Wikibook

Been listening for days now how Julian Assange is some sort of demented megalomaniac. The oh-so-dim conversations on the radio are all about how gratuitous this latest document dump is, how secrecy is necessary for diplomacy, how his behavior can be construed as some new definition of treason.

Interestingly, many of those fulminating, at least here in the United States, are journalists. If ever we have been treated to the spectacle of the U.S. press as the de facto fourth branch of government, it is on this occasion.

Let us pretend that we have a sentient press corps in this country. What precisely is newsworthy in all this Wikileaks business? Because there is something hugely novel to have come out of Assange’s actions.

Nobody likes Iran? Nope.

Canada has an inferiority complex? No.

Americans subvert Spanish justice? No.

Prince William is a corrupt upper-class twit? No.

I suppose a hint is in order. Think: Spartacus, Luther, Robespierre, Marx.

Correct. Assange is a revolutionary. In contradistinction to Seymour Hersh and Daniel Ellsberg, Assange is not about abuse in a system – no, he is engaged in an all-out assault on the system itself.

It does not really matter what the documents say. Assange is simply trying to cripple the ways those in power communicate with each other. Knowledge, now more than ever, is power. If everyone on the inside thinks his or her opinions, intentions, plots, bribes, coups, murders, lies, frauds, deals, arrangements, networks, etc. will one day be exposed to those on the outside, then the interconnectedness of elites will have to be pared down, modified to such an extent that their effectiveness in carrying out secret agendas will be damaged. And even if they come up with lean, secure systems, they too will one day be hacked into and exposed. The genie is out of the bottle.

Assange has been saying this for years. Plainly. He is dedicated to bringing down the proprietary secrecy of those in power, believing it inimical to the functioning of true democratic institutions. Just think, for example, of how Obama broke his promise and conducted negotiations with the health-care industry behind closed doors. It’s our money, the president is our employee. But secrecy prevailed.

Examples are legion, in which something that should be transparent and open is not. We already know something about the lies regarding the wars, the mass killings, the tortures, the financial fiasco, the mortgage meltdown… Assange has started with the U.S. but expect more to follow: he’s already said he’s going after a bank and suggested as well that he has some stuff on the Russians. I wouldn’t be suprised if UN peacekeeping then comes up, followed by NGOs, charity operations, polluters – perhaps even something about the press.

To many, then, Assange must necessarily be the enemy. He wants to shatter their comfy arrangements, their public narrative about how everything is working so well and how you shouldn't worry your pretty little heads about this, that or the other aberration. So those calling for his scalp, or using Interpol as a smear machine, do have some justification. He is their nightmare. Just yesterday we saw the ever-reliable Joe Lieberman do a fairly good imitation of a propaganda minister, boasting about how he got Amazon to shut down Wikileaks’ servers. This is but a foretaste. To truly crush what Wikileaks and its inevitable successors plan on doing would require a level of repression unseen in the West since the middle of the last century. It will be interesting to see how far people will be willing to go to shut it down – or, for that matter, to keep it up.

Spartacus revolted against the injustice of slavery; Luther, against the cash cow that had become the Catholic Church; Robespierre, against the denial of power to the bourgeoisie by the ancien régime; Marx, against the inhumanity of unfettered capitalism and industrialism.

Whether you agree with Assange about this moment in history depends, of course, on whether you think our institutions are quarter- half- or entirely corrupt. Your call. But what you can’t turn away from is the fact that a new form of revolution is afoot, one that, if it meets with the success its author hopes, makes that other contemporary specter, radical Islam, look like yesterday’s game. The internet revolution has, at last, spawned an internet revolution.

Assange is facebooking the way the powerful operate.

This is new. This is news.