General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Eight myths about Assange [View all]freshwest
(53,661 posts)That does not preclude me having other opinions or things I want to have evolve in the future.
Many OPs on the board at times leave one wondering what the intent is. There are very strong feelings either way on this, but I am somewhat neutral.
Some claim Wikileaks is a fabrication of TPTB to divert attention, and things will go as they intend regardless. They want us to adopt a conspiracy mentality to get us to leave the political sphere to other more attention getting movements.
At that point, we cede the ground to the fundies and Reich wingers, who are not diverted at all, they have their media idols in place. I'm still working on this in my own head, using my own logic.
You may have noted the name Kristinn Hrafnsson on the Wikileaks entry in Wikipedia that I cited on this thread:
He has worked at various newspapers in Iceland and hosted the television programme Kompás on the Icelandic channel Stöð 2, where he and his team often exposed criminal activity and corruption in high places. In February 2009, while investigating the connection between Iceland's Kaupthing Bank and Robert Tchenguiz, the programme was taken off air and Kristinn and his crew were sacked.[3]
Shortly thereafter, Kristinn was hired by RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. In August 2009, he was working on a story about Kaupthing's loan book which had just been published on the WikiLeaks webpage, when the bank got a gag order issued by the Reykjavik sheriff's office, banning RÚV from reporting on the loan book, which could be publicly accessed online via WikiLeaks.[4] The prohibition order was withdrawn later.[5]
Kristinn was fired from RÚV in July 2010[6] and has since worked as an independent journalist, collaborating with WikiLeaks and stepping up as the organisation's spokesman as its founder, Julian Assange, was forced to retreat from the limelight due to persistent legal litigations. He called the December 2010 attacks upon Wikileaks a "privatisation of censorship".[7] In 2012, in his quality of Wikileaks spokesman he defended the organization on the website of the Swedish Television against what he defined as a smear campaign by the Swedish tabloid Expressen. [8]
I definitely approve of disclosure and believe most Americans do as well, after we voted in people to write the FOIA. In all cases, the status quo resists, because those working in it are so invested in the system, that they don't know where their job ends and feel under threat. If the status quo had not resisted in the days of the Pentagon Papers, we would not have several freedoms we have now in reaction to them.
It seems that Wikileaks is exploring a different level of disclosure than we are currently used to working with, using a method which could be called the rats in the walls (of the internet) chewing the electrical wires and causing things to happen. Probably not the best example, but it must have felt that way in the Bush years when TPTB were faced with the worldwide opposition to the PNAC.
So they began scrubbing the net and have not stopped, and have employed bots and other methods to stop the flow of information. Their main tool now to suppress is privatization, and we were always dealing with this.
Corporations always controlled the majority of the communications, except those our of educational facilities. The forces of privatization pulled the rug out from under the older liberal public institutions. The Wikileaks story is one of playing close to the wire of opposing not only formal governments, which are increasingly privatized in all functions, but the same corporations that allowed our voices to be heard.
We have been playing in the field they owned. Period. They can shut it off when they wish, that has always been the case. So we speak at their sufferance. With a global economy, they can pick us off one country at a time. The global nature of Occupy is a strength, but no greater than the IWW or other such organizations once were. They are no longer powerful, sad to say.
Assange and friends found a hole with their knowledge and went with it. Some can get outraged at the actions of those countries that bowed to those private interests that wanted him stopped. Those private interests, in the eyes of some, have taken over so much of the operation of our economy and government that the corporations are the mater, not the elected government.
So we seek for Wikileaks to free us, and it is true, that throughout history when there is more knowledge, there are revolutions of one kind or another. We want this because of our frustration with the reality presented us by corporate media did not match the real life scenes we knew, and it has hurt us terribly. We are working to escape the bonds of a global corporate state or states supported and created by those who feel it is the only way to survive..
But I would not call it a state in the way that we commonly think of government. When I hear someone going after the government, my eyes glaze over, they are living in Reagan land. This is not a version of 1984 with an all powerful government, but more text book fascism we are confronting in the world.
Democratic government was our middle man that stood between us and these interests. They tell us all the time to hate it and seek to make it the ultimate bogeyman, like Glen Beck does. But break it or remove it and then deal with them directly, is what they're selling us and it will create the neo-feudalism. So they pay these people to get us to want to abandon it. We can do so and let them have their way, if we think we will be more free. But anyone who knows what the days of the company store really were, knows better.
The changes made by Wikileaks and Assange are hard to quantify except in terms of media stories. The Arab Spring entered the summer and not worked out as expected, no more than the heart breaking Tienanmen Square protests of 1989 did.
Still, I want Assange to go to Ecuador and see if he can help a sense of global consciousness (I'm embarrassed at the term, it's been so overused) to move us to what we have to become to survive.