A piece from the NY Times.
It's distressing to see the propagandist thrust of the flood of articles like this, making reference to "antisecrecy radicals", and drowning out discussions of the US blocking Human Rights initiatives and murdering journalists and teens from the sky.
This is circling back to the very concept of civilization, which Freud described, albeit in his own terms, very well. There is a fiction predominant in Western culture of an absolute objective reality, and that is perhaps the west's most dangerous disease, buttressed by the artifice of enlightenment rationality and the nasty subsequent habit of discarding evidence that does not fit into a dominant paradigm or convenient mathematical model. In short, it's bad science. Rationality has made the west exceptionally unreasonable. The pearl in all this was constitutions, i.e. expressions of the moral nature of a state independent of the winds of mob politics. The crisis in the US is not unlike that in Nazi Germany - a culture of fear, sponsored by corporate interests engendered by the Industrial Revolution, with masses becoming wholly unreasonable, and subverting the very constitution that may have been the soul of a state.
Today, the US is a war criminal second to few. Certainly Soviets, Chinese, Liberians, Ugandans, and many others can be blamed of equally atrocious behavior, but none on this scale of mayhem or hypocrisy, and none there today profiting from genocide in the interest of shareholder dividends and wearing the shield of a false 'democracy' quite as visibly as the US.
It is clear that there are many sides to the Escheresque fence of political divides. We are human, and context changes our reality violently. As Whitman wrote: "I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." Many among us have innocent ideals, and many others are irreversibly scarred by the reality of what can happen on the ground when the interest of 'good' from a given perspective is not backed by outright despotism to stem the 'savage horde'. It is impossible to deny sympathy to the soldier who has killed an unarmed person in the grip of panic. The same ideals that might have driven that person to become a soldier will never, ever, forgive that action, yet we turn our backs on them because they are unlikeable and remind us of our own human fallibility.
I read somewhere an opinion piece (I believe it was German) about how the US cannot set itself right without a great national recognition and atonement for the crimes of the past three decades, like Germany did during its reconstruction. It makes sense. To rediscover common values instead of limping around damaged and fractured, it has to be recognized: the massacres, the murder, the xenophobia, the stealing, lying, and killing of democracy, the trading of human presence and rights for 'security' of profits, the extra-judicial assassinations.
The real challenge is that when one has been radicalized by the crimes of a state, it is hard to visualize a positive way forward. Subversively, without ever mentioning it directly, Obama promised that to the US, and clearly he has become mired in this new "hot war", compromising ideals in an illusory democracy and horse-trading away what we all believe to be inalienable human rights to a feudal plutocracy that will not see its wealth dwindle at any cost, especially when that cost is to others.
Assange is a criminal in the dominant interpretation, and Bradley Manning is a hero of conscience no different from Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dali Lama, or Frank Wills.
Do you know that name? He died in poverty and obscurity, despite having done a job well, and caused a house of cheating cards to crumble. No one cares that Hillary Clinton lied outright when claiming that US national security was put at risk by the revelations despite very probably being aware of the Pentagon's memo stating that this was not the case, or that Sara Palin called for Assange's death. These are real crimes of conscience, yet they go unacknowledged by a deeply compromised establishment.
This is, indeed, doing my best to rain on an obscene parade. The time for parades is not now. This is the time to figure out how to make things right.
