WikiLeaks: so much in the open
Looking over this latest batch of WikiLeaks, I’m struck by how few surprises there are, and by how much of importance goes on pretty much in the open. An attentive reader of the news with a decent knowledge of history basically knows most of this stuff already.
I don’t mean this in the sense in which the bourgeois press is using it—by using the epithet “old news” to dismiss the significance of the revelations. What they want to dismiss is the truth that the U.S. (like most other nation–states, though they’re not as globally consequential) kills, cheats, and lies. It’s always useful to have documentary evidence of that truth. And it’s satisfying to get the juicy details of how Hillary Clinton signed an order to get Ban-Ki Moon’s credit card numbers.
But revelations like these are further proof that the conspiracist view of history, in which a secret cabal plans everything and everyone else is just an ignorant dupe, is wrong. Follow the news, and you’re pretty much aware of the major goings-on. Though no doubt the faithful 9/11 Truthers have a great explanation of why none of these leaks reveal how Dick Cheney wired the WTC to explode.
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Geez, Doug. I knew you were naïve but this is too much even for you! Obviously WikiLeaks is an elaborate false flag operation run by the Illjewminati. Diplomats don’t even really file cables anyway; they send telepathic telegrams c/o their local Masonic lodge.
(But seriously: I predict that the conspiracists will soon find some cable, seize on minor syntactic ambiguities, misinterpret acronyms, etc, and conclude that it’s the 9/11 “smoking gun.” Just you wait!)
According to the Guardian, the scapegoat for these leaks didn’t have access to the really secret stuff about how 9/11 was an inside job, the CIA had JFK assassinated, and every president since Grant has been in contact with aliens:
I feel your pain, as nothing is worse than becoming engaged by people who treat ignorance, paranoia and self-importance as a political stance. I have spent too much of my day off today trying to be ‘fair’ to conspiracy theorists by admitting that Assange was redacting documents, that Wikileaks has changed from a “wiki” model to a centralized one that hints at an internecine power grabe and that he could very well be a hired-gun type showcasing his intelligence-world-hacking skills as some emails released by one of his former collaborators may indicate, but that admission hasn’t been enough, because Assange is most certainly a mind-controlled Mossad puppet as his mother was marginally involved in a drugs-and-child-abuse cult during his early childhood, etc., etc., Jews invented sports clothing, etc., George Soros helped Nazis create financial instruments when he was a ten-year-old in occupied Austria and laid aside seed-money for WikiLeaks then, etc., etc. etc., so I am too exhausted to have patience with the tin foil hat crowd. Why I have engaged with this nonsense today is beyond my understanding. “Enjoy your symptom,” I guess–maybe Gary Null has something to sell that will help with that?
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It was only a matter of time before Julian Assange became a street pop icon — http://bit.ly/f6YZ8x
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