Weak Leak

The last few weeks have seen a plethora of “confidential” information hit the newspapers thanks to the now (in?)famous organisation “WikiLeaks”. With The Age firmly in hand, I’ve been cashing out the info cache on a couch...

[It’s all a bit stale now (I’ve been busy during the holiday season) but it’s still worth a re-hash... I think so anyway!]

Some Interesting Facts about Australia

The most time and attention has been given to Australian issues and I will quickly canvass them, though I honestly do not find them the most engaging.

Probably the biggest “leak” concerning Australian politics was that of Mark Arbib’s close relations with the US embassy. Even though the refrain “every politician does it” (and, c’mon, as if we had any doubts that our politicos were working for Washington... that’s been clear as day since Howard and Bush started sleeping together!) did suffice to curb most people’s enthusiasm, there was something particularly unsavoury about hearing that name (“Arbib sounds Arabic!”), which had been so recently invoked time and again in the unprecedented leadership coup of the Labor government. The man who decides who rules the country turns out to be (surprise surprise!) in cahoots with the US; indeed, apparently the US vets our leaders now. None of this should be particularly surprising to anyone who has one eye on the international stage; the only thing I’m wondering is why they bother disrupting the charade they had going in the first place! Must be serious change a-comin’...

Besides the (Bob) Brownnosing of Obama’s America, which would’ve been of little interest to many people (apparently the Greens are as relevant as they are conventional), the only other real “Australian” issue to come out of these “cables” was our “boys” in “Afghanistan.” They’re in trouble or something? No...? Well, whatever the case may be they’re certainly in trouble now since these leaks came to light (shame on you Julian Assange)!

For anyone who doesn’t understand the situation in Afghanistan, you don’t need WikiLeaks to bring you up to speed. Let me explain how it’s been going recently, since the US invasion, and (for any other force invading that part of the world) for the last 2,000 odd years. Here are some pictures to help...        

An Australian solider performs his weekly duty, oral sex, on a local warlord.

The warlord is well pleased. The solider survives another harrowing week.

As you can see, the conflict in Afghanistan is all about fucking as many of our own as possible before calling it a day and bringing them home. There are lots of nice little excuses as to why this occurs, but this is essentially what it boils down to. For those who say that we are there to fuck “them,” I will say that that is equally correct, in so far as they are us (but honestly, you can’t win a war through casualties alone. This is borne out in many conflicts, the most analogous probably being the “American War” in Vietnam... So really the only effect is the fucking that occurs, and everything that is born of it, since we’re not using adequate protection over there).

Some Interesting Facts about the Rest of the World

More interesting for me than anything to do with Australia are some of the less widely covered (though still reported! I got all of this from The Age, remember...) events uncovered in the wider world. Most of the cables simply contain schoolyard-level gossip on who calls who what names. While slightly entertaining (and most certainly distracting), this is in no way informative or important stuff. To get to the real deal, you gotta go a little deeper, underneath all the flying colours and pretty patterns...

For me, some lesser issues which resonated were the real considerations behind the freeing of “terminally ill” (he’s still alive and kicking a year on) Lockerbie bomber and that the Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim(ović! GOLLLLL!!!)’s sodomy charges were, well... “See, this whole thing was just a set-up.” (Is this the kind of set-up Assange himself is now trapped in?) What also caught my eye were Jeddah consulate-born stories of a Saudi Royal prince throwing a party with coke, booze, and hookers (at least he knows how to have a good time!). While this hedonism is an affront to traditional Islamic sensibilities, the satanic family heads must be proud of their son following in their footsteps (though he has a long way to go yet!).

   

The reports I found most disturbing (though hardly surprising), however, were those concerning big corporate actions in Africa and specifically the country Nigeria. Now, it’s no surprise that Nigeria is Shell’s bitch; it has been for many a decade thanks to its high concentration of accessible oil reserves. Shell’s complete infiltration of Nigeria’s government at every level is really just a formality in their control of that nation. Their boasts about it are a little more perplexing, however. Maybe they just want to assure WikiLeaks that they can’t tell them anything about Nigeria which they don’t already know. Significantly more troubling than Shell is Pfizer... Here we have a multinational corporation attempting to cover up the fact that it’s using Nigeria’s child population as a Petri dish. (This is pretty fucking evil... to understand more on how multinationals and governments use third world populations and target them with vaccines read http://www.vaclib.org/news/donstalk.htm) Having already settled both criminal and civil cases, at a cost of over $75 million, it then, according to released embassy leaks, proceeded to investigate various possibilities to pressure the government out of the settlement sum (all of this, one must remember, ensures that the full extent of the occurrences isn’t revealed in an open court).

Un-Jan: A Pot leaking Leek Soup

“All of this is well and good, Jan,” you might say, “but I always knew there was evil in the world and corrupt governments. I see it on the news every night. Is this wikileaking thing really that important?” Far from trotting out stale arguments about freedom of information, government secrecy (because, after all, isn’t that what we want from our governments?), and protection of the press, I’d have to say that I do agree with you on an initial level. These leaks don’t change anything. They don’t “shift the paradigm.” They don’t even reveal particularly pressing matters. All they serve to do (and this is probably not a conscious choice on the part of the leakers) is maintain the illusion that there are separate nation-states (and multinational corporations) which vie for power through realpolitik in some kind of savage wild which is international politics. Obviously, “everyone” thought this before and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, though they might give our leaders a bit more credit due to their Machiavellian machinations. This all serves to support and reinforce current conceptions of the international stage, the world, and reality; that nation-states have real and tangible disagreements and compete at a fundamental level and, to a lesser extent, that the U.S. is some kind of supreme country which holds all the power within its grasp, both of which are serious illusions.  

     

Much of this is like uncovering a hoax, only to discover that the uncovering (or the uncovered truth) itself was also a hoax. These kind of double-agents, backstabbing backstabbers, cross allegiances, and facade-under-facades (fake-outs?) are the play-dough of the most undeveloped Hollywood hack; yet when faced with their possibility in reality we shy away from the thought and, in fact vehemently deny any sort of possibility (is this because we see it in so many political action/thrillers that we are conditioned to think it all make-believe; the stuff of an overactive imagination, an underdeveloped ego, or undernourished emotions?) It’s like an onion; you tell yourself that the skin is the deepest layer, then when you break through you see that the skin was in fact simply the first layer, but you all-too-quickly accept that it was only the skin that was fake, that this second layer must be the real deal... alas, it is not. You can go deeper. A difference in the metaphor, however, develops as the peeling of the onion is not getting closer to the truth step by step (as you are to the centre of the onion), because each layer removed supports the one it reveals insofar as they are both layers and there are similarities to them. So WikiLeaks shows us that politicians are not honest when dealing with us and competing each other, but to give this attribute to politicians assumes that their dealings with us are important / make a difference, and that their competition with each other is authentic. The leak is comprehensible to the extent that it coincides with the current framework.

Another potent image is that of the puppet master, but one should consider that the person pulling the strings isn’t revealed all at once, through some sort of tour de force. It is more like a play of finger puppets where one discovers that each character is in fact just a finger, that underneath all the different costumes exist the same fundamental drives, energies, and substances. They are still, however, viewed as different entities though they might have the same cogs working within them (to go deeper on mutual interconnectedness read about Indra’s Net). When one follows a bit further they find that these fingers are each connected to a hand, yet there is still no sign of a unity between these hands (in fact, more often than not they oppose each other for the sake of the reality of the performance); we’ve simply got it down to two sides now (a kind of dualism?). Only later does one follow the hands to arms which are linked to the one body. So the puppet master displays himself in many variant forms; it is not simply the matter of lifting one veil to reveal the ultimate truth (is there even a final veil?).

Julian Assange – Wanted Man

Just as there is not much truth in general news reporting, so too is there not much to be gleaned from all these wikileaks. They may, however, be useful insofar as they may have allowed some people some flexibility or mobility from the suffocating atmosphere of mass media; they may have a positive influence. They may convince some people to look deeper. It is important, however, that (although it has already started happening) people do not simply flock to Julian Assange and consider WikiLeaks the new authority and arbiter of the truth and information. Assange is simply a tool being used by those who truly control (with or without his actual knowledge) the flow of information in today’s world. It is important to remember, when thinking that Assange’s every move brings us one step closer to the truth, that the most fundamental information, which would truly shift the way we think about the world, can’t be leaked in a conventional sense (that is, they do not exist in document format, or if they do, never survive for very long) and certainly would not be found in such an accessible place as diplomatic cables.

It is important to remember that the “U.S.” could kill Assange (or any of the other people who were probably more instrumental in this information coming to light) at any moment they want to. It is true that it would probably incite more people into active political speculation but, if the threat was big enough, they would do it (remember Kennedy?).  What this tells us, then, is that Assange mustn’t be all that problematic to the powers-that-be. In fact, it is possible that they are using him as a distraction (I balk to say method of disinformation). This is affected by America openly threatening Assange with extradition, or opposing him in any other numerous ways thus placing the limelight on him and making people rally around him (and therefore subtly influencing their views). There is also the way in which people react to the object of hatred of an object of hatred (“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”), so that Assange (or those who wish to “grow” him) may capitalise on anti-American sentiment. This aggrandisement of various individuals serves to help current power structures and is shown clearly in this song (especially the pigeon – falcon, whisper – thunder bit).  

Whether he goes on the lam or not is yet to be seen, though it would allow the myth of Assange to live on for much longer, if not forever...