WIKILEAKS

It is hard to know what to say about Wikileaks. The main difficulty is that in an age that demands almost instantaneous responses, it is impossible to read hundreds of thousands of documents in the space of 24 hours.

However, bearing that caveat in mind, I do have some thoughts.

1. When the world's powers unite in condemning you, sometimes in almost apocalyptic terms, then you know that you have hit a raw nerve.

2. That impression is reinforced by said powers' almost universal statement that Wikileaks' actions are a threat to national security, which puts citizens' lives at risk. Invoking national security is a typical trick by the powerful, since - by definition - it cannot be challenged; to answer would be to put lives at risk etc etc. Nobody ever says exactly who would be put at risk, or by whom, or in what way. It is a bit like the mediæval church's invocation of the devil to rebut all difficult questions.

3. If, in a particular case, we don't know whether to lean towards openness or secrecy, I think we should lean towards openness. Edmund Burke once said that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". In other words, we need people actively to hold authorities to account. Bodies such as Wikileaks may well get it wrong from time to time, that is one of the risks; but better that than that nobody does it.

4. That becomes relevant when you stop to consider that some of the things that Governments (particularly the American Government) have done, or have thought about doing, would be illegal - and punished as such - if done by private citizens. A good example is spying.

5. More generally, the decade of the noughties showed what happens when powerful people push their own agendas and ordinary citizens and/or Parliaments acquiesce. The world got itself into two major conflicts (Iraq and Afghanistan), both of which were futile and hugely costly in terms of lives and resources, and at least one of which was illegal. If, by publishing documents about these conflicts, Wikileaks has made it more likely that political leaders will think twice before doing such things in the future, then they will have done the world - in other words, all of us - a favour.

Finally, we should spare a thought for the person/people who actually gave Wikileaks the documents. In the same way as the mediæval church was ferocious in its persecution of heretics, fellow Christians who simply disagreed with the political powers in some way, so the world's "free" countries will be ferocious with the leaker(s) if and when they catch them. Freedom apparently does not mean freedom to criticise.

Walter Blotscher