The State. Secrecy. Security. Censorship. Big Brother. Courts. Police. Corporations. Banks. Espionage. Treason. Assassination. Infowar. Field of battle. Troops. Terrorists. Criminals. Hackers. Activists. Danger. Arrest. Imprisonment. Avenge. Retaliation. Defiance. Subversion. Justice. Freedom. Rights. The People.
These are the keywords of a conflict with revolutionary potential. Most of them could be the keywords of any conflict. They happen to be some of the most frequently recurring words one encounters when following the battle between the Wikileaks movement and the state.
This is a conflict, with publicly announced goals, with actual confrontation, where strategies are at play and power is at stake. This may be obvious, but remembering that this is a political process, and should be analyzed as such, may help to prevent some from carting it off into some obscure, minimal sub domain of specialist discourse, like “cyber activism,” “digital politics,” or even “info war.” (Not to worry though, the “social media and digital activism” industry that has been spawned around State Department sponsorship, with all of its gurus and TED talks, will ensure that this diversion of the discussion will in fact take place. Some will be convinced: this is all just about “the Internet,” not about “the real world.”) But this war is not about information. The war is about what people accept as their relationship to a state that has been ardently expanding its power at our expense. It is a long-term war. The Iron Curtain did not fall in 1989; instead it was simply drawn around the entire globe. In somewhat broader terms, we are continuing and hopefully drawing to a conclusion what Immanuel Wallerstein and others called the World Revolution of 1968 (and some of the actors then, are present and fighting once again now, thank you Daniel Ellsberg). In an even longer time frame, we are battling the fact that the Nazis were not so much defeated after World War II, as much as their politics became the template into which our imperial politics were assimilated (whether in terms of mushrooming state propaganda, the accepted use of torture and scientific experimentation on captives, to using weapons against civilian populations, to massive state surveillance). If people keep calling each other Nazis, so frequently, it is precisely because the Nazis have been so successful. And in much greater temporal depth, we are fighting the effects of the rise of the modern state and its profoundly damaging impacts on human social relationships. This is a still unresolved clash between centralized power, a relative novelty in human history, and more egalitarian social forms that dominated the majority of human history for millennia. Now, the state wishes to reduce all of us to an infantile, vulnerable, dependent population—a bunch of thumb-sucking, head-bobbing, burbling toddlers preoccupied with “safety,” requiring the father state to “protect” us.
It is a conflict, but the political arena in which it is fought out is constantly changing shape, widening to be certain. It is not a “game,” as anthropologist F.G. Bailey liked to say, with agreed upon rules and established judges, and predetermined goals and prizes. This is a conflict where the rules of the game (diplomacy, state secrecy) and the game itself (empire) are being directly challenged, with the intention that such games never be played with people again.
http://www.counterpunch.org/forte12142010.html
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