[lbo-talk] A Counterpunch essay on state secrecy

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Dec 10 07:38:36 PST 2010


The Marxism list seems to have almost nothing to talk about except this, except (more usefully) mass or potentially mass responses to the attempts to suppress the leaks. That repression may backfire.

But those attempts are a mistake. From a left political perspective (rather than from the intellectual's armchair) the leaks only add more confusion to the huge overload of information which is a barrier rather than an aid to organizing. There is not one piece of information in the files of the federal government the release of which would give even a whisper of aid to the tasks of organizing.

Fortunately, the "powers-that-be" are as innocent of the facts of (mass, non-electoral) politics as are most of those celebrating this most recent flood of unusable facts. (At least in the short run and friction it may cause among capitalist governments is I politically irrelevant.)

Our political problem remains what it always has been, reaching and mobilizing those who _already_ passively agree with us. They don't need to be persuaded that the current policies (domestic and foreign) of the U.S. state are vicious. They need to be persuaded that action on their part will make a difference.

Carrol

-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 3:48 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] A Counterpunch essay on state secrecy

One last basic element about state secrecy must be brought into question. Nothing, not even nuclear weapons research which is known as being "born secret", is secret before it, in idea or form, exists. That would be actual nonexistence whereas secrecy purports really existing things to be nonexistent. For this reason Galison titled his article "Removing Knowledge". He wrote, "Epistemology asks how knowledge can be uncovered and secured. Anti-epistemology asks how knowledge can be covered and obscured. Classification, the anti-epistemology par excellence, is the art of nontransmission." By obscuring literature on the volume it does, state secrecy begins an "illiteracization" of the populace. Removing and restricting knowledge creates literate and illiterate castes.** Illiteracization from state secrecy has dramatic consequences for our understanding, and thus shaping, of our own history. As Paglen wrote, "In terms of numbers of pages, more of our own recent history is classified than

is not. ... Our own history, in large part, has become a state secret."

...

So dominant is the positive narrative of state secrecy that such basic questions like, "If something is too dangerous or embarrassing to even talk about, perhaps we should not do that thing," seem starry-eyed and hopelessly

naive. But that it is common sense does not mean it is good sense and when the volume of secret literature exceeds that of the transparent world it is a question that must be asked. This modern development of an exclusively literate caste holding 'legitimate knowledge' is, at best, a highly questionable outcome.

http://www.counterpunch.org/johnson12092010.html


>From today's counterpunch. It's long. The above two paragraphs appear at
the end. The two caste system of literate and iliterate is modeled in the first part of the essay on religious authorities in the Middle Ages who could read

and write in Latin and therefore possessed the power to define the word of God to the laity who could not know the word of God for themselves.

There is a further point about state lies. By blinding as much of the populace as possible, the society as a whole can not take corrective action to protect itself. The most obvious example is the state of the US economy, why it's in crisis, and in probable decline. The effect of the constant drone of neoliberal theology is equivalent to puting on a blindfold and walking around near a large deep hole in the ground.

Earlier in the week I spent most of a day watching videos from Afghanistan going back to 1995. The 1995 video was made by Ahmed Rashid with a visiting Australian journalist. They meet in Kabul and take the risky drive south where the Taliban were in control. Back then Karzai's brother was in Kandahar. Karzai had briefly returned to Kabul from Pakistan. We've been winning the current phase of the war in Afghanistan for nine years now. Just

today Robert Gates said we are making progress. If you count the Reagan era against the Russians, it's been something like twenty-five years of progress.

Lying, secrecy, and propaganda are all used to control the public mind. The best weapons against this deception system are memory and knowledge used to create a rewrite. It's a real art that we all have developed to one extent or another. In other words, we have become intelligence officers decoding the activities of the US as a foreign power.

One of the things that wikileaked cables show is that the US State Dept believes much of its own propaganda. The Afghan and Iraq diaries show a similar thing going on in the military.

Here is one gem from the current batch dated July 28, 2009:

``(C) When the Secretary [Clinton] mentioned the U.S. initiative to locate new cell phone towers on outposts that we control, Verhagen agreed to look into doing the same at Dutch bases in the south. Up to then, the Taliban had

been very successful at making cell communication go dark at night, hampering the U.S. ability to communicate.'' 09STATE78274

It should be obvious that if the US has to drive around in armored vehicles,

prefers helicopters, and communication goes dark at night things are not going well.

CG

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