On 12/14/2010 6:49 PM, ken hanly wrote:
> Why are these groups on the French left so critical of Wikileaks and Assange?
> I could fathom it if they thought that it was all a CIA operation but these
> groups seem to repeat the mainstream mantra that Assange is endangering lives.
>
> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/fran-d13.shtml
Ha. It's always a pleasure to be reacquainted with WSWS. In a restless world, some things never change.
To take a stab at your question: First you need to separate the people quoted here. Eric Besson is ex-PS but now a pretty hard-right Sarkozyste. Hubert Vedrine (who coined the term "hyperpower," BTW) is the head of the PS foreign policy establishment, and a former foreign minister. It would be shocking if he weren't critical of Wikileaks.
Of the two far-left groups quoted, Lutte Ouvriere is merely accused of not paying enough attention to Wikileaks. Only the NPA is provided as an example of a far-left group that said something critical of Wikileaks and the criticisms were fairly mild.
That said, it's no doubt true that there's much less enthusiasm for Wikileaks on the French left than in the Anglophone world. My best shot at an explanation would focus on two points. First, there's the point that Vedrine made in the comment quoted; this is a common trope in French political discourse, across the spectrum - I saw a right-wing minister make exactly the same point recently:
> Védrine told France Inter radio that WikiLeaks “is the very proof that
> transparency, that sort of false golden calf, brings nothing. Contrary
> to President Wilson [US president during the First World War], who
> opposed secret diplomacy, I tend to think that in diplomacy which is
> entirely public there is always a risk of fanaticism.” Védrine
> denounced the “myth of absolute transparency” as “masked totalitarianism.”
Second, there is a more general "republican" aversion to what you might call vigilante attacks on the state. The great mythic example is precisely the incident that provoked the formation of the Popular Front in 1934: rowdy, populist demonstrators, including Communists, the far-right, and veterans groups, had a protest in front of Parliament after a scandal exposed some politician's corrupt dealings. There were some attempts by a few right-wingers to storm the parliament; the police opened fire and killed 15 people; the prime minister resigned the next day. Coming just a year after Hitler's accession to power, the notion that a democratic government in France could be brought down by street action was profoundly disturbing to both grassroots Communists and Socialists and the Popular Front was soon formed to defend democracy.
Obviously, this historical incident isn't the only reason why this attitude is so prevalent in French political culture. The attitude is part of a larger cluster of political emotions very widespread in France that abhors"populism," as in demagoguery; such demagoguery often feeds on "exposures" and "scandals" and demands ever more "transparency" from its targets -- such as the Tea Party's insistence that all of the Congressional negotiations on Obama's health reform be carried out on TV. The whole chain of association: total transparency ==> demagoguery ==> populism ==> fanaticism is implicitly present as a negative reference in much of French political and social discourse. A lot of this, by the way, could be seen in the French discussion of the Polanski case.
I hadn't come across those quotes from the French left until I saw this WSWS piece, although it's sort of what I would have expected. But I have to admit that reading it (and writing this post) had helped me put words on my own more vaguely formed aversion to Wikileaks, which I had been feeling but hadn't really been able to express.
SA