William Kern, my colleague at TMV, quoted a Spanish paper’s headline: “WikiLeaks: The Assault on ‘Big Brother’ Begins (El Pais, Spain). He also mentions another article headlined “Thanks to WikiLeaks’ Disclosure, Classical Diplomacy is Dead.”
To the world at large America now, post-United States diplomatic cables leak, appears as a large wild elephant caught in the quagmire of its own making. And a very very confused nation. Earlier, poor George W. Bush was blamed for everything related to political, defence and diplomatic decision-making in the USA. Now it seems that the entire US establishment, including a large section of the mainstream media, was overtly or secretly behind him enjoying America’s new found position as a Big Brother.
“[WikiLeaks story] does lift the curtains on the American
mentality, on America’s fundamental intellectual incapacity to deal with
the outside world in any other way than by dividing it up into good
guys and bad guys, says John Laughland, Director of the Institute for Democracy and Co-operation.
“America – at least the State Department – is the victim of a sort of
political autism. In other words the political inability to deal with
the other.” More here…
Amy Davidson writes in The New Yorker: “Sarah Palin said that Assange should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden; Newt Gingrich said that he should be treated as an enemy combatant; and Bill Kristol wants the Obama Administration to think about kidnapping or killing Assange and his collaborators.
“It is striking to see how unabashedly that line of reasoning has been pursued. If we can shoot down Julian Assange, how about any investigative reporter who might learn something that embarrasses our government? We seem to have hopelessly confused national security with the ability of a particular Administration to pursue its policies.” More here…
The New Yorker carries the best profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. And Assange’s critics would do well to read the full text!!!
“The name Assange is thought to derive from Ah Sang, or Mr. Sang, a Chinese émigré who settled on Thursday Island, off the coast of Australia, in the early eighteen-hundreds, and whose descendants later moved to the continent. Assange’s maternal ancestors came to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, from Scotland and Ireland, in search of farmland, and Assange suspects, only half in jest, that his proclivity for wandering is genetic.
“Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales…
“In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. ‘I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,’ he recalled…
“When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teenagers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or ‘nobly untruthful’—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks.” More here…
Deepa Kumar, an associate professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, writes: “The corporate media are reliable and consistent. They consistently focus on the sensational, and they reliably take the position of the US government. So, it should come as no surprise that the recent release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks is being covered with much sound and fury, signifying little.
“On the sensational and gossip-mongering front we have Gaddafi’s Ukrainian nurse, Angela Merkel’s “manly” leadership skills, Putin’s cozy relationship with Berlusconi, sex crimes charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, etc. On the mundane lapdog front we have repeated stories touting the administration’s line about ‘national security’ and the rationale for why the cables had to be kept hidden from public view, US efforts to bring legal charges against WikiLeaks, questions of whether Hillary Clinton should resign, the internet and its regulation, etc.
“At the end of the day, the WikiLeaks cables reveal a lot about the mechanics of imperialism. They not only provide concrete proof of the levels of duplicity and the self-serving logic that drives political actors on the international stage; they can also, if placed in proper historical context, shed light on the day-to-day functioning of empire. But don’t expect to find such analyses in the corporate media.” More here…
And The Economist: “If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee.
“Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy.” More here…
The Aljazeera wrote: “‘Cablegate’ has provided the Arab public with an insightful peak into the inner circles of their respective states…” See here…
What do the WikiLeaks really reveal…
Here’s my earlier post on WikiLeaks…
Swaraaj Chauhan describes his two-decade-long stint as a full-time journalist as eventful, purposeful, and full of joy and excitement. In 1993 he could foresee a different work culture appearing on the horizon, and decided to devote full time to teaching journalism (also, partly, with a desire to give back to the community from where he had enriched himself so much.)
Alongside, he worked for about a year in 1993 for the US State Department’s SPAN magazine, a nearly five-decade-old art and culture monthly magazine promoting US-India relations. It gave him an excellent opportunity to learn about things American, plus the pleasure of playing tennis in the lavish American embassy compound in the heart of New Delhi.
In !995 he joined WWF-India as a full-time media and environment education consultant and worked there for five years travelling a great deal, including to Husum in Germany as a part of the international team to formulate WWF’s Eco-tourism policy.
He taught journalism to honors students in a college affiliated to the University of Delhi, as also at the prestigious Indian Institute of Mass Communication where he lectured on “Development Journalism” to mid-career journalists/Information officers from the SAARC, African, East European and Latin American countries, for eight years.
In 2004 the BBC World Service Trust (BBC WST) selected him as a Trainer/Mentor for India under a European Union project. In 2008/09 He completed another European Union-funded project for the BBC WST related to Disaster Management and media coverage in two eastern States in India — West Bengal and Orissa.
Last year, he spent a couple of months in Australia and enjoyed trekking, and also taught for a while at the University of South Australia.
Recently, he was appointed as a Member of the Board of Studies at Chitkara University in Chandigarh, a beautiful city in North India designed by the famous Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier. He also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students there.
He loves trekking, especially in the hills, and never misses an opportunity to play a game of tennis. The Western and Indian classical music are always within his reach for instant relaxation.
And last, but not least, is his firm belief in the power of the positive thought to heal oneself and others.