Misunderstanding WikiLeaks

There's some debate on the degree of international cooperation in apprehending WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. At Telegraph UK, "WikiLeaks: British Police Asked to Join Hunt for Julian Assange." Also at Memeorandum. And there's some breaking stuff at NYT that I haven't gotten to yet, for example, "Diplomats Noted Canadian Mistrust Toward U.S."

For now what's sparking my interest, and some frustration, is the easy accolades so many commenters are offering to WikiLeaks, with attention especially on claims that increasing transparency is a means to a greater libertarian end. And in this I'm finding, as a side note, through Ross Douthat, that Will Wilkinson is now blogging at The Economist. I was a subscriber for three years while in graduate school. I read that magazine religiously. But like just about every other mainstream periodical in recent years, its quality has deteriorated badly. Outside the pages of Wall Street Journal, The Economist used to be the place to read the most rigorous analysis of free market economics. Yet now the previously classically-inclined editors at The Economist have jumped ship. (Alan Caruba captured this unfortunate descent just the other day, "Climate Change Idiocy and The Economist.") So I guess it makes sense that Will Wilkinson's blogging there now. The countercultural left has increasingly joined with ideological libertarianism to escalate the contemporary attack on the modern moral regime and the foundations of social order. To take that attack to its logical conclusion is to launch an extreme repudiation on state power, since it's the state that controls the monopoly of force and the means to prohibit certain activities, such as drug use and prostitution. But with the recent WikiLeaks dump, the left-libertarian alliance has metastasized into a romantic nihilism, which sees a heroic purpose to WikiLeaks when the exact opposite is true. My old infantile antagonist E.D. Kain gleefully provides a synopsis, which perfectly illustrates the verbose left-libertarianism's replacement of firm realism with fluffy fawning:

The government has a monopoly on violence; the media has only words. We should encourage underdogs like WikiLeaks who continue to fight an uphill battle, not against the United States – this country is more than its government, after all – but against the over-reach of the state. We have ceded so much of our own privacy to our government, perhaps now we would like to return the favor.

WikiLeaks may be a small player, really, in the bigger scheme of things. But to some degree it is also a bellwether, a forecast of things to come as information and technology continue to nip at the heels of the state. Perhaps we really are approaching a time when government becomes less relevant, less necessary, where other institutions both real and virtual can begin to supplant the role of the state in our lives, subversively at first but then more openly as time passes. I don’t know. I’m not even sure what that would look like in practice. Predicting the future is not among my talents; I cannot see where frying pans leave off and fires begin. But if I am at all correct then we should also realize that when an institution is threatened it reacts accordingly. Things will get worse before they get better.

If this were just a philosophical excursion vis-à-vis theories of federalism and government devolution, that'd be one thing. But it's not. We're talking about a 21st century non-state actor conducting information warfare against the United States. It's not a big surprise that WikiLeaks' most enthusiast backers are found among the world's anarcho-communist contingents. What's pathetic --- although not new, just even more pronounced --- is how willingly the libertarians jump on board this lame new vehicle toward alleged greater government accountability.

So to be clear: Julian Assange despises America with all he's got. There's nothing good about his agenda. And libertarianism is deathly nihilism if folks can't get their heads around the idea that there's little functional alternative to the nation-state in today's post-modern advanced democratic societies. That's not to say we can't limit the expansion of the state nor improve government performance and accountability. But we'll destroy ourselves by radical attempts to tear it down. And back over at The Economist is a deep clue to the ideological confusion. Folks apparently never got the memo from earlier this year on the bogus WikiLeaks Apache video "Collateral Damage." There's wasn't anything "objective" about it. But tell that to The Economist:

WikiLeaks's release of the "Collateral Murder" video last April was a pretty scrupulous affair: an objective record of combat activity which American armed forces had refused to release, with careful backing research on what the video showed. What we got was a window into combat reality, through the sights of a helicopter gunship. You could develop different interpretations of that video depending on your understanding of its context, but it was something important that had actually taken place.

A lot of commentators apparently act as though they're offering profound insights of democratic theory when expounding on WikiLeaks. I note E.D. Kain as one exhibit, although Glenn Greenwald comes to mind as well. But it's really not such a super sophisticated or intellectually glamorous issue. WikiLeaks wants to destroy authority. People are going to get killed, and not in the name of any state interest that could be otherwise checked by the processes of democratic governance. IBD had a great editorial on Julian Assange the other day, and I'll close with this, "An Infoterrorist?":

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the soon-to-be chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is absolutely correct in calling for Assange's outfit to be classified a terrorist organization under U.S. law. King has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to charge Assange with a crime under the Espionage Act. While Holder's office has announced an investigation, don't hold your breath.

But what of Assange's accomplices in the U.S. and foreign media?

The New York Times, where Assange gets to dump "all the secrets fit to leak," boasts that its collaborations with WikiLeaks give "the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions" — hardly a rationale for endangering our liberty.

This is a continuing, slow-motion disaster for the U.S., and our government has done little beyond having a State Department lawyer send a huffy letter to Assange's lawyer in Sweden.

These leaks must be plugged — by force if necessary — before it is American blood we find flowing.

At the video, more radical left-wing Wiki-boosting from communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

RELATED: From Peter Feaver, "WikiLeaks Only Interested in Damaging U.S. Foreign Policy."