For my sake, please!

Open Letter to Reporters without Borders

The reputable press organization Reporters without Borders (reporters sans frontières) have issued an open letter to wikileaks citing them for what the see as reckless behaviour in releasing 77,000 confidential documents. You can read it here: http://en.rsf.org/united-states-open-letter-to-wikileaks-founder-12-08-2010,38130.html. Naturally, I disagree with them, and I sent them an e-mail about it, as should you rsf@rsf.org. I decided to also publish my views here, as I believe it is an important issue. So here goes:

I have just finished reading your "attack" on wikileaks, and I must say I am a bit disappointed.
While I realize that a great deal of the difference between your organization and wikileaks is a result of differing values, with regards to the legitimacy of the state itself and its methodology, I do find your approach a bit lacking in focus.
I am of course fundamentally respectful of your work to further press freedom and end censorship and alike, but when you claim that wikileaks' release of documents gives the various authorities around the world legitimate reasons to monitor the internet and keep internet activists under surveillance it smacks quite a bit of backwards logic. That would be like saying that the government can legitimately keep journalists under surveillance because some of them publish confidential materials. There is no legitimacy in such a policy and there never will be. It seems to me that you as an organization should rather focus on that instead of running errands for the Obama administration in taking down Wikileaks.
Also, this issue touches on fundamental issues in state theory, and the philosophical reasoning for a democratic system. The question remains whether a state should be allowed to keep secrets from their own people, while resting on the "legitimacy" the same people provides? Or rather, should a government answer to its people, and be ready to defend its policies without secrecy and threats of legal action? Democracy is founded on the right to overthrow the government should it lose legitimacy, by peaceful means or otherwise. With the excesses we see today, with more than a million dead in two wars, mostly civilians, we as citizens are in our rights to expose and criticize government policies. We have a fundamental right, and even obligation to protest against heavy handed and illegitimate state behaviour, by any means we have at our disposal.

Additionally your arguments seem a bit willy nilly considering that you untill recently praised wikileaks for leaking documents pertaining to Guantanamo and the incident known as "collateral muder". There is no fundamental difference between this most recent release of documents, and these earlier instances. The only difference is in the respose from Obama and his cronies.

Organizations such as your own will continue to reap the benefits of wikileaks' work in the future, as well as suffer the collective punishment of the authorities. The question you should ask yourself is simply, whose side are you on? I'm not implying that you should stand by wikileaks regardless, or that this issue only has two sides, but if you are in favor of press freedom, you cannot turn your back on wikileaks in this matter, and claim that they are the reason why the government is cracking down on freedoms. The government is cracking down on freedoms, because they are protecting their own power, despite lacking legitimacy and a system of principles to back them. All they have is force, and the people's fear of force - in whatever form it takes. Place the blame where the blame is due.

Privatized Propaganda

My political view are well known to anyone who's frequented this blog, or otherwise been subjected to my opinions. They're not really the subject of this blog however, I just wanted to tone an ever so little black flag before I get started on my subject: privatized propaganda warfare.

Over the last year or so wikileaks has become the most publicized actor in an ongoing information war between peace activists and various governments of the world. Wikileaks ofcourse has been responsible for leaking a great deal of classified material pertaining to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this upsets the people responsible for sending troops to this wars.
Wikileaks however is not the only opposing actor in this war against government information monopolization and spin doctoring, and the war is not new.

I have previously posted the cultural terrorist manifesto, as well as a video by Emergency Broadcast Network - and both of these posts concern the same ongoing information war. What EBN, the Grey Wolves and Wikileaks have in common is that they represent a phenomema or ideology often dubbed infoanarchism. An ideology they also share with the swedish Pirate Party and several other groups and individuals - including yours truly. The main motto for this loose movement of people is "information wants to be free". If you're into revolutionary romanticism we can call this an "information guerilla". It's a quite accurate description.

In other words it as an ongoing insurrectionist campaign being waged between state forces and comercial media with huge budgets and established channels of communication and technology on one hand, and volunteers with highl improvised means of communication and distribution on the other. In many ways this is an example of assymetric warfare, or fourth generation warfare, but on the information front rather than on the classic battlefield.

Assymetric warfare is seen by many as the most important tendency in modern conflict and it is usually typified by regular military units with training and technology going against a guerilla with little or no training and little common ground with their enemy. Usually wars are fought over territory or ideology, or both, whereas an information war is waged in the field of public image and credibility and over a strictly ideological goal.

The interesting thing is however what history teaches us about what happens when a large military system takes on a guerilla. Quite often the "weaker" party succedes, and the government must accede to loss. Whether we are talking about conflict of force, in the cases of the american revolution, the vietnam war or Gandhi's campaing to oust the brits from India - or we are talking about popular protest movements such as the civil rights movement in the sixties. To retain some shred of legitimacy a government cannot trample the rights of its citizens lest it become a dictatorship. So this wikileaks bout is something of a pickle for the authorities. They must attack the activists while trying to come out as the party that takes care of the public interest. Wikileaks must be made out to look like they are thugs, criminals, sociopaths and evildoers, rather than concerned citizens. Once people start questioning why the government so often feels the need to take on their own citizens, whose will they supposedly draw their legitimacy from, the authorities are quite simply fucked...

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions, maybe while you check out this wonderful little rap about wikileaks.

Wikileaks, the falcon and the snowman.

This week Wikileaks has released approximately 90,000 classified documents garnered from sources within the massive US defence. Pentagon and the White House are consequently angered to the point of bursting like lemmings, and have naturally initiated a search for the "traitor" in their midst. However, it seems that several thousand employees had access to these particular documents, and the search for the culprit may not be as easy as it is to find the un-american in "24". It is going to take time, and it's going to involve quite a few people.

This of course leads my mind to american intelligence in general. Of course the expression itself became an oxymoron with the invasion of Iraq because of their quite laughable work, but organizations like CIA, NSA, SS (secret service in case you didn't know) and the FBI have a long history of fuck ups. During the cold war their ranks were so littered with sleepers and walk ins that it's not much of an oversight to say that they lost the intelligence war against the Soviet Union. This history of incompetence goes back even further, to the days of OSS (office of strategic services), who were so easily spotted while under cover that the joke was that OSS was an acronym for Oh, So Social. Despite their efforts to make you think otherwise, the american intelligence agencies really are laughable compared to their counterparts in other countries.

This history of incompetence makes me think of one of Sean Penn's early films, the Falcon and the Snowman. Usually on film the CIA and similar organizations are portrayed as labyrinthine conspiratorial agencies full of hardcore toughies with the latest in technology, death squads and intelligence gathering gadgets. Whether they are up against innocent civilians in the ridiculous Enemy of the State or even the slightly more realistic Three Days for Condor Condor, or they are defending freedom against horrible soviets in ... Errr... I don't think I've ever seen a film where the CIA are the good guys except for comedies or James Bond. Even good ol' boys in the US prefer to see their very own CIA as the enemy. And it's no wonder. You don't want these people on your side. Just look at their work in Chile back in 1973. In the real world espionage isn't quite so sci fi-ish or fancy, and their agents are hardly as kewl as in the movies. (True, the do have technological monsters like Echelon in their service, but the CIA still can't catch Bin Laden. Not that it would matter much if they did. People are pissed off at the US for a reason. Bin Laden isn't Cobra Commander you know...)

The Falcon and the Snowman is a film about a pair of walk in spies (played by Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton) and their follies as they hand over documents to the KGB in exchange for monetary attention. While most films involving espionage of some sort feel the urge to include gun fights and explosions, and the occasional cleavage, this film is quite realistic. Intelligence work is mostly analysis and catalogueing documents. Very few of the people involved with intelligence work go to embassies and sleep with beautiful russian women to whom they reveal their secrets. (Though the latest espionage debacle between the US and Russia may have you think otherwise...) It's a good film, despite David Suchett's appearance as the russian spy master. You really get a feeling for how difficult it is to discover a leak, catch the perpetrator or get the needed evidence to prosecute. The two spies live the good life for quite a while there, despite being flamboyant and complete amateurs.


The Falcon and the Snowman is based on the real life story of Christopher Boyce, a former student turned spy. As I said the various intelligence agencies were riddled with operatives handing over information to the Soviets. Some of them were never caught, but some were. In the end Boyce is found out and has to go to jail for what he's done, and I am quite certain Pentagon will go to great lengths to have their man in the Wikileaks case as well. How many people's feet they will step on during the investigation is a matter of some concern. We also know that they won't exactly shy away from disregarding the persons rights once he has been arrested, as they have done with Bradley Manning, supposedly responsible for blowing the whistle on the Collateral Murder episode. But chances are it's going to take quite some time, and it's going to be very embarrassing to the investigators. As if the leak itself wasn't enough.

There is one fatal difference between Boyce and the sources in this case though: that of motivation. Boyce was supposedly motivated by greed the wikileaks sources are motivated by their justified outrage over US behaviour in Afghanistan and Iraq. I say fatal bacause it's a hard blow to the legitimacy of american war efforts. It's not OK for the US defence to keep their oversights secret, and it's not OK to portray the whistleblowers as traitors. The US was once founded by people who wouldn't stand for unjust treatment of civilians by imperialists, and those values seem to have been forgotten since.

The US authorities claim that Wikileaks is a threat to national security, but we all know what they're really threatening: national secrecy. If the government is really founded on the people its legitmacy wouldn't suffer from openness around the methods they use in war, or the consequences thereof. It is founded on military might, threats and violence however, Obamas response is all the more logical. The campaign in Afghanistan and Iraq was never justified, nor were the methods employed and the continued secrecy surrounding these issues add insult to injury. Obama should worry more about the casualties his soldiers are piling up, and less about saving face over leaks of documents pertaining to his predecessor.

If you want to donate money to wikileaks follow this link:
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support

I have my eyes on you, you pervert!

I use a tool that allows me to see what keywords people search for when they end up here at Thulethinks. I write blogs about strange subjects, and accordingly I get a bit of traffic from various strange google searches. Nothing like the kinky zanyness that turns up in Batcheeba's analysis, but still.
- man pubic hair torture
- hot stories first time handjobs
- erected boys
- snuff tortureporn
- torture mutilation rape snuff young girl story
... and so forth. Things you don't want people to know you play with your genitals to.

Very funny. What's even more funny, and quite frightening too, is that the tool that allows me to see these keywords also allows me to see the poor people's IP-addresses and locations, as well as OS and browser and so forth.
Imagine what a person with some real computer knowledge to do to harvest information. Imagine what corporations can do, or the authorities. I mean, I'm a total n00b when it comes to the information superhighway, and I can access this information with a click...

It's time to be paranoid.

KALIGLIMMER

In case you are one of the few people who hasn't noticed, me and Batcheeba are currently involved in a new blog venture called Kaliglimmer. It's a blog where we review underground music and art in a variety of genres (and other material should we feel that it fits the bill). You might find it interesting.

The adress is http://www.kaliglimmer.blogspot.com.

Incidentally, for those who care about these things, Kaliglimmer is a mineral otherwise known as muscovite. A nearly translucent, mostly black and very fragile mineral - and very beautiful. In Norway it is known as kråkesølv (crow's silver). Kali is of course the hindu god of time and death (as well as a whole bunch of other things), and I suppose Kaliglimmer means that it shines like Kali's aura or something like that. As per our obsession with crows, Kali and shiny things - as well as beauty where others see worthless junk, the name fits the blog.

Be sure to contact us if you have material you want reviewed.

Space Battleship Yamato and the golden age of the Emperor.

If you're lucky, or a complete nerd you've seen the early anime series from 1973 called Space battleship Yamato, or Starblazers. It's a real classic, and paved the way for many later shows. In particular Macross (westernized as part 1 of Robotech), which was indeed in many ways a parody of Space Battleship Yamato, stylistically, thematically, and story wise - even down to the level of color schemes for heros and villains. I first saw Space Battleship Yamato when I was about six years old, and later when I was 11 - and then again as an adult. While the show certainly stands well on its own two feet, and is surprisingly little outdated, there are a few elements that fascinate me today, as a historian, that I didn't notice as a kid.

Like many science fiction and fantasy narratives there is an underlying element of romanticism in this show, but in this one the symbolism is even more potent and obvious than usual. Firstly, consider the name and theme of the series. Yamato, the legendary battleship from WWII rises out of the mud to defend Earth from invaders. Yamato is of course not just a ship, it is a term refering to ancient Japan, and the ship was given this name to symbolize the return to ancient values and traditions in a modern age.

With this in mind the scene where the Yamato rises out of the mud, guns first, it's easy to see this as a potent image of the old martial traditions of Japan being resurrected from the dirt, to provide the last ditch defense the ship also attempted in real life. The historic battleship Yamato was famously sent on a suicide mission in april 1945, but was sunk just south of Kyushu. During her four years of service she only fired her main guns once, in 1944. In the show the rebuilt Yamato rises into the air, and blows an enemy carrier into dust. The symbolic vindication of WWII Japan could hardly be more obvious. The show is in fact, rare as it might be, a resurrection of a resurrection myth. It makes the historian in me salivate. Seriously, it does.

But let's start at the beginning. The very first scene of the series depicts a battle near Pluto. Alien intruders enter our solar system, and a fleet attempts to repel them. They fail, and we are shown how the commanders of the fleet are torn between fighting on honorably, or returning to earth to defend the planet. One commander makes a futile suicide run against the enemy in true kamikaze fashion, refusing to face dishonor over losing the battle, while the admiral of the fleet turns around - wiser but perhaps not as honorable. After the battle has been lost we are shown how Earth is bombarded with meteor bombs, strikingly similar to the atomic blasts over Nagasaki and Hiroshima during WWII. We are told that the radiation levels are so high that life on earth will be extinct within a year, unless the invaders are countered and humanity finds the planet Iscander. Cue Yamato, commanded by the aforementioned admiral. Cue vindication. Cue revenge. After fighting off the attacking carrier the admiral declares "This is the Yamato we've been waiting for so long." We are then shown a fictionalised (but mostly accurate) account of the sinking of "the ship of japanese men", as witnessed by the admiral. Indeed.

So where am I going with this? Am I going to claim that Space Battleship Yamato is some sort of secret vindicationist nationalist plot to sully the minds of japanese youth by way of anime? Hardly. Quite the opposite in fact. While certainly militaristic and resurrectionist the series is also humanistic and positive in its outlook. The admiral points out that the tragedy of Yamato was that she was a ship born to fight, but that now her mission is changed. She is no longer a vessel of destruction, but on a mission to save and defend all humanity. Not just Japan.

Let's look at the psychology of this. In the early seventies the young adult generation had been born just after or just before the nuclear attack and the fall of the empire. Their parents had perhaps fought in the war, and lost. The ideology of imperial Japan had been discredited, and the country humiliated by occupation. People were faced on one side by the shame of defeat, and on the other by the shame of knowing that the Japanese emperor and his government had caused anguish to so many people, in the name of old fashioned imperialism. Space Battleship Yamato addresses both these issues. The ship repels the attackers and gives hope of victory, without bringing death and suffering to humanity. Additionally it allows the crew of the ship to resurrect a part of the humilitad Japan, and bushido, while using it for good. The survival of humanity rests on a Japanese warship. The admiral who returned to earth and faced defeat, rather than die fighting, gets to save mankind. The kamikaze mentality of his colleague is honored, but with an emphasis on the futility of his attack. Had he retreated his efforts could have proven a great deal more meaningful - and been a celebration of life rather than death. It's all very beautiful. In fact someone should write a book about the symbolism in this series. It would be voluminous, and I certainly can't cover it all here.

This sounds like a recipe for success in post war Japan, but in fact the show failed miserably in terms of popularity. First the format was cut down, then it was cancelled outright. It wasn't until the huge success of Star Wars that the show met with success, first as Starblazers and with american voices, and then as new episodes in Japanese. After that again is cast for a multitude of other shows, featuring ships flying in space, strange aliens attacking earth and so forth. Without Space Battleship Yamato, we would never have seen the legendary Voltron, G-force (american version of Gatchaman), Macross/Robotech and other lesser known series.

It's a very good show, and it deserves its legendary status, and that's my final thought on this subject. I'm not so much into anime or manga in fact, despite my nerdyness, but this series will stay with me for quite some time. I leave you with a link for part one of episode one courtesy of youtube. Enjoy. (Unfortunately embedding has been disabled.)