What would you think if your mother called you this evening and told you that your very best friend from grade school, high school, college and beyond came to her and told her everything. Because of some quirk of a new found belief, this friend thought it was best to be transparent about not only his life, but yours as well. So your mother now knows everything. Like what you drink and how often. And how often to passing out. Who you slept with and how often you have sex with someone you don’t really know. The drugs you like and have hidden in your apartment. The kinky stuff as well. Your deepest secrets that really you shouldn’t have told your friend and you certainly never wanted your mother to know. Even if she suspects some of the things might be true.
How would you feel? Mad at your friend? Worried about who else knows? Worried what your mother now thinks about you? And now your friends just sort of look at you since you may have told your friend secrets about them and they heard about them.
Well, that is just what Julian Assange just did. He told your mother everything and he also told a number of people too. Stuff they suspected or assumed, but now it is out in the open, well what you said, not what anyone else said.
Why did he do it? The enigmatic Mr. Assange doesn’t really say. He says it is for transparency. But I think what he has done is not transparent, but created a one-way mirror. People can look in on our dirty laundry, but we only see ourselves. Being transparent would be taking the cables related to Iran and publishing Iran’s cables about us. That is transparent.
My belief is that Mr. Assange is an anarchist who found the best bomb. One that doesn’t kill anyone, but can be deadly. He says he is a journalist, but all he is doing is dumping these cables and letting everyone else evaluate them. There is no investigation or interpretation of these cables, because he doesn’t care about that. He is only interested in disrupting the world.
I think it is very naïve of people to think that governments have only positive things to say about one another and can be transparent to each other about what goes on. Diplomacy in itself is the absence of transparency. Mr. Assange and his minions seem to believe I have a right to learn that we don’t like the Russians. I know we don’t like the Russians, but I don’t need to tell them we don’t since they don’t like us either.
In the end, Wikileaks will be an interesting footnote to the world history. Mr. Assange will go away and brood about why he isn’t in charge of the world and his minions will grow up and get jobs and wonder what the hell they were thinking back then. Unless, like a playground dust up, a push/shove match starts over a few words. Then Mr. Assange will need to think about what he started and how many lives might be lost because he thinks he is better equipped to tell the world what to think than everyone else.
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