The Devil's Best Trick

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.”
-- one of the charges against King George III listed in the US Declaration of Independence

Stifled laughter murmured across the congregation gathered at the church of Western democracy shortly before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, when Chinese authorities announced public protests would be allowed during the games but only at officially designated parks; and only if applications were approved in advance. As of August 21, three days before the games ended, the Public Security Bureau had received 77 applications from would-be protesters – hardly dissidents considering their amenability. None of them had been approved. In fact, two elderly women, aged 77 and 79, who applied to protest the demolition of their homes, were even ordered to undergo a one-year re-education training program through labour. (The order was subsequently rescinded.)

Canadians shook their heads, at once sad and smug. Those wacky totalitarians, we smirked, grateful to be living in an enlightened, free and open society.

This was just under two years before the G20 Summit in Toronto this past June. In April, security officials announced Trinity Bellwoods Park in the city’s west end, well beyond the visibility of the gathering world leaders, as the “designated speech area”. The officially sanctioned place of protest was later moved to Queen’s Park, considerably closer to the Summit, but such pronouncements were still being made with a straight face. The Globe and Mail reported that one Montreal activist subsequently Tweeted: “Just discovered a ‘permit’ to protest against the G20 in Toronto: it's called the Charter of Rights. So, stop asking cops for ‘permission’.”

US President Barrack Obama since taking office has repeatedly sought bi-partisan consensus on issues ranging from health-care reform to foreign aid. In his stead, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appears to have succeeded in establishing a united front between America’s left and right in reaction to his recent controversial release of confidential international diplomatic cables. Conservative political celebrity and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has equated WikiLeaks with terrorism. “'[Assange] is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands,” she declared on Facebook. Taking the Obama administration to task, she went on to ask, “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”

Palin found an ally in, of all people, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said that the disclosures of confidential cables were “not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests,” but also “an attack on the international community.”

Here in Canada, Tom Flanagan, a political science professor at the University of Calgary and former advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the CBC, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually.” When asked to elaborate, he said, “I’m feeling very manly today.” Although Flanagan quickly apologized for what he called his “glib” remark, political higgledy-piggledy predictably ensured. Official Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff said Flanagan’s remarks “crosses the line.”

“I think it is absolutely irresponsible, reprehensible to use language of this sort,” he said.

Assange, for his part, said in an online interview with The Guardian that Flanagan and others like him should be charged with “incitement to commit murder.” The “others” would presumably include Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, who, as glibly as Flanagan, told the panel of debating commentators Alan Colmes and Monica Crowley, “I’d like to see a little drone hit Assange.” Among the Canadian media, conservative columnist Ezra Levant in the Toronto Sun suggested: “U.S. President Barack Obama could do [to Assange] what he’s doing to the Taliban throughout the world. He doesn’t sue them or catch them. He kills them. Because it’s war.”

Assange’s crime – for which he apparently should be summarily executed without a trial – is repeatedly described as putting innocent lives in danger. One commonly held limit to freedom of expression is that utterances cannot pose a mortal threat to the public – one cannot be allowed to yell “Fire!” falsely in a crowded theatre if the resulting chaos can be reasonably expected to cause death or injury. However, as the McClatchy newspapers Website reports: “Despite similar warnings ahead of the previous two massive releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by [WikiLeaks], US officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death.”

“WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history,” Assange told The Guardian. “During that time there has been no credible allegation, even by organisations like the Pentagon that even a single person has come to harm as a result of our activities. This is despite much-attempted manipulation and spin trying to lead people to a counter-factual conclusion.”

Not one death.

Another common criticism of the latest WikiLeaks deluge of leaked cables – criticism often put forth by members of the mainstream media – is the dismissal that they reveal nothing new or significant. “For all the fuss and hand-wringing provoked by the WikiLeaks online vomit, I fail to see where America’s reputation has been significantly harmed,” wrote Rosie DiManno in The Toronto Star. This, however, does not explain why Clinton would be so upset. Could it be she feels that WikiLeaks’s revelation that her State Department directed diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and even biometric data of foreign officials, likely in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, is indeed considerably to her disadvantage? This is listed among a number of other, similarly significant revelations in the Dec. 1 article by Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com. We in Canada for our part were surprised to learn, among other things, that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner personally had asked Clinton to consider releasing Canadian detainee Omar Khadr from Guantanamo Bay, even as our own government steadfastly refused to intervene. More nuggets surely will be delivered in the weeks ahead.

Nor surprisingly, Chinese security officials has blocked access by its citizens to the WikiLeaks site. Those wacky totalitarians…. Wait….

In the same post, Greenwald describes how Connecticut Senator and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security Joe Lieberman is devoting considerable energy and resources to persuade private companies such as Amazon, whose cloud servers had provided refuge for WikiLeaks when it was attacked by hackers, to deny continuing service to what was becoming a rogue operation in the eyes of Western democratic leaders. “That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host -- and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet -- is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time,” said Greenwald.

As of this writing, for various reasons, Pay Pal, EveryDNS and Tableau have also discontinued service to WikiLeaks. Cyber-attacks by hackers, whose identities and motives remain secret, continue. Assange remains in hiding, as authorities pursue him for alleged sexual assault – accusations which he denies. The latest developments on these and other related matters crop up across the Web, even as the WikiLeaks disclosures of the diplomatic cables continue through the mainstream media – which apparently are not guilty of treason or terrorism when reporting on them.

Those who preach in the church of Western democracy enthusiastically recount the gospels of Jefferson and Lincoln. They also educate the young on the cautionary tales of Orwell, Huxley and Solzhenitsyn. As all these lessons fly out the window, and as the heavy hands of power grow as fat as the pigs at the dinner table in Animal Farm, I can only suggest one more inclusion in the syllabus: The 19th-century prose poem “Le Joueur généreux” by Charles Baudelaire, which contains the phrase that was later used famously in Bryan Singer’s 1995 film, The Usual Suspects: “The devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist.”

Photo by Salvatore Vuono at Freedigitalphotos.net.