I think Wikileaks and equivalents are here to stay. We have to deal with a
panopticon future in which privacy is less and less possible, particularly for
western governments. The future holds leaks based on cheap high-tech spy
equipment everywhere. I can easily imagine watching a president have sex on top
of he oval office desk someday or watching a politician make some incriminating
statement.
And few people are as aware as I am that western journalists today across the
political spectrum are a joke when it comes to global events, and that includes
Anderson-Cooper, although he isn't as heinous as most. I know first hand that
most overseas "journalism" is the equivalent of a Chinese-only
speaker wandering the streets of New York for a day to determine the state of
USA politics by interviewing street people. It is either that, or it consists
of repeating lies from official spokesmen from the White House to Tbilisi. It's appalling
and it is only getting worse. In that respect, Julian has made the current
generation of astonishingly lazy journalists unable to continue business as
usual. I don't use the word lazy lightly. The laziness is not just a matter of
being unable to afford travel. The laziness is deeply ingrained careerist intellectual
rot.
But I think that Julian and most folks in the Western world (including
Greenwald) are going to get quite a wake-up call. At least 1/3 of the world has
extremely different fundamental values from the typical reader of Op-Ed News.
At least 1/3 doesn't mind the idea of slavery, believes one-man religious
dictatorship is ordained by god, wants to keep women as voiceless childbearing
units, and would be very happy if everyone in the first world died a horrible
death. We only see this in our sphere as people who are in the wack-job fringe.
We don't experience it as the fundamental context of our lives. Their values
being different, what they will create will be rather different than liberal
ideals.
People look at what is going on in Egypt
and Tunisia
and it is all very exciting and wonderful. How fine and photogenic it is to see
twenty-something's demanding this and that. But few notice that these two
nations have been the least autocratic, they have had governance closest to
what people like Greenwald would want to live in. Yes, they were effectively
dictatorships and they didn't do things our way exactly, but overall,
governance was the best in the region and that is why their regimes fell. What
will they create in the next ten years? That is anyone's guess. But I am not sanguine.
I am hopeful, but I doubt my hopes will be realized.
Now we have Libya,
and events there are providing cover from the PR war in big media for other,
less unpleasant autocrats that have dropped off the media's radar. Some in Libya are educated and some are definitely not in any sense we recognize. I've met boys in the region who make the hicks from
"Deliverance" seem like cultured college professors and some of them
are rather photogenic too. Give them a gun and a knife and they will happily
pose with their foot on your chest holding your severed head up with a grin for
the camera.
Don't get me wrong, Gadhafi is one of he most evil men to survive the 20th
century. Foday Sankoh, the monster who had his revolutionaries cut off hands
and feet to terrorize Sierra
Leone was a graduate of Gadhafi's school for
revolutionaries. Gadhafi has been behind a great deal of the genocidal work in Sudan. I cannot
help but hope he and everyone around him dies as horribly as those they
slaughtered. But I am not so naive as to think that what replaces him will
necessarily be better.
History shows that evolution moves along toward better lives. Revolution
usually does not. Revolution is exciting and makes great copy, but it is rare
that it succeeds in doing anything but handing a new jackal a harsh grip on
power. Sometimes those new dictator types aren't too bad, as in Cuba, Egypt,
Bolivia or Tunisia.
Sometimes the society can evolve into something better with peaceful
transitions as in Chile or Bolivia. The
society they create can have some excellent aspects and we are remiss not to
acknowledge those things. Castro did good things, so did the wealthy family
that ran Tunisia,
and so did Mubarak. But they didn't do them with entirely clean hands. Usually,
what revolutions create must wait long past the new jackal's death for
evolution to kick in and move the society into a better place. Look at Mao and China, or Lenin and Stalin in the USSR.
Revolutions tend to be fed by youthful demographics. The youngest have the most confidence, and they want to fight. It's exciting when young to go out on the streets and be free of adult supervision, doing wild and crazy things. I have heard adults reminisce fondly over adolescent hi-jinks during civil war. Young people want to go out and do grand things and at that age, death is something to laugh at.
In Farsi there is a word for these times we see in he middle east, "Harj-O-Marj." It means society turning upside down. The middle east has known this for millennia, it is an ancient pattern dating back to the god-kings of Persia. We liberal democrats of the west are a very new thing in the world. We are the outgrowth of the protestant reformation and the renaissance. And most of us liberal democrats are quite provincial, firmly ensconced in our absolute belief that most people share our values at a deep level. We just cannot conceive that huge swaths of people really don't share basic values. But seriously, they don't. So I am very mixed. We shall see where things go, and that is about all I can say with confidence.
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