Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Aug 22, 2010, at 8:58 AM, Andy wrote:
>
> > I'm curious what you all think of the significance of WikiLeaks.
> >
> > It occurred to me that the Afghanistan documents and Iraq video don't
> > really reveal anything except details of what is already known in
> > general. It's not as if the callous killing of innocents in Iraq is
> > going to surprise anybody.
>
> I think you're basically right. It's always nice to have a document that proves something you suspected, but almost everything we need to know is openly available.
>
I've already posted my agreement, but John Adam's post makes a good
point. When he writes, "or propaganda," Im not sure whether he uses it
in the current common sense or in the oriiginal 2dInternational sense.
The current sense correspnds, actually, to the old sense of "agitation"
-- and I believe on widely known public facts can be useful for that.
Consider his example of the video: that is, I think, of no use as
_agitation_, because showing it presupposes an audience has been
collected. But it could, for the reasons he suggests, be excellent
propaganda. One can often (at least when conditions are right -- when
the prairie is dry) bring people to a forum or other program just on the
bare public facts: but it will consist of what for lack of a precise
term I will call liberals. They have tood intentions. They sort of
believe that police should behave and that often they don't -- but they
still have lurking in their souls the conviction/feeling that Officer
Friendly represents the ESSENCE of police, that the "bad guys" are only
bad apples in a barrel of pretty good ones. And something vivid such as
the video he mentions or (closer to the leaks that began this thread)
some leaded document in which a Police Commander suggests that some
public needs a lesson not to fool with police, could be used to harden
the 'newbiies' attitude towards police, and that would be a major step
both towards recruiting new 'cadre' and cementing the support of a wider
circle.
So yes, leaked facts can be useful propaganda in the old sense of that term.
Off the top of my head.
Carrol