RSS Feed items

C4SS web administrator Mike Gogulski appears on the Pacifica Radio Network to discuss the Help Bradley Manning web site. 5:35pm Pacific on KPFK 90.7FM Los Angeles, 98.7 Santa Barbara or listen live on the Web.

This article could be seen as a follow up to my previous article, Without Adjectives.  In further discussion with a few people, talking about the extra-anarchistic aspects of various forms of social justice, I said “Anarchism is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a just society.”  It seemed like a statement that warranted a bit of expansion, so here we go.

Anarchism is necessary, we can say, to create a just society.  As far as I can tell, the best definition of anarchism is “the belief that no one has any special authority to do anything that anyone else doesn’t have.”  Anarchy, then, is a society in which this principle is widespread enough to be a truism.  If one group of people can arrogate special authority to themselves to rule over others, this alone is a vast injustice in and of itself.  But it also creates a cascade of further injustices.

Neoconservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has been exercised lately (“Terror and Candor,” National Review Online, July 3)  about the “cowardice” of the Obama administration in refusing to identify “Islamic extremism” as the  enemy in the War on Terror.

When we survey the destruction inflicted on this country by terrorism, Krauthammer says, we should look the enemy square in the face and pronounce him guilty by name.

Fair enough.

Reporting after the earthquake in Haiti revealed a massive toll of death and homelessness (230,000 and a million, respectively), and the immense damage to transportation and utility infrastructure. When power, sanitation and clean water supplies are cut off, water-borne epidemics ensue quickly. With a population weakened by hunger from a breakdown of the food distribution system, the rider on the pale horse gets busy.

Wikileaks, which describes itself as a “multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public,” has inadvertently failed in its mission.

The recent criminal investigation of 22-year-old American intelligence analyst Bradley Manning highlights the reality that legally, Wikileaks cannot do much to protect individuals who leak government information deemed “classified,” even if the individual sees disclosure of the information as being to the public’s benefit.

In the US legal system, this public interest moral argument carries no weight, and Manning will most likely be persecuted for his actions.  Instead of Wikileaks being persecuted, or any other news source, the government is going looking for the leakers or whistle blowers themselves, attempting to prevent “shooting the messenger,” along with adding additional privacy measures to government information.  When Manning was turned in by a fellow hacker friend, Wikileaks could not protect him and his identity any longer and the case became completely out of the website’s  jurisdiction and into government hands.