposedly elected them. It is also to be considered whether any election is free given a country like the US where half the population does not vote with 58% for the last presidential election and that was the best since 1968. The you must consider the intellectual capacity of many of those to consider the issues. Many are fundamentalist Christians and FOX news viewers which must call their ability to choose freely into question. Then you must examine the link between advertising spend and actual vote received and conclude that for the vast majority elections are an emotional experience based on thought processes that would provide years of gainful employment for counselors. Just look at our own experience with FF over the last 15 years and the current level of support for Sinn Fein.
Next you must consider the deals done by the very politicians when they enter government and the reality that in order to be elected (as in generate cash for advertising) you must demonstrate your support for big business, Christian fundamentalism or Jewish extremism. Although the latter two may not give you money but will quite overtly trash your life, your seed and generation, calling into question the notion of the bible as “the good book”.
Following on with the “it’s all about jobs, stupid” school of politics which we are more then familiar with and any ethical considerations go out the door. Just talk to the Appalachian coal miners or the Construction Industry Federation. There is a reason why petrol is so cheap in the US. That reason is to make money for the oil companies.
Let’s turn to public service recruitment next. I’ll just capitalize the PUBLIC SERVICE bit to be sure you get it. It may well exist in some areas like the Depts of Social Welfare and the maybe the Wildlife service but the notion is completely absent from Finance, Foreign Affairs or any of those areas. This is simply because only those people who accept without question the dictates of their political masters could work in these areas. To work in the CIA you would have to (I assume) believe the things that they believe. And if you believe that the interests of the American People are paramount and superior to the interests of all other peoples on planet Earth then you will willingly do them things you do.
Of course all of this is only possible when carried out in secrecy. The fast majority of people have an intuitive understanding of what’s right and wrong. They rarely have to give any kind of public expression to this understanding because they know that their lifestyles are dependent on pretending that there is no wrong being done in their name. So we have IBEC calling for increased consumption rather than a re-balancing of expectations with regard to quantity and quality. By this I mean that we pay for quality rather than quantity making it possible for less intensive production methods to be used. Meaning we simply eat less and thereby solve the obesity epidemic. Or we might travel less and reduce the carbon footprint. All schemes of intensive value-added production result in low wages for those at the bottom and higher profits for those at the top.
So if the US government is invading countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people in order to secure market influence for those who fund it’s political system, should we not be aware of it. If policy is being decided by public servants who belief systems serve a particular sub-section of the population should we not be aware of it. In the end there is a fair degree of the emperors new clothes about all this. We are by and large in denial of what is done in our name. The Irish people bare collective responsibly for the activities of the Irish Catholic Church over the last 60 years. The Irish people bare collective responsibility for the financial mess we find ourselves in. And the very last thing we want is to be faced with the realities of what we let governments do in our name. Ignorance may be bliss but it also creates the world we live in.
So whatever the personal motives of people like Julian Assange, it is my belief that greater good is being served by the publication of these documents. My belief is that the extra-judicial actions of the United States government reflects the deep conflict currently going on within the US as the dark, very dark, forces of fundamentalism (both Christian and Jewish) battle it out with the aspirations of the founding fathers for freedom of speech and of expression.
Our lives are structured around lies. Our parents lie to us, our teachers lie to us, our representatives lie to us. They do this and can do it because we are children who refuse to accept responsibility for the world we live in. When we are children such methods have their place but painful and all as it must be, we are obliged to grow up. But we want to believe in paternalistic Gods who will take care of us and keep us in childish innocence. The World Wide Web will make that belief very difficult to maintain. We know from the science of psychology that when dissonance arises between our internally created world view and the reality of our experience, we must either change our internal perspective or disconnect from the outer world. We enter an imagined world that results in constant pain as we smash ourselves daily against the hard surfaces of planet Earth.
