WikiLeaker Julian Assange probably deserves the Prometheus of the Year award, as you can tell by how determined the world’s powerbrokers have been to hustle him offstage, unplug him.
As has been widely noted, he is in hot water not for telling lies, but for making available the truth. (You remember the truth: that which will make you free.)
It’s inconvenient truth, like the behind-the-scenes version of the Vietnam War made available by Daniel Ellsberg, truth, we’re told, with a straight face, that will make it harder for those running the world to run it in the usual fashion.
You don’t want to know that stuff, we billions are being told. Let us handle it.
What’s disturbing is their confidence that we billions will buy into their reasoning.
In the movie “A Few Good Men,” Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep insultingly challenges Tom Cruise’s brash young naval lawyer, who is seeking the truth about the death of a marine under Jessep’s charge: “You can’t handle the truth.”
Well how about it? Can we handle the truth? Do we want to?
It’s not like we don’t already know the story of business-as-usual in the highest places, in diplomatic closed-door sessions (not to mention corporate boardrooms). The cat’s been out of the bag for a long time. There was the movie “The President’s Analyst” back in the 60s, a thorough (and entertaining) expose of covert opps, international spying and other governmental hanky-panky as well as of the sinister machinations of the all- powerful telephone company of the time. These days it seems like every other thriller out of Hollywood blows the whistle on corrupt big power (Syriana, the Bourne movies, Fun with Dick and Jane, the Wall Street tell-alls).
I remember on emerging from “The President’s Analyst” thinking (with 60s style naivete) : well I guess that pretty much puts the kibosh on all that behind-the-scenes stuff, now that Hollywood has blown their cover.
Clearly, the real question is not: “How will diplomacy survive the leaking of the truth?” but “How does business-as-usual ( high level corruption, lying, naked greed) survive when the fact is it never has been a secret?”
A major element in the recent defeat of a simplified, much cheaper, single payer healthcare system was the failure to eliminate the insurance industry as middle man. Wendell Potter’s devastating whistleblowing had been widely available long before the publication of his book Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.How could that information not have been the death knell of that industry (which already had the rep of a used car salesman)?
We can only conclude that the industry is more powerful than the truth about the industry. Nice sentiment, that the truth shall make you free. But it ain’t necessarily so.
From the relative lack of outrage over the concerted effort to suppress Assange it would seem that we the masses are resigned like children to be content with edited versions of reality handed down by the grownups. And surely our lack of aggressive curiosity is reassuring to those machers getting away with murder, literally and figuratively.
WikiLeaks disclosures, like other digital, Info Age phenomena, are potentially empowering for the many, at least in theory making possible a whole different relationship to P ower. But only if we want that new relationship.
In “A Few Good Men” the response to Colonel Jessep’s paternalistic challenge is: Yes, we can handle truth. We are not children; we can and we must know the reality of what goes on in our name, and the world, even the armed forces, will be better off for it.
Here on Cape Cod we insist on transparency. It’s what the town meeting style of government is all about. But what about the truth of how the rest of the world is run?
Can we handle it? Or is it just TMI?
No Comments