WikiLeaks just a smokescreen

As I wrote this I felt I’d been given a challenging advertising brief: write a campaign that will convince zealous feminists to happily subscribe to pornographic magazines for men and make those women look forward to savouring the contents. In other words, I’m inclined to think most will sneer at this piece. But that’s what can happen when you think outside the box.

Smokescreen: the most powerful technique a magician has for his illusions is diversion. He diverts the audience’s attention away from what he is really doing and, hey presto, the woman sawn in half suddenly leaps out of the long box without a scratch on her.

What more powerful diversion from the “truth” than WikiLeaks, which arguably will go down in the Information Era as the hugest, most damaging encyclopaedia of leaks ever made available to the hoi polloi and with more to come?* I hastily add that there are a lot of potentially damaging “truths”. The US intelligence broke God knows how many laws to get private information on officials in various governments, or there’s the lowdown on clandestine ops in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Ummm … didn’t we know all that already, without knowing the details?) And we can be thrilled that bereft families in Iraq and the US can have closure about what happened to loved ones. But this is how a truly powerful diversion works. It does contain many truths. We can hear the saw cutting through the box. We see the saw doing its work. We are convinced what we see is the truth. (Or should I say we want to be convinced?) Meanwhile the pretty lady inside is secretly chuckling.

The “truth” itself can be used as the magician’s diversion. It does not matter how many damaging facts the diversion contains. The hoi polloi (us) think it is, or will be, a global watershed in terms of the dissemination of information, more of a defining moment than even 9/11.

Not really. Let us take the Roman Catholic Church and all the “leaks” about that mammoth religion. The Catholic Church has been shown to be riddled with doctrinal errors, conspiracies, inquisitions, pay-offs for molesting priests, rife paedophilia, “historically proven” documents or gospels that “reveal” a very alternative, married Jesus. Nevertheless … millions carry on being Catholics. For all the revelation of those “truths” the global power of that institution has not been affected. The Vatican is still immensely wealthy.

As outlined in his “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”, Julian Assange’s mission to reveal state and terrorist conspiracies and dispose of regimes is extremely bold and radical. But regimes, global corporations and religions have one similarity among others; they rely on the manipulation of beliefs for their continuity. Let’s substitute words such as religion for terms such as regime, government and corporate in one of Assange’s statements from “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”, which I put in bold: “To radically shift religious behaviour we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that religions do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of religion, such as the Catholic Church we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behaviour that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of religious language, and into a position of clarity. Finally we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange or, for that matter, old religion bashers like Christopher Hitchens can stand on their heads. Religions won’t change. Nor will other complex, ultimately acephalous global powers, such as capitalist regimes and global corporations. Those entities will just change strategies, become more acephalous so fewer heads in the global system don’t know too much.

So WikiLeaks has a surfeit of highly sensitive information (and more on the way) and the hoi polloi think they have achieved a great victory. In fact, they know it. An enemy is at his most vulnerable and is more easily kept in control when he is under the illusion he has won. Assange may be fond of saying that “the first victim of a war is the truth”. But I add this corollary: “the first victor of a war is the truth and the war’s victor dictates what that truth will be.” And the Information Era heavily relies on as much hype as possible to make anything a product (like Facebook), including intelligence leaks. In two or so years time we will be already discussing the blockbuster WikiLeaks Hollywood movie, assuming it is a box office hit.

I am inviting us all to think, very carefully, about what is really going on here. Ask yourself: what on-the-ground difference will WikiLeaks really make? War criminals like Bush Junior will continue to enjoy his retirement. Professor Condoleezza Rice will carry on with her lectures and book tours. Tony Blair will still peacefully kneel in his pew before the altars of that other great, immovable, patriarchal system, the Catholic Church. And more importantly, the global show will go on. A number of anthills are upset; they will be restored soon as diplomatic ties and blue chip business dealings are more important than what nasty things were said about leaders (again, see footnote* below) by US diplomatic staff or how many psychological profiles Hillary Clinton wanted on foreign leaders. Everybody knows everybody else is doing that anyway — behind closed doors. Some of it just got out in the open for a bit and the lid will soon be back on. One doubts China would have wanted to get involved in either of the Koreas and the leaks in that regard are a convenient excuse not to; China’s policy is one of world economic domination, not military. Going by Assange’s definition of what he wants to win, he has not won, will not win and nor has anyone else. The world has for a long time lived comfortably, or numbly, with a lose-lose situation.

And I would be far more impressed if WikiLeaks reveals to us, at long bloody last, what really went down with JFK’s assassination. As an aside, what difference would that leak make now, anyway?

* On diversions. After finishing writing this article last week I read with no surprise in the Mail & Guardian about Russian Prime Minister Putin’s angry reaction to leaked cables and nasty remarks pertaining to Russian leaders, BUT THEN “[Putin] also suggested a more complicated theory — that “somebody” with a political agenda was feeding the cables for WikiLeaks to release”. Putin suddenly defends the US? Inevitably, we have smoke and mirrors begetting more smoke and mirrors. It would be a naive error to assume that the WikiLeaks documents are infallible, sacred texts. Or that such classified information is that easily accessed and all the encryptions decoded … for example apparently by a mere army private, Bradley Manning?

A version of this article first appeared on The Mocking Truth on NewsTime