Wikileaks And The Conspiracy Theory Of History

A post by me at Contested Terrain on whether Wikileaks proves that geopolitcs is driven by good old fashioned material forces (e.g. that it is the Arab oil lobby, not the neocon/Israel axis, pushing military aggression against Iran – small-imperialist power politics, not Jewish conspiracy) or in fact whether the leaks are a Soros/Mossad/CIA/neocon false flag operation as part of the ZOG world government.

Comments

jams o donnell said…
Perhaps I am getting cynical in my middle age but very little that has been leaked comes as any surprise... The action the Arab leaders have urged against Iran is definitely no surprise given their proximity to that country.

The Chinese attitude to DPRK is interesting though (but again not hugely surprising given the DPRK's antics).

Hi ho
Anonymous said…
Fact: Secrets are hard to keep. Cork out of the bottle. post-it-all 1-to:world. Problem ? Just as much the printed book once was. Main question: what’s next: E-Power to the people. Maybe it is good, because together we can control what no government can (ie. the global society we need to survive) Technology is a thread, it always was.. it always was unstoppable
bob said…
I agree completely Jams. Doug Henwood says it well here: http://lbo-news.com/2010/11/29/wikileaks-so-much-in-the-open/
ModernityBlog said…
Marvellous Bob, I was intending to write more on the Wikileaks stuff soon, I didn't think of that angle :)
jams o donnell said…
Thanks for the link Bob. The more I see of the leaks the more I think that they are an awful lot of very little.

On a more cynical note I wonder if a Saudi king and several Emirs were praying for an israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities - A double whammy in that the jb wuld be done while being able to express anger ad outrage at Israel's perfidy!
Anonymous said…
ignorant shite

your acolytes are even werse.
modernity said…
http://www.slate.com/id/2276857/

Bob, Not one of Hitchen's finest moments
bob said…
Acolytes - what a lovely word.
Anonymous said…
with wikileaks, i think there are two separate issues here. one is the content of the cables themselves, and the other is the frenzy and furor surrounding their release.

1. i agree with jams and others that the content of the cables are for the most part pretty tame stuff. for example, in one cable, nicolas sarkozy is tagged as being a "thin-skinned authoritarian." my only criticism of that statement is that it doesn't go far enough. or the materials about the middle east. for anyone who has done even a casual amount of reading in the history and politics of the region, the statements of the saudis or sinora come as no great surprise, given the long-standing antagonism between iran and most of the rest of the arab world.

2. what's becoming more and more disturbing, however, is the brewing cyber-war and the political response to and ramifications of wikileaks for both its supporters and detractors. there's an excellent article about this entitled "12 theses on wikileaks" which i highly recommend, particularly for the questions it raises about what wikileaks portends for the future of investigative journalism in a postmodern "flat" world:

http://mondediplo.com/openpage/twelve-theses-on-wikileaks

without sounding too flippant, i suppose one of my complaints is that it's all too easy for me to imagine the folks at wikileaks and even more so their supporters at anonymous--the group behind the cyber attacks on mastercard, pay-pal, etc. and one of whose members when asked what his politics were simply replied ,"i don't know"--as donning a guy fawkes mask when they send their bots out to do battle with the evil empire. resentment, hostility, suspicion, vigilantism, conspiracism, closed, shadowy organizational structure, information without knowledge, all the passivity of the spectacle and embrace of bad faith--it all seems to be just one more example of the regression of politics, where the political world is becoming more and more dominated by either populism or nihilism, neither of which have anything to do with the left.

les

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