There’s an argument doing the rounds that the fairly unspectacular disclosures of the Wikileaks suggests the notion of political conspiracies is bunk. I’m not convinced by this. Firstly, it ignores the fact that beings compartmentalise: all institutions, from the U.S. state to the council of Alfreton, Derbyshire have varied levels at which data and ideas may be exchanged. Being exposed to one doesn’t mean that you can judge it all.
Say that you believe your partner is conducting an affair. You might steal their mobile phone and, finding nothing juicy in the inbox, feel relieved. But their email – which is shielded by a sturdy password – may contain all sorts of filth. Similarly, these new cables were taken from Siprnet: a secret network used by the DoD and State Department to exchange information. Millions have access so you’d have to be a dunce to bung the most sensitive info there. They don’t, in fact: “top-secret” information is kept well away. Assuming that there’s nothing more extraordinary elsewhere is like being shown the ground floor of a house and surmising that it has to be a bungalow. These new cables, then, give us an insight on a certain level of political maneuvering; it’s quite wrong to think that they define the limits of it, though.
December 7, 2010 at 5:19 am
Alfreton.
Why Alfreton?
December 7, 2010 at 11:22 am
Alfreton, indeed.
*Corrects spelling.*
I just rifled through a list of minor league football sides. From Derbyshire, anyway, which I’ve always liked despite never visiting.
December 7, 2010 at 1:13 pm
That’s a fine example of angry-semitism you’ve found there, Ben. (the first link)
I liked: Wikileaks shows that it is the Arab oil lobby, not the neocon/Israel axis, pushing military aggression against Iran – small-imperialist power politics, not Jewish conspiracy.
Apparently ‘it is the Arab oil lobby’ on the basis of a single remark some fawning diplomat has managed to trawl up. It’s as if fixing intelligence around the policy was just a blip.
And if it’s the cable I’ve come across, it was nothing to do with oil.
And the fact that one person apparently wants Iran bombed is suppposed to make us think that someone else doesn’t. Even though there’s a huge and blatant evidence base that clearly imputes Iran-invading ambitions to that other party (or ‘axis’ – this kind of semi-esoteric rabble-rousing stuff is often unguarded about some things – it was in in-house rants from Dersh and Mad Mel that I first heard explicit reference to an Israel-Iraq War connection).
And (Doug Henwood made a similar points here: “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.”)
As you point out, claims that the cables refute any very general statement about their subject matter are pretty ridiculous. But poor old Doug has got his sophistry in such a tangle that he’s magnified that absurdity to epic – epoch-making – proportions.
When you (just assume for a minute you are an unscrupulous ideologue) are claiming to disprove something, inflating it is generally a good idea. But here Dougie has forgotten that the big knockdown objection to the made-up conspiracy theory of history is that it cannot be disproven (thus if it were a scientific theory, it would be unfalsifiable, thus not scientific because Popper, hence Popper conjuring it up in the first place).
December 7, 2010 at 1:23 pm
My God the comments to the Henwood piece are pretty unedifiying. I’d almost find it less nauseating if they would just cut to the chase and wank each other off over a big cardboard cutout of Alex Jones in Nazi uniform. (Actually, no.)
December 7, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Hah!
Yes, I’m not quite sure why anyone’s keen to suggest the Israel lobby isn’t a) influential and b) calling for “action” against Iran. It’s not as if they aren’t aren’t proud of both! A strange case of wanting to show off your baking prowess while insisting that you’re all outta cake.
I think the only purpose the “conspiracy theory view of history” serves is to allow one to avoid engaging with particular theories. (In fact, from personal experience, I know that’s true.) Henwood’s claim that as there’s no “secret cabal [that] plans everything” – ie. not everything is a conspiracy – to “follow the news, and you’re pretty much aware of the major goings-on” – ie. there’s no conspiracies – is frankly nonsensical. Like saying, “As the Santilli film is a hoax, we’re the only intelligent life in the universe!”
December 7, 2010 at 10:52 pm
The highest level cables that Manning had access to haven’t been released, and these are diplomatic cables in any case, not those from the actual intelligence services, although the line between the two is blurry as Wikileaks has shown. Try for instance to find many references to rendition – they’re very few and far between.
December 8, 2010 at 12:07 am
Good point! Few references to torture or the black sites, but we know that it exists and that they’re there.
Here’s a priceless bit on the Spanish judge Garzon, by the way…
Criticising Guantanamo = “anti-American”!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/135369
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