Dan's blog

Decadent left, eh?

Well, there is certainly something to be said about a serious thoroughgoing left as opposed to a narrow interest-group one.

But this is surely wrong, for instance, in arguing that the anti-Keystone pipeline movement is a narrow (NIMBY?) movement — it’s “game over for the climate” if it is built. There may be some narrow interest groups involved, but it’s in the broadest interest of the species and the biosphere, which is much broader any focus on Wall Street etc; this “killing off American jobs” is a standard right-wing talking point, and a red herring (plenty of better ways to employ people) or false (it actually doesn’t employ many people in the long term). Likewise for the unions — some may be decrepit and narrow in practice today, but almost all modern movements for social equality and justice involve unions; again the idea that unions are by nature a narrow interest group is more standard right-wing nonsense (the general population has become a “narrow interest group”, but corporations represent the “national interest”).

Add to that, that he is, in standard NYT fashion, displaying his credentials of respectability by throwing random insults at OWS — “flakes”, “fantasists”, ridiculous people who appreciate the historical value of the Paris Commune!

As for the climate justice movement, there certainly is some constructive criticism to be made. In general it has not been willing to make arguments against the economic system; Naomi Klein had a good article about this recently . The climate crisis is a vindication of everything the radical left has been saying for a century, and the best argument right now for a radical change in the economic system. Certainly this argument is not being made anywhere near enough.

But, the climate movement frames the issue just as I said above, not in terms of local issues, jobs, NIMBY, or narrow environmental questions (this forest, those turtles) but in terms of the climate and the planet and the species as a whole. The quote “game over for the climate” is James Hansen, NASA leading climatologist. Bill McKibben regularly talks in these terms and links it to indigenous struggles and the idea that the earth maintains all life, and OWS struggles. Occupy activists see the recent Keystone decision as part of a turning of the tide.

So, it seems that there are moves in the right direction, although there is plenty still to be done. To draw a clear distinction between single-issue, decadent climate justice movement and radical, whole-system OWS movement is not quite right; they naturally politically and philosophically run together, are partly already running together, and are increasingly running together.

And we must make it even more so!

The whole movement of occupations is a massive global phenomenon, one barely knows where to begin in discussing it. It’s all over the place, in the sense of existing in cities everywhere, which is a good thing. It’s all over the place, in terms of its political coherence, or lack thereof — which is a bad thing, as a matter of abstract principle, but in the backwards political and cultural context of the US has probably been a very good thing. And it’s all over the place, in terms of its programme, or lack thereof — again, a bad thing in principle, but working very well in a backwards context.

As far as the Australian context goes, the economic situation is nowhere near as dire, and Australia retains more of the remnants of a welfare state, has a fortuitous boom fueling Chinese industrialization and the death of the planet, no great indebtedness, not such massive inequality, not such massive unemployment, not such massive racial disparities, and so on. But the anomie, the dissatisfaction with the system, the alienation and disgust with life under this system is readily apparent. Give it the material conditions, and it will come.

A particular difference, relevant to Australia, is that one of the major factors that made Occupy Wall Street into a mainstream phenomenon in the US, was the support of unions. And not just verbal support, but their ability to mobilize thousands to demonstrate in support. So far as I know, that was completely absent in Australia.

The state repression was brutal, which is always sad and infuriating. I don’t think it’s surprising; the gratuitous viciousness meted out to movements, nonviolent or not, which challenge the system in fundamental ways is a constant of history. It is only shocking when one forgets the history; and the history of radical dissent in the last few decades, especially in Australia, is shockingly thin.

I was more surprised by the nonviolence of occupiers in the face of such police violence; all the more so, in the cases of Berkeley and Davis. Certainly nonviolence in such circumstances is correct strategically, and almost always in principle, particularly in the present day when the State reigns so supreme in the means of violence. Still, it is quite astonishing to note that, faced with the bone-crushing savagery of the police attack, there was a complete absence — to a man — of anyone willing to try to lay a finger on these vicious thugs. The level of admirable principled nonviolence is stunning, and all the occupations I know of are virtually unanimous in their commitment to nonviolence. I do wonder how much of it is more a reflection of a general ineptitude in violence, rather than a principled commitment, but either way it is quite heartening. There is part of me that would have loved to have seen some cops decked along the way, getting a taste of their own medicine, that it would have been rough justice; which, I suppose, is only human. And no doubt there is a time when a commitment to nonviolence and turning the other cheek becomes an invitation to be treated as a doormat. But we are not there yet, and in any case the nonviolence has been very positive in effect: it wins support to the movement when it remains nonviolent in the face of such brutal violence, and it makes a stunning statement of principled action. It was clearly the right strategy here.

I think there is more to the difference in Australia than just the economic situation. I would add cultural factors, which in general require engaging in speculation and exaggeration; I am exaggerating tendencies I perceive in the following. Australian society is much less forthright on matters of principle. An American proudly states their mind, and they and all around swell with pride in their first amendment and free speech. An Australian does it, and everyone tells them to get their hand off it. I tend to think the circumspection in Australian culture is generally better practice, as the first real lesson of democracy is knowing when to shut up, and the appropriate time to open one’s mouth. (Not to mention the propensity for proudly self-announced moral virtue to stink of hypocrisy.) On the other hand, of course, the zero’th real lesson of democracy is knowing how to talk. So the square full of nonconformist signs and people and behaviours sits more easily in the US than Australia; or at least, certain parts of the US. I don’t doubt Australia could do it too of course.

One more even more speculative cultural thing. Post-invasion Australia is a nation of convicts; this leads to some mistrust of authority, which can be healthy, but usually this only applies in contexts where it is irrelevant (traffic police, elected politicians, etc). But more importantly in the present context: Australia is also a nation of wardens. Any threat disturbing the peace of conformity and resignation raises the greatest annoyance and indignation, until the deviant elements are hauled off and taken away, out of sight, and all returns to the order and stability of the prison. That is the Australia of wardens: silent, clean, and white.

Argh. Anti-gay-marriage argument!

There are some arguments worth considering against the gay marriage movement — for instance, whether it’s the best strategic focus. Is queer liberation best achieved by conforming to dominant practices and institutions like marriage, or is there a better means and focus of struggle? And of course, there are long-standing arguments, especially those made by feminists, made against marriage itself, as a patriarchal, hierarchical, and historically oppressive social institution. Since I am not gay, though, strategy for queer liberation is less a question for me, and one on which I defer to the people who are most affected.

However, these arguments against gay marriage are not the ones one tends to come across in the mainstream. Such as our sample here.

Let’s put aside Akerman’s more hilarious notions. Gay marriage is “inconsequential”, so that queer people and their concerns are of no consequence — recall, the first step in hatred of the other is to deny the humanity of the other. On the other hand, doing something about climate change is “demonic” — I wonder what is of consequence then? The queer community “loses” Akerman because they called for non-discrimination in donating blood — can he possibly be serious, and even if so, can he possibly be serious using this as a reason to oppose the queer community’s call for gay marriage rights? Is a more complete non sequitur posible? He even appears to regret the legalization of gay sexual acts, and he propagates stereotypes of queer people as attention-seeking and sexually obsessed. This particular article seems determined to offend anyone who cares about climate change, discrimination against gay people (even in donating blood), deficit spending, internet infrastructure, the environment in general, and more; including anyone who knows a non-hetero person. Being so ridiculous, it’s more of a laugh, and probably won’t convince many people.

But let’s put this aside and get to the one argument he does make.

“[M]arriage is the union of a man and a woman. That’s right – it is the practice of individuals of opposite sex joining in a recognised civil or religious bond. That is the definition of marriage. Anything else is not marriage.”

A standard tactic to shut down debate about marriage is to make it a matter of definition. Having made the definition, if you don’t satisfy it, you are excluded.

The problem is that social issues are not mathematics, and words of social description do not have mathematical definitions.

Language does evolve over time — and, thankfully, a single person can’t control it. You cannot stop a political movement by reading a dictionary at them.

(Case in point: Akerman’s usage of “homosexuals” for queer people gives him away as a fossil.)

I’ll be happy to use the word “marriage” loudly and clearly to describe married gay couples, and will repeat, and repeat, until this argument sounds as antiquated, as obscure, as esoteric, and as irrelevant as the overzealous grammarian decrying a split infinitive.

Marriage is a social practice that evolves through time in any society; and social struggles do involve changes in language. It may be a good or bad institution. But love is love, and stable, loving, life-long relationships are entitled to the same legal and social status regardless of sexual orientation.

To marry, to marry, to gaily marry, adverb and verb, woman and man, man and woman, woman and woman, man and man, and everything in between.

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

— Frederick Douglass

[an extended version of the usual quote]

“Consider the shrink. Many mental problems originate not in diseases of the brain but in deficiencies of society. The arduousness of living with unfulfilling work, financial insecurity, arbitrary bosses, lack of solidarity and insufficient personal power, together with the anguish caused by racism, sexism, ageism, lookism, ableism and all the other oppressive hierarchies that plague this society, helps explain the fact that more than 10% of the population (and not counting those with substance abuse disorders) suffers from mental or emotional problems. There are enough troubled individuals in the United States to keep busy 100,000 psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and a much larger number of clinically trained social workers and other mental health professionals. People’s mental problems often appear as deviations from social or legal norms and therefore are problems for the status quo as well as for the deviant individuals.

The problems of both would be solved if troubled individuals abided by the values of the status quo, and of course the mainstream mental health system more often than not works to alter behavior in that direction. But attempting to adjust people to the unhealthy society that caused their problems in the first place may not always be the healthiest approach for either the individuals or society. A simple alternative would be to help some trouble individuals bring out, clarify and sharpen their implicit critique — to strengthen them for the struggle in which they are engaged, instead of removing them from it, because the struggle can be both therapeutic for the individual and beneficial to society. But the institutions of mental health, such as hospitals that employ psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, are institutions of the status quo. They are not about to turn the troubled into troublemakers, no matter how healthful that might be. The mental health professional is someone that such an employer can trust to move confused people away from struggle with social norms and authority and toward a life in which they are “well adjusted” to their place in the socio-economic hierarchy.

As professionals, psychotherapists are “nonpartisan” in their work: They just help ill people get better. But to declare extreme nonconformity an illness, as psychology professionals often do, is a partisan act because of the down-on-the-victim therapeutic framework it rationalizes: “Treating `sick’ individuals” is a much more politically conservative framework than is “treating individuals troubled by a sick and oppressive society.” Evidently it is not the place of the clinicians to question the health of the society to which the patient must be adjusted. Their “legitimate” professional concern is how best to bring about the adjustment. In this alone, they are expected to use their creativity. The few who do raise questions are seen as “getting political,” even though it is hard to imagine how they could get any more political than mainstream clinical psychology itself, which often practices conservative social action disguised as
medical treatment.”

— Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds

“Should all taxes be abolished?”
“Should all legislation be replaced by judge-made law…?”
“Should police be privatized?”
“Should we abolish worker safety regulation?”
“Should the law itself be privatized?”

Mostly kooky, and good for a laugh I guess.

Any serious libertarian opposes not only illegitimate domination and authority by the State, but in all its forms… including the most obvious today, by capital. In the present, the State at least is subject to some forms of democratic control. Capital is not, and remains tyrannical in its nature. Serious libertarians realised this by the 19th century. As long as one does not recognise that, the use of the word “libertarian” is laughable. “Proprietarian” would be a much better word. Redistributive taxes, worker protections, etc, should be supported by all serious libertarians, not because they empower the State, but because they oppose entrenched, centralized, undemocratic economic power and support those without it.

But this is obvious. It takes an education to forget it. Or to be in the service of entrenched economic power.

To be truly happy, you must understand that the world is terrible.

The small scale is sometimes not depressing; that is why so many remain there. Personal lives may be joyous or melancholy, personal relationships may be fulfilling or abusive, personal activities may be empowering or self-destructive. But to this day the flowers still bloom, the lovers still embrace, the children still play, families still grow, the artists still create, the musicians still play and the people still dance, and happiness, in whatever measure we are able to steal it, accumulates. There is love in every day and every small human action. Alienation, consumer society, the market, and the leaden weight of financial and personal and institutional burdens have not yet entirely destroyed these pleasures, though they try and though they often succeed. Beneath every maniacal institutional role, beneath every soul-crushing occupation, beneath every deadening task and every snarl of cynicism and sarcasm flailing behind it, lies a human capable of love and sympathy. In most cases, anyway: the corporate executives, the politicians, the leaders — like the kings and aristocrats and other malevolents before them — are selected for by institutional psychopathy, and have in great measure become assimilated. But even they can often turn off pathology at home’s front doorstep.

Even beyond the cuteness of the small scale, there is beauty to be found, though usually only by leaving humans as far behind as possible. The human world stands insignificant before the natural one, though we chip away at its achilles heel, goading it to crush us, and with us, civilization. The goading threatens even these pleasures, yet for the time being they remain a palliative. We have swamped the Pacific with garbage, but its waves still roll onto the shore. We will melt their glaciers shortly enough, but the cordilleras still tower to the ends of the earth. All the more so as we melt the ice caps, oceanic vastness surrounds us. And though our excrement even extends there too, the nothingness of interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space retains the beauty of unspoilt darkness.

Beyond and behind it all, within the fabric of reality, even transcending it, lie inspirations and joys of the most sublime beauty; how I wish I could immerse myself there permanently! Accessible only to our greatest faculties of abstract reason, they present a challenge to understand and a puzzle we cannot yet solve. Only reason can seek this realm, and only reason can understand it. This greatest of beauties, cold, austere and monumental, by its nature precludes access to the ignorant, and renders answers which, while the greatest of our oracles still only hear the faintest murmur of the final answer in its signals, shine with eternal simplicity and abstraction. These physics — and behind them, their language, mathematics, the language in which not just this but any reality can be written — remain a haven of coherent peace, even if they constitute the laws according to which their most complex consequences, namely ourselves, destroy their unfolded beauty in reality. There is no personal being there, none of the superstitious remnants of past ages of human folly, with their moral judgments and crosses and crescents and candles; but there is inspiration, and beauty.

So peace, love, joy and bliss are available to us at many levels, depending on our predilections and preferences and interests — even in a world of violence, horror, and ongoing and oncoming catastrophe. But depression, or at least, certain knowledge of great tragedy, is unavoidable too: and, I would say, is necessary to understand and overcome if one is to live fully.

Indeed, depression is written into the nature of the universe. Love is not so written, though it unfolds in us as a consequence of this nature; nor morality, nor pain, nor suffering. Depression, however, is so written: the thermodynamic heat death of the universe will come, one way or another, to claim human and whatever other civilizations ever exist. Just as no loving creator, but only a malevolent one could create our world of violence, poverty, and war, nor could such a loving creator ever make such a universe, doomed to decay and oblivion.

To understand the world, you must know that it is terrible beyond comprehension. This is true not just of physics, but of human individuals, and human society too.

While love, concern, sympathy, and care are not written in the constitution of the world, they are its consequences. Conscious beings evolving out of it become aware of their own strange place in this universe, born and evolved as exiles on these inhospitable shores. Death, fear, and suffering await, and reason finds that other beings share the same fate as us. Evolutionary solidarity combines with cold rationality to demand that the suffering of one conscious being is the suffering of all, and the joy and flourishing of one is the joy and flourishing of all. Love is not written in the constitution of the universe, but it is written in the constitution of every conscious, subjective, solipsistic universe that evolves out of it. Death is not the heat death of this universe, but its utter annihilation, and an annihilation that will come shortly enough for us too. Depression, or at least consciousness of mortality, is written into the nature of your personal universe, as well as that of the physical universe.

But this recognition of shared consciousness, mortality, and suffering, is the rational basis of sympathy, caring, and love. It is aggravated by the knowledge of suffering. It is shocked by the knowledge of systematic social oppression. It is infuriated by the continuance of injustice. It is outraged at the thought of physical aggression or violence. And it is apoplectic against violent aggression in the form of war. Those who are relatively rich, or powerful, or live in certain geographical regions, may think that such catastrophes do not affect them. But even there economic institutions crush the soul, via the need to sell one’s labour, via mind-numbing work, via obedience to usually illegitimate authority, via participation in destructive systems and corporations, via the manipulations and subterfuge of capitalism and markets, via the system which threatens to consume humanity. Only the ignorant or the foolish can analyse the world around them — even the rich western corporate utopia that a minority find themselves in — and find it other than a valley of tears. Peronal lives may sometimes be a garden of delight, but at the social scale the situation, and the outlook, has usually been bleak.

In these circumstances, the most immediate source or depression — human society — is also the most tractable. Fixing human society is a ridiculous idea, surely! But fixing the fundamental sources of depression in realms at other scales — individual mortality, cosmic absurdity — are entirely impossible.

These twin primordial catastrophes — your imminent oncoming death, and the nothingness at the end of the universe — are the rationalist version of the fall of man. They are the fruit of knowledge achieved by conscious beings, and they transform the practice of living: from a frolicking in delight in the garden of sensual pleasure, to a struggle of purpose and survival as exiles on inhospitable shores, individual, social, and universal.

One may indeed still frolic in the garden, at least until human civilization makes the garden uninhabitable; and indeed, never forget to frolic as best you can! But to remain here represents a failure to grow up, a failure to mature, a failure to live fully. We are faced with the certainty of tragedy at almost every scale, except the social scale, where tragedy is only highly probable. That is precisely the scale which depresses us so much, because every missed opportunity, every failed election, every stymied reform, every bigoted reactionary and ignorant blowhard and ignored comment and ineffective activism represents, in the final analysis, a theft from the human potential in our short lives, on a small planet, in an unfathomable universe.

And if we do spend our short, insignificant lives attempting to improve that fate of that society, preserving and improving its glories, its rationalities, its joys and its beauties — and ending its greed, its hypocrisy, its violence, its war, its exploitation, its inequality, its injustices — what better achievement could we hope to build? What other achievement could be more worthwhile? And not doing so, guaranteeing the worst possible outcome — why then would life have been worth living at all?

What else could give meaning to human life once we have rejected, as irrational and unbelievable, the magical fairytales of eternal life and eternal justice with which past superstitions have attempted to comfort us? In fact those superstitions induced us to accept injustice in this world, for better luck in the next. There is no such world, and if we shall ever again enter the celestial city, we shall have built it ourselves.

But that means dedication; it also means conflict and argument; civilizing, to be sure, but not without personal costs. If we are serious about building a society in which human potentials can be realised, then this entails a revolutionary transformation of social institutions. This is to be expected: the universe is an uncompromising place, and human society has been uncompromising with its planet. We must be uncompromising in forging a compromise between our species and the rest of the world; in ending the rapacious systems of environmental destruction and human exploitation which ruin the planet and our selves.

Love — arising rationally from our nature, as an answer to the fundamental questions of human existence — leads us to a hard place, to an extreme place, to a place laced with outrage, fear, incomprehension, frustration, anger, impatience, rage, probable defeat, and potential doom; but it is this place, and only this place, from which we can really see the stars, from which we may survey the coastline of these inhospitable shores, and from which we can really walk towards a better future — one consciously created for ourselves, so that human beings may flourish.

It rolls on with its thousands upon thousands of corpses, it rolls through towns and cities, through prairie and forest, though the mountains and the plains, through heaven and earth, through the valley of the shadow of death, across the meadows with the sunlit radiation of death, and into the towns with the streetlights of death.

And as it comes, piled high with steaming corpses, piled high to the heavens, leaden with the limbs and parts of civilians, all good citizens everywhere prepare accordingly.

As the monstrosity of industrial death approaches, the citizens deploy their response.

Confetti!

Tickertape!

The people line the streets! All good hearts swell, and joy and pride fill the air at the brave drivers of the train, serving us all, piling more corpses on from afar.

The drivers, indeed, are brave. Consider what’s in the train!

However, there remain some few nefarious holdouts, where the train does not enter to parade its contents. Relentlessly pilloried, ridiculed, the inhabitants remember a shadow of a reason why they once sent the train away — but what were the details again? Some were not born when the train last came. Some never wanted it to leave. Some remember the righteous fire of past glories, and share battle scars suffered fighting over issues which once consumed their lives. But all drink from the river Lethe, and all become clouded as to what is actually wrong with the train. There was something in it, wasn’t there?

Nonetheless, time is short. The train wants to parade, the confetti has already been distributed.

“Not everybody can get on board the train! Discrimination!”

“Getting on board the train means I can’t get off! Career coercion!”

“If I get on board and then leave, I’ll be in debt! Financial coercion!”

“If I get on board, I won’t be able to read everything on the internet!”

True enough, and persuasive, or so it seems.

Meanwhile, from the villages of Pakistan, from the villages of Yemen, from the fields of Iraq, the high scores of industrial-scale remote-controlled video games, civilian charred remains, are deposited onto the carriages.

The train is approaching…

On the repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy by the US congress, there was some argument as to the approach for the left to take. Some called it a red herring. My view is that, even if true, saying this is a bad idea.

This is an instance of a general pattern. A positive reform passes. Conservatives fume. Liberals cheer as if the millennium has arrived. Radicals are split. Some radicals say it’s good but we need to push for more. Other radicals say it’s a distraction from the real issues. Others may in between or somewhere else.

Well, for the purposes of social analysis, that may well be a useful question to debate. But in general, as an approach to everyday discussion of the issue, the “distraction” position is a bad strategy — particularly when the reform has just passed.

Because, if it is actually a real reform (like repealing DADT is), then people’s lives are actually improved, even if only marginally. And if a non-activist, or someone whose life is improved, is listening, then they do not hear an intellectual debate between insightful people. They hear something else. They hear, hey this awesome thing just happened, my life just improved and those idiotic radicals are saying it’s nothing. What’s more, they say it’s a bad thing, a distraction — rubbing it in my face. They want my life to go back to how it was before. Those idiots talk as if my life doesn’t matter. And they talk among themselves in a strange language, with marxist jargon, words like imperialism — which I might interpret to mean that things I hold dear are evil. It’s a bunch of weirdos engaging in a circle jerk claiming to understand and wanting to improve the world, but sneering when it actually does improve.

Look at what this does. It takes someone who is interested in the issue, emboldened by the reform, and now even maybe interested in further reforms and a deeper analysis. And it alienates them, and those who would push for further reforms have managed to insult and offend them.

More. Someone whose life is actually improved by the reform can indignantly attack you for being insensitive to them. This is very unhelpful and unseemly. You just picked a fight with a potential ally. This person may be backwards on some issues — but now they get to attack you, self-righteously, and pronounce these backward views with scorn.

Much much better would have been to say that it’s a positive reform, but to note its limitations. Say how it doesn’t end injustice. Invite those who are interested in, and pleased about, the reform to do something even more useful. Don’t say anything that can be reasonably interpreted as putting them down or belittling them.

In fact, this sort of talk is a major symptom of the weakness of the left. The reform is ineffectual, they say! It’s a red herring. It’s a distraction! Don’t delude yourself that you won anything. We didn’t really win. The system is much more powerful. You’re ignorant for thinking so. And me and my radical buddies actually understand what’s going on better.

Even though it may not actually be so, this sounds defeatist from the outside — and anything that sounds defeatist fails to attract a movement of people prepared to do something; hence nothing happens; hence the defeat happens; and the defeatism perceived from the outside is confirmed. Even though it may not have been before, the Left becomes more of a circle jerk. Even though it may not have been before, the Left becomes more defeatist. Even though it may not have been before, the Left becomes more defeated.

Similar issues recently with Obama’s healthcare reform, which seemed to me that it would actually help some people, even though it was largely a corporate giveaway. Same with the election of Obama. Same with any reform. My blog posts about both give what I think is a good strategy in these sorts of situations.

What a drama to be living through! Heroes and villains, Davids and Goliaths, information and censorship, the free press and grand corruption, all on a planetary scale.

The cables continue to drip out; each day brings new revelations; the world is being cracked open for all to see. What a time!

Since Wikileaks was established in 2006, its mission has inspired millions:

The power of principled leaking to call governments, corporations and institutions to account is amply demonstrated through recent history. The public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive institutions forces them to consider the ethical implications of their actions. Which official will chance a secret, corrupt transaction when the public is likely to find out? What repressive plan will be carried out when it is revealed to the citizenry, not just of its own country, but the world? When the risks of embarrassment and discovery increase, the tables are turned against conspiracy, corruption, exploitation and oppression. Open government answers injustice rather than causing it. Open government exposes and undoes corruption. Open governance is the most effective method of promoting good governance.

The world today groans under corruption and exploitation, injustice and oppression, from the individual to the planetary scale — and the injustices range from the frustration of individual lives, up to wars ravaging entire nations and ruining millions.

Our planet has become a neighbourhood, tightly connected by economic, informational, and communicational links.

But our planet’s political system remains, at the supranational level, barbaric — as if our neighbours in the next nation were still inscrutable, incomprehensible outsiders. The human race still allows itself to be governed by jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths; by States, such monsters still, as these cables reveal, that they will consciously and deliberately consider endangering millions of innocents because of their leaders’ differences of opinion.

International politics is an anachronism. The citizens next door are our sisters and brothers; and States’ backroom dealings often conspiracies against us all. These dealings sugarcoat together the innocuous and the vilest acts of war and terrorism; all run together over champagne and caviar.

This system is a throwback to a distant age, a relic of kings and their courtly intrigues.

But the modern nation-state system is not an eternal phenomenon. It is historically young; indeed, the modern State system, from the 18th century and earlier, could usually only be imposed upon the populations of the world by force or conquest. It is not a fact of nature.

It can change — indeed it must.

Today, this very day, as human civilization faces the immediate and dire prospect of sending itself into environmental disaster, the spectacle of sovereign nations bargaining against each other while they tip civilization off an environmental cliff, is more absurd than ever.

The nation-state may not disappear any time in the near future. But if it thinks it can pursue its own interests at the expense of others, it will continue to endanger the human race; and it will continue to encounter such resistance as at present. Human beings can live a better way.

The hilarious spectacle of illiterate accusations of treason against individuals not citizens of the relevant states is entertaining, if a sad reflection upon the intellectual development of certain political sectors.

But there is a “treason” that Wikileaks represents: it denies loyalty to the State; it denies loyalty to *any* State. Its loyalty is to truth, to fact, to knowledge, to the love of humanity and to individual conscience above all. Its organisation and supporters are citizens of the world; they bear no allegiance to any absurd geogrpahic entity; and indeed this is the only defensible position for an enlightened human being in the 21st century.

Wikileaks uses the pre-existing supranational chaos as its venue; and launches into it coherent broadsides of fact, assisting citizens of the world to organise their understanding of the world.

International law barely exists; and while multinational corporations may race to the bottom, organisations like Wikileaks can race to the top, through preferred jurisdictions as one State after another tries to drag down free speech and the free press.

In this law of the supranational jungle, Wikileaks survives and presses on, despite the attacks on it; it is not a mole that can be whacked away.

But this law of the jungle, this supranational vacuum of the rule of law, is precisely the setting, and the outcome, of unjust international relations — of the polite barbarism of diplomacy. This is the venue into which Wikileaks steps. Wikileaks takes advantage of supranational uncivilization in order to civilize it.

Wikileaks is a media organisation.

But it is also a guerrilla insurgency, nonviolent, armed only with information, much more powerful than any bomb.

The attacks upon it are real enough, from respectable editorials inciting murder and assassination — a crime, to which free speech does not extend its protections — to abusive lawsuits and denunciation by all the massed forces of the embarrassed, unjust status quo. It fights a war of information. With a servile media in the democracies, and repressed media elsewhere, a liberal transparency approach is not enough. The state of the world demands a transnational information insurgency.

* * *

The world is changing. Diplomacy will never be the same; respectable voices decry that diplomats will never again have frank discussions! Clearly not so. But the voice that cries out in horror against diplomatic inabilities is the same voice that shares caviar with murderous foreign policy. Diplomats, indeed, might never again want to have *certain* frank discussions: namely, those discussions that wreak vast injustice upon the world; those that talk blithely of going to war against populations of millions; those that speak of evicting entire populations as if they never existed; those that attempt to shut down human rights investigations and protect the perpetrators. We need not mourn their demise.

No better example is possible that:

The public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive institutions forces them to consider the ethical implications of their actions… when the risks of embarrassment and discovery increase, the tables are turned against conspiracy, corruption, exploitation and oppression.

And, if Wikileaks, and free speech in general, can be defended against the outrageous attacks upon them — a big if — then this is a possible, and likely, outcome.

Wikileaks is pushing the nation state system out of its complacent and vicious, cynical equilibrium. It is not an attack against the international system, but an attack against international *un*system; it is humanity crying out for law and order on its planet. The determined and courageous efforts of a small group, empowered only by the internet and their principles, push towards justice even the system of the world.

Their inspiration raises the hope, once more, of living in a just world where human beings may flourish.

* * *

As for the anachronistic state and its system — to this beast, accustomed to polite savagery, now provoked and flailing in all its atavistic fervour — we can say:

To avoid wholesale document dumps — stop classifying innocuous party gossip and television reviews, along with covering up shocking human rights abuses.

To avoid conscientious and principled violation of secrecy laws by its citizens — respect international law and human rights.

To see no more damaging and embarrassing megaleaks — treat the peoples of other nations as you would your own.

To avoid embarrassment from small, persecuted activist groups — stop trying to dominate the world.

To avoid leaks from military personnel — stop ordering the military into operations in supreme violation of international law.

To avoid leaks that embarrass you — stop doing embarrassing yourself and the dignity of the human race.

To avoid leaks that expose injustice — act justly.

For when there is justice, there will be no more leaks — there will be no need.