[lbo-talk] Wikileaks according to The Guardian

[Rory Dufficy]

>
> That the information in those official memos was highly politicized even
> before it was used as propaganda by the government is now a given.  If the
> government is removed as a mediator and propagandist and the official memos
> go directly into the bloodstream of the web does that suddenly depoliticize
> them and render them truthful?
>

I posted this to the Marxism list, but it's relevant here too:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/225319

"Levitte observed that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is "crazy" and said
that even Brazil wasn't able to support him anymore. Unfortunately, Chavez
is taking one of the richest countries in Latin America and turning it into
another Zimbabwe."

This from "Elysee Diplomatic Advisor Jean-David Levitte". Is he saying what
the State dept. wants him to say? Or the State dept. hearing what it wants
to hear - and Levitte wasn't nearly this categorical? Either way, it's so
disconnected from reality as to be helpful in reminding us that the opinions
reproduced in the logs are those of arrogant legatees of empire and their
fawning foreign counterparts and that these opinions are not uncomplicatedly
'insider' opinions, buttressed with clandestine knowledge, but instead (or
as well) reproduce the kinds of phatic speech engaged in by bureaucrats who
imagine themselves a ruling elite: the presumptively-big-britched, ignorant
delusions of head servants.