Quotes, Quotes, Quotes

[I've been enjoying reading the letters' page of the newspaper here (The Age, in Melbourne). Many of the comments on this WikiLeaks saga I thought really hit the nail on the head, and deserved a larger audience. So over the past week or so
I've been copying down all the best ones. Enjoy]


It’s a shame they don’t go after sites hosting child pornography with the same vigour they’ve been going after wikileaks.
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Bush and Cheney start a war based on lies, and Wikileaks is supposed to be illegal for telling the truth?
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Only a politician would call the truth irresponsible
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The Swiss have no scruples hiding the blood money of the worst criminals in the world, yet they froze the account of Julian Assange. Who put the frighteners on them?
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Mike Huckabee says “anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.” There is a word for those who advocate the execution of people who have committed no crime. Terrorist.
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Julian Assange is living proof that the nation that touts free speech so much, the USA, only allows it when it does not tell inconvenient and embarrassing truths about it.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau said in his book “On the Social Contract,” that “The people of England thinks itself free; but it is free only during the parliamentary elections.” Afterwards, they lived under an elected dictatorship.
The Julian Assange affair shows that this remains the case today. Politicians have poured bile over the whistleblower. In the US, elements of the Republican Party have demanded that he be put to death. Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric verges on the hysterical. Our Prime Minister and Attorney-General have mouthed the same hypocritical cliches as their US masters.
As in Rousseau’s day, politicians’ promises of transparency and accountability are soon forgotten; hidden behind thickets of “cabinet secrecy”, “commercial-in-confidence” and raison d’etat. They have mutated from servants of the people to masters over them.
Yet, there is an antidote to their machinations, which is why they are so furious over Wikileaks. As Oliver Wendell Holmes snr said in 1852: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by uninterrupted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently aware to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

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It’s easy to dismiss the extremist mullah s in Pakistan baying for the blood of a “blasphemer” as products of a cruel, primitive and bigoted fundamentalism. Apart from the absurdity of the “crime”—one that belongs in the Middle Ages—it highlights the problematic nature of an Islamic society, and we should all take note.
But where does this place the senior Republicans and radio hosts in the United States baying for the blood of Julian Assange? They are clearly on the same moral level as their pronounced enemies. In any civilized society, these individuals would be charged with incitement to violence. So where is that civilized society now?

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The most revealing aspect of the Wikileaks drama has been that no one has come out and denied the veracity of the leaked diplomatic cables. Kevin Rudd has tried to laugh them off as inconsequential. But no one has said these revelations are a pack of lies. So when has speaking the truth become a crime? And if it is, how do we explain it to our kids?
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I for one find it refreshing to hear the truth about the lies and misrepresentations peddled by politicians of all persuasions.

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There are times when an event occurs that provides an opportunity to test the bona fides of those who participate in the political debates that are part of a thriving democracy. The WikiLeaks affair is one such event.
Political populism in the US is keen to paint government and its instruments as essentially working against the best interests and rights of its citizens.
The healthcare reform debate used the dearly held right to free speech as a means to attack the proposed reforms in ways that left many in Australia finding new respect for our own less than perfect political (and for that matter, healthcare) system.
Yet when WikiLeaks exposed some of the inner workings of the US and other governments, the same political populists suddenly lose their interest in the rights of individuals and start defending governments.
It is worth noting that the strident calls for violence and suppression against those who published the documents are the stuff of totalitarian regimes.

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If Wikileaks had been operation 10 years ago, the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were based on the lies and greed of the US and its allies, would not have started. The lives of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians would have been saved. It would certainly have saved the US economy from inching towards the present chaos as a result of the burden of financing these wars.
Assange has given true democracy a new lease of life when it has been dying around the world in the hands of unscrupulous politicians, corporations, and political donors. He deserves the support of all Australians.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on American Foreign Policy and US Politics