Sunday 5 December 2010

Wikileaks

One of the better commentaries I've read about Julian Assange and Wikileaks so far:

http://www.torontosun.com/blogs/al_parker/2010/12/03/16424376.html

If you're too lazy to click on that link / read the whole thing, I particularly like point 1:

1. I've seen a lot of stuff in the WikiLeaks document releases that makes sense, that shows American diplomats seem to have a fairly good real-politik handle on what's going on in their spheres of interest. I have seen nothing that surprised me. The only thing that shocks me is the disconnect between what the U.S. diplomatic despatches are saying and what the American establishment - and I guess the American people - want to pretend the various situations are. Fantasyland is a dangerous place to carry on legitimate discourse and make relevant, realistic decisions.

Indeed, I think Alan Parker hits the spot here (and sets a good stage for the rest of his article to follow). Was there anything really surprising about the statements revealed by Wikileaks? A seasoned political scientist following in the tradition of realism will in fact say that the discourse unearthed is predictable (and maybe even effective - would've scored an A+ in the tradition of state/sovereign self-preservation). What gets everyone, though, is either some feeling of hypocrisy or the refusal to believe that those things are actually being said. Hypocrisy because the US government keeps doing things like claiming that their involvement in the Middle East is driven by justice when quite obviously it's not, and a refusal to accept what has been said/found because people clearly have an inconsistent notion of what the US stands for (or should be doing) versus what the US actually is doing.

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