[Local_activists] WikiLeaks, Ideological Legitimacy and the Crisis of Empire

[Wanda Ballentine]

I've just been reading J.M. Coetzee's Nobel 
prize-winning , Waiting for the Barbarians,  and 
this passage rings in my ears - “What has made it 
impossible for us to live in time like fish in 
water, like birds in air, like children?  It is 
the fault of Empire!  Empire has created the time 
of history. Empire has located its existence not 
in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the 
cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of 
rise and fall, of beginning and end, of 
catastrophe.  Empire dooms itself to live in 
history and plot against history. One thought 
alone preoccupies the submerged mind of 
Empire:  how not to end, how not to die, how to 
prolong its era.  By day it pursues its 
enemies.  It is cunning and ruthless, it sends 
its bloodhounds everywhere.  By night it feeds on 
images of disaster; the sack of cities, the rape 
of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.”

http://www.truth-out.org/wikileaks-ideological-legitimacy-and-crisis-empire66418

WikiLeaks, Ideological Legitimacy and the Crisis of Empire
Sunday 02 January 2011
by: Francis Shor, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

While empires try to maintain their hegemony 
through economic and military prowess, they must 
also rely on a form of ideological legitimacy to 
guarantee their rule. Such legitimacy is often 
embedded in the geopolitical reputation of the 
empire among its allies and reluctant admirers. 
Once that reputation begins to unravel, the empire appears illegitimate.

The establishment of the US empire in the 
aftermath of World War II built upon its economic 
and military supremacy. That empire created an 
architecture of financial and geopolitical 
institutions that served not only its own 
interests, but also those of global capital and 
international legal and democratic structures. 
There were, of course, myriad contradictions that 
materialized throughout the earliest cold war 
period, but much of the West accepted the general 
framework and ideological legitimacy of the 
empire. While a crisis of legitimacy emerged 
around the Vietnam War and the undermining of the 
Bretton Woods agreement by the Nixon 
administration, it was not until the end of the 
cold war and the development of reckless unipolar 
geopolitics over the last decade that a real 
decline in US hegemony became apparent.

Given the battered economic and military standing 
of the United States over the past several years, 
the hysterical reaction of the American political 
class over the recent release of State Department 
cables by WikiLeaks is not surprising. However, 
it is instructive to note the response of those 
in the West to such "displays (of) imperial 
arrogance and hypocrisy" as reported by Steven 
Erlanger in The New York Times. Erlanger cites an 
important editorial from the Berliner Zeitung 
that underscores the question of ideological 
legitimacy: "The U.S. is betraying one of its 
founding myths: freedom of information. And they 
are doing so now, because for the first time 
since the end of the cold war, they are 
threatened with losing worldwide control of information."

Commenting in The Guardian on the hypocrisy of 
the United States, British columnist John 
Naughton points to Secretary of State Hillary 
Clinton's January 21, 2010 address about Internet 
freedom and the remarkable subsequent about-face 
in denouncing such freedom as practiced by 
WikiLeaks. Naughton does not spare other 
officials in the West who have been clamoring for 
curtailment of such freedom of information on the 
Internet. As alleged by Naughton: "What WikiLeaks 
is really exposing is the extent to which the 
western democratic system has been hollowed out. 

 And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is 
lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger."

The abuses heaped on Julian Assange and the 
threats against him, especially, but not 
exclusively, from politicians in the United 
States, reflects this hollowing out of democracy 
and a fear of the new virtual world of free 
speech. Writing in the December 11, 2010 issue of 
the Melbourne Age, Assange's Australian attorney, Peter Gordon, opines:

     The sight of the most prominent politicians 
in the world inciting either the prosecution, 
incarceration or assassination of Assange, or the 
persecution of his family, is a form of barbarism 
that demeans us all. Moreover, the phenomenon of 
companies as big as MasterCard and Visa being 
gangpressed into anti-trust violations of their 
commercial relations with WikiLeaks is truly frightening.

Beyond the critical matter of freedom of 
information, however, is the erosion of alliances 
by stalwart supporters of US global hegemony in 
the aftermath of the WikiLeaks publication of 
some of the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic 
cables. When The Guardian released some of the 
documents dealing with Poland, even its 
conservative prime minister, Donald Tusk, 
declared that, "we have a serious problem 
 not 
with image, as some countries do, and not 
reputation, like the US does. It's a problem of 
being stripped of illusions about the nature of 
relations between countries, including such close allies as Poland and the US."


The Australian government has been buffeted by a 
series of revelations that surfaced when the 
United States rejected an appeal by that 
government to see all of the cables relating to 
US-Australian relations before WikiLeaks released 
them. Beyond the embarrassment to members of the 
Labor government, there is a growing sentiment 
that the US is both arrogant and incompetent.

Perhaps the drive to shut down WikiLeaks and 
prosecute Julian Assange is the last gasp of a 
dying empire to shore up its fading legitimacy in 
the world and among its own citizens. Hence, the 
hyperbolic criticism by US Attorney General Eric 
Holder that WikiLeaks has put "the lives of 
people who work for the American people at risk; 
the American people themselves have been put at 
risk." As the WikiLeaks publications make clear, 
the diplomatic corps is just another instrument 
of the US empire. Indeed, it is the empire itself 
that is putting its own citizens at risk through 
the reckless, illegal and immoral actions perpetrated around the globe.

In their desperation to retain the empire, the US 
political class is undermining the remaining 
vestiges of the empire's legitimacy over the 
WikiLeaks affair. They may also be preparing to 
expand the definition of treason to include those 
who are dedicated, as is Assange and WikiLeaks, 
to freedom of information, especially when it 
reveals the duplicities of empire. Beyond 
WikiLeaks, the crisis of empire, according to 
Filipino scholar-activist Walden Bello, "bodes 
well not only for the rest of the world. It may 
also benefit the people of the United States. It 
opens up the possibility of Americans relating to 
other people as equals and not as masters."

Given the panic of the US masters, it might be 
time for the serfs at home to revolt under the 
banner of "Treason to Empire is Loyalty to 
Humanity." If that seems a little too 
provocative, we should remember the first 
American struggle for independence from the 
British Empire. In defense of his anti-British 
Virginia Stamp Act Resolution, Patrick Henry is 
alleged to have declaimed: "If this be treason, make the most of it."