In these short articles Humphrey McQueen gives us a snapshot of the impact of WikiLeaks on Empire. The first is a brief history of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The second is a speech By what right are we here today? given by Humpfrey at a Wikileaks rally, Garema Place, Canberra, on 16 December 2010. Then there is Humphrey’s speech “Don’t shoot the messenger: WikiLeaks, Assange and Democracy” at a public forum in Sydney along with Scott Ludlam, Australian Greens Senator Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange Humphrey McQueen, Historian, ANU Chaired by Mary Kostakidis. Finally Yes, Virginia, there are conspiracies, a speech by Humphrey at Canberra Friends of Wikileaks, Coombs Lecture Theatre, Australian National University, 27 June 2012.
Of course WBT has published these speeches previously; we publish them firstly to give some idea of the impact of WikiLeakes and the campaign to free Julian Assange. Secondly, to combat the nonsense put out by mainstream political parties, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the liberal press including The Guardian, and the right wing media like Sky News or as Humphrey calls it ,Mass Murdoch. Ian Curr, editor 3 July 2024.
Assange – beginnings and ends
WikiLeaks – Julian Paul Assange (b. 1971) began hacking in 1987 as ‘Mendax’ (Latin for ‘untruthful’) leading to his arrest in 1991 and conviction in 1995. He registered WikiLeaks.org on 4 October 2006 as ‘an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking.’ It operated with ten full-time staff, 1,200 volunteers and an annual budget below €1m.
An early post exposed corruption and murder in Kenya, earning the Amnesty International Reporting Award. Mainstream outlets paid more attention from November 2007 to the Guantanamo manuals on how to lie to the Red Cross, and even more in April 2008to the ‘Collateral Murder’ video of US helicopter attacks on civilians.
The 28 November 2010 release from 260,000 US State Department ‘Confidential’ cables made WikiLeaks as recognisable as Google, saw credit-card corporates block donations, the Pentagon set up a war room and the Department of Justice initiate a secret grand jury while US voices called for Assange’s assassination. Assange was attacked as the ’most dangerous man in the world’ but was readers’ choice for Time’s man of the year. Australian Federal Police concluded that he committed ‘no crime’. The U.S. military sentenced Chelsea (Bradley) Manning to 35 years on 30 July 2013. Although attention has shifted to Edward Snowden and his NSA downloads Assange is Mass Murdoch’s only Australian rival for influence over the mediascape.
On 30 May 2012, his lawyers lost their fight against his extradition to Sweden on sexual molestation allegations but he was granted diplomatic asylum in the London Embassy of Ecuador on 18 August 2012. His life turned into a television soap, with more media investigation into his private affairs than into the crimes that WikiLeaks documents.
Hence, WikiLeaks is significant for what it reveals about the new and the old media as well as for the lies it displays. Beyond Assange’s accusations about ‘lily-livered gits’ is how data are machino-factured into ‘all the news that’s fit to print’, as the motto of the New York Times has put it since 1896.
When that corporation picked up the ‘Camp Delta’ revelations from Wired, Assange thought that information would ‘bubble up’ as if from a blog. The limits of that method taught him that ‘publishing in the computer age therefore becomes about performing the task that the systems allow and facing down the ingrained, self-protecting habits of the old publishing way.’ Seeking ‘the widest possible circulation,’ WikiLeaks dealt with five small-l liberal print media, primarily the London Guardian.
WikiLeaks unsettled the profession as much as did the new media. Was Assange an editor, investigative journalist, leaker or ‘newsman’? To merit the label ‘investigative’, a journalist needs to do more than serve as a stenographer for a leaker, as was the case with the senior New York Times reporter who was ‘elated’ to have ‘the whole story’ of Camp Delta handed on a plate.
WikiLeaks is emblematic of a ‘Sunshine Journalism’ which shines light on lies and crimes. Attracting support across the political spectrum from those opposed to limits on the web, it broke into a social order shaken by the GFC to hit prominence in step with the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring. Assange believes that ‘people want answers now to questions they once didn’t even know were questions. The Internet,’ he writes, ‘by itself does not give you freedom. The Internet is simply a way to make publishing cheap.’
References
Daniel Domsheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks, Scribe, Melbourne, 2011.
David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, Guardian Books, London, 2011.
Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange, Underground, William Heinemann Australia, North Sydney, 2011 edition.
Andrew Fowler, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2011.
Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2011.
Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, OR Books, London, 2012.
Wikipedia entries for Assange and WikiLeaks.
Entry in Bridget Griffin-Foley (ed.), Encyclopedia of Australian Media
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By what right are we here today?
Wikileaks rally, Garema Place, Canberra, 16 December 2010
By what right are we here today? Why are we confident that we can protest and not be shot at by the political police on the fringes of this crowd? We take it granted that we won’t be arrested as we leave. We do not expect to lose our jobs by speaking out for Wikileaks.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth gives us no right to peaceful assembly. The only two rights in that document are fair compensation for confiscated property and freedom from religious discrimination in the public service.
Nor is our right to be here today in Magna Carta. That document gave power to the barons against the monarch. The serfs had to revolt against both kings and lords to gain a breathing space.
Under pressure from the ultra-reactionary Citizens Electoral Lobby, the Coalition spokespeople on education want Magna Carta in the National Curriculum. Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne contend that our rights arrived from England in a box. The truth is that such rights as we possess were won against the likes of Bishop and Pyne. Their political and ideological forebears opposed the rights that they now pretend to endorse. When those rights were being won, their kind denounced the struggle for freedom as terrorism.
For instance, who gave us a free press? Was it some Murdoch from 200 years back? No. A free press was won by London radical printers. One hero was the Republican and atheist Richard Carlile. He was backed by 150 tradesmen and others who, between them, went to prison for a total of 200 years. The tally would have been greater had London juries often refused to convict, despite the bias of presiding judges.
At the same time in the penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, the governors imprisoned newspaper editors. The proprietor of the Sydney Monitor, Edward Hall, continued to conduct his paper from his prison cell. These ex-convicts brought an end to the licensing of newspapers here before that freedom came to Britain.
Behind such fetters was the wisdom of the propertied classes in educating only those slaves, serfs and wage-slaves whose literacy served wealth and power. For the rest, the British government did all it could to guarantee ignorance. The London Examiner announced under its name: ‘Paper and print 3½d. Taxes on Knowledge 3½d. Price 7d.’
Who is the rightful inheritor of Carlile and Hall? Mass Murdoch or Julian Assange? Hall and Carlile won our right to know what is in Wikileaks against the Murdochs and the Gillards of the nineteenth century. Of course, the media will never be truly free until they cease to be businesses.
So again I ask: by what right do we assemble here today? Our right to protest was won by continuing struggles. Free-speech fights have raged across Australia for nearly two hundred years. Take one case. The NSW government banned the British union leader Tom Mann from speaking in Broken Hill during the 1909 strike. When Mann stood just inside the South Australian border, hundreds took special trains to hear him. Where is a politician today who could get anyone to cross the street to endure their spin-doctoring?
The right to speak without a police permit became a burning issue during the fight against conscription in 1916 and 1917. At the time, so-called British liberties had been wiped out by the War Precautions Act. The solicitor-general later explained the scope of its powers:
… the result soon was that John Citizen was hardly able to lift a finger without coming under the penumbra of some technical offence …
The legal right to speak, publish and assemble had been abolished. The practical rights to do so were kept alive by the hundreds who broke the law.
Speaking in the Hobart Domain in 1916, union organiser Samuel Champ answered our question:
Our liberties were not won by mining magnates or stock-exchange jobbers, but by genuine men of the working-class movement who had died on the gallows and rotted in dungeons and were buried in nameless graves. These were the men to whom we owed the liberties we enjoyed today. Eight hours and other privileges in Australia had been won by men who suffered gaol and persecution.
The War Precautions Act was still being used against union officials ten years after the Peace Treaty. By then, the government had set up a political police force and passed a Crimes Act aimed at any kind of dissent.
Take a case from the 1930s depression. On Friday night, 19 May 1933, the Communist painter Noel Counihan locked himself in a metal cage on Sydney Road, Brunswick, to keep speaking while the police cut the bars and locks. Meanwhile, the police had shot a decoy speaker in the thigh – he carried that bullet for the rest of his life as a testament to British liberties. Counihan joined seventeen others in prison for speaking in public. They held Marxist study classes and taught the other inmates to sing the Internationale. The conviction was overturned on an appeal through a technicality. Far more importantly, the campaign for free speech had become so intense that the government had to rewrite the Street Meetings Act. Permits were no longer necessary. Brunswick now boasts a monument to the free-speech fighters.
The contest takes ever new forms. Throughout 2010, the Melbourne City Council has been harassing the defenders of the Fertility Control Clinic in Wellington Parade. Radical Women turn out once a month in defiance.
By what right? Our right to be here today was upheld by street marches in Brisbane throughout the 1970s against the corrupt and reactionary regime of Bjelke-Petersen. Thousands were arrested, many of them bashed more than once. In their front ranks was Labor Senator George Georges. Where is the ALP Senator today who would spend nights in a prison cell? They are too busy attending $10,000-dinners for the big end of town.
By what right? Our rights have been earned by breaking oppressive laws. The Eureka rebels stood trial in Melbourne in 1855 for treason. They had taken up arms against the Crown. In terms of the law, they were as guilty as sin. But what happened? Juries of their peers set them free. The jurors did not sentence them to hang but treated them as the heroes they were.
Across the centuries, oppressive laws have been changed by the good sense of jurors. Only this year, the prosecutor in the Cairns trial of the young couple charged over the chemical termination of a pregnancy told the jury that they were to apply the law, not to rewrite it. The jurors knew better and threw the case out, thereby, making it highly unlikely that anyone else will be charged with this offence.
By what right do we gather here today? Our right was secured by three votes by the Australian people to reject government policies. The first two of these victories came during the First World War when the people voted against attempts to introduce conscription for overseas service. Had the state got that power, the balance of forces would have been tipped against liberty. For a start, greater military powers would have opened the door to industrial conscription. The mood of the country would have changed. The defeat of the plebiscites allowed progressives to claim moral authority in their resistance to mass slaughter.
The next mighty victory came in September 1951 when a majority rejected an attempt to alter the Constitution to outlaw the Communist Party. The Menzies regime had come to power late in 1949 on a promise to ban the Reds. So confident was the state that it ordered the barbed wire for a concentration camp to contain 1,000 communists and their families.
Unions challenged the law in the High Court. Six of the seven judges said the ban was unconstitutional. Their reasoning had nothing to do with the protection of liberties. They feared that the Act limited the powers of their court.
What happened next is unbelievable in terms of parliamentary performance today. The leader of the Labor Party, ‘Doc’ Evatt, led the campaign against banning the Communists. He took up this cause with the support of only 12 percent of the population. Where were the focus groups? Evatt won the popular vote after tens of thousands of supporters turned that 12 percent into a slender majority. Where is an ALP leader today with the guts to follow Evatt’s example? Moreover, the taking up of an unpopular cause did not harm Labor’s popular support. At a half Senate election in May 1953, the Labor vote increased by more than 5 percent on the poll in April 1951.
Defeating conscription and the anti-Red Act are the pillars of our liberties. They are our Magna Carta. They are our Bill of Rights. It is no surprise that Pyne and Bishop do not insist on these three victories being in the National Curriculum. Without all the struggles sketched above, we might not be able to protest here today. Without them, would we be allowed to read the Wikileaks on the front pages of the capitalist press?
Now I want to change tack and look at occasions when state secrets have helped to perpetrate great crimes. Had the truth been known at the time, millions of lives might have been spared.
Of all previous leaks, none was more significant than the one that exposed the May 1916 deal between the British and French empires to parcel out the Ottoman Empire. The Sykes-Picot Agreement appears in the film, Lawrence of Arabia.
The horror story of the Middle East is bound up with that secret Treaty. At the time, we were told that we were at war for the rights of little nations such as Belgium. That truth of this sordid trade war was that the blood of the Anzacs was shed for oil. The truth was exposed in 1918 once the Bolshevik revolutionaries threw open the Czarist archives.
In 1919, Britain’s minister for warmongering, W S Churchill, backed an invasion of Russia to overthrow the Soviet government, but the Red Army defeated the reactionaries. Early in 1945, prime minister Churchill asked his generals to prepare to invade the Soviet Union the moment Nazi Germany surrendered. The military chiefs told him that they would face a mass mutiny. A year later, in March 1946, he delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, which is credited with announcing the start of the Cold War. Perceptions of that declaration would have differed had someone leaked his attempt to attack his Soviet ally while the hot war against fascism was still being fought. Small wonder that Churchill said that truth in wartime was so precious that it had to be protected by ‘a bodyguard of lies’.
Now look at some local examples of how a leak might have altered the course of events. The first case is the dispatch of Australian troops to the war against the peoples of Indo-China. Prime Minister Menzies lied to parliament about the commitment to Vietnam in 1965. On the evening of 29 April, he claimed to be reading out a request from the prime minister of South Vietnam. The letter arrived hours later. Moreover, the letter made clear that the initiative had come from Canberra. The deceit became public ten years later and is written up in Michael Sexton’s War for the Asking (1981). Had those cables been leaked at the time, the debate around the war would have been very different.
The same is true for the US claims that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked US warships in what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The US government used that allegation to justify its bombing of the North and to step up the war effort. Before the Pentagon Papers exposed the lie in 1971, a million people had been slaughtered. Daniel Ellsberg faced prosecution for leaking the truth.
Occasionally, crucial documents have fallen through the cracks. During the 1975 chaos that preceded the dismissal of the Whitlam government, some CIA cables got into the hands of journalist Brian Toohey. They revealed how alarmed the CIA was at Whitlam’s remarks about its spy base at Pine Gap. Meanwhile, in California, two young operatives at another CIA monitoring station saw a mass of cables about what US agencies were doing to undermine the Labor government in Canberra. As political novices, they tried to pass the information to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City; the KGB thought it was a sting operation and knocked them back. The pair went to prison and their story became a book and feature film, The Falcon and the Snowman. We are yet to see the cables setting out what the US was doing to subvert its Australian ally.
Toohey published the Book of Leaks in 1987 with reports from the National Times, the weekly investigative paper. Once upon a time, the exposures made by Wikileaks were what journalists did. Now they are mostly stenographers of the ruling class, putting their by-lines on press releases from PR agencies for corporate plunder.
From 1975, a range of people have struggled to publish cables about what the Canberra bureaucrats knew and when they knew it about Timor Leste. The authorities said they were suppressing the information to prevent upsetting the military dictatorship in Jakarta. Perhaps they were. They were also shielding themselves from the embarrassment of being complicit in covering up the murder of five journalists at Balibo and then in the mass murder of tens upon tens of thousands of Timorese.
The modestly titled Documents on Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1968-1975, published by its editors, J R Walsh and G J Munster, was the subject of High Court cases before the government destroyed all unsold copies. The substance of the documents became available when the editors summarised them in Secrets of State (1982). Its Introduction began with a universal truth: ‘Doctors bury their mistakes, bureaucrats classify them “top secret”.’ The editors explained the grounds for the police action against them: the documents embarrassed public servants and politicians who equated the national interest with their reputations.
Thus it was again in 1999 with the leak of cables around the referendum in Timor Leste. A prime suspect in those leaks, Clinton Fernandes, later exposed the subservience of Howard, Downer and Rudd to Jakarta in his Reluctant Saviour.
One constant throughout these tussles for information has been Canberra’s performance as deputy-sheriff for the US imperialists. The naming of ALP heavy Senator Mark Arbib as a points man for the US embassy is nothing compared to the decades of involvement between the ALP and US intelligence, a special relationship which went to the top with Hawke and Beasley. Gillard’s pursuit of Assange is the latest instance.
Gillard is probably right to call Assange guilty. The counter-terrorism laws here are more repressive than those in the UK and repeat the War Precautions of 1914 when ‘John Citizen was hardly able to lift a finger without coming under the penumbra of some technical offence’. Is it possible that Assange has lifted a little finger? The HQ for ASIO that is being built under the shadow of the US eagle will house hundreds of spooks whose job descriptions include gathering evidence to prove that he has. Across the lake, the pollies prate about British liberties in the national gasworks.
My end is in my beginning. Again I ask you to ponder by what right we are here today. The answer is in our acting as we are doing, that is, by stepping forward to remind governments and corporations that we will not be silent, that we see through their lying as much as we distrust their promises. Our assembling here this afternoon is just one more example of how Australians have carried forward the Oath sworn at Eureka in December 1854:
We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.
By living up to those sentiments as we are today, we need never hesitate when asked by what right we protest and struggle. Our rights to do so were won as they are now being upheld through protest and in struggle.
WikiLeaks can help us interpret and change the world
More than 400 people crowded into a lecture theatre at the University of Technology Sydney on February 17, 2012, a public forum, “Don’t shoot the messenger: WikiLeaks, Assange and Democracy”. Also at the forum were Scott Ludlam, Australian Greens Senator Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange Humphrey McQueen, Historian, ANU Chaired by Mary Kostakidis.
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“Don’t shoot the messenger: WikiLeaks, Assange and Democracy”
I don’t have to tell you why we are here. Instead, having been introduced as a historian, I shall spend most of my time relating what is happening now to past struggles, and why they relate to the ways in which information is regulated.
This evening is the second time I’ve been on a panel with Christine Assange. We spoke together outside parliament house during the Obama visit. She apologised for not being a public speaker. I have to say that you should look forward to hearing her. Hers was a speech that would put any public figure in Australia to shame. Nothing that the leader of the opposition or the prime minister could say could carry not only the conviction but also the content. What made the difference with Christine’s speech that morning was she had something to say.
We also heard from a group of Congolese who spoke passionately about the nine million Congolese who had lost their lives in the fifty years since their fake independence. They were there to protest against the US mining corporations in their country that are responsible for that slaughter. Many of you would have seen the documentary by Raoul Peck on the life and murder of the Congo’s first President, Patrice Lumumba. A further question occurs: had there been a WikiLeaks then, we might have had the answer to what happened to the secretary-general of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold whose plane crashed in Africa in 1961.
Japan could also do with a WikiLeaks to get some sense of what is going on around the nuclear reactors. Had WikiLeaks been operating, many of the disasters that have happened over the decades, like the radiation leaks, would have been investigated in public and there may have been more action to prevent the continuing melt-downs.
We can do with a WikiLeaks here to tell us the extent to which the banks are lying to us about the cost of borrowing money. One thing we all need a WikiLeaks for is to expose this abominable phrase “commercial-in-confidence”, which we know means “corruption-in-the-cabinet office”.
As I said, I’m not going to take up the legal issues about Wikileaks. I want to go back and look at how the relations between information and power have changed in the last couple of hundred years. Throughout all of human history, the one percent have struggled to make sure that the 99 percent couldn’t read or write at all, let alone read what WikiLeaks has revealed. Within living memory, French was the language of international diplomacy.
Slaves in America were flogged if they tried to learn to read. They nonetheless resisted, using what was available to them — which was the Old Testament — to compose hymns of protest, such as ‘Let My People Go’.
The Church used Latin to befuddle the masses. John Wyclif tired to translate the Bible into English just before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. He managed to die before the bishops got to him, but they dug his bones up and burnt them anyway. The authorities were convinced that he was in hell, but they thought they should do the little bit extra that they could.
It wasn’t only the Holy Inquisition that tried to stop people knowing what was going on in their world. No less than a president of the Royal Society from the late 1820s, a Mr Giddy, announced:
Giving education to the labouring classes of the poor will be prejudicial to their morals and happiness. It would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society has destined them. Instead of teaching them subordination, it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets and render them insolent to their superiors.
This is not the skeptical voice of science speaking, but the claim of a social class determined to protect its property.
When Marx was writing Capital, he used the evidence that had been collected by the factory inspectors who interrogated teenage boys working in Satanic Mills six days a week, twelve and more hours a day. They asked Jeremiah Hayes, aged twelve, what a king was. He wasn’t a complete ignoramus. He said: ‘A king is him that has all the money and gold.’ Yet he was a bit confused beyond that because he said, ‘a princess is a man’. William Turner was asked where he lived: “I don’t think I live in England. Perhaps it’s a country, but I didn’t know it before.’ Another factory-hand, aged seventeen, had been in church where he learnt that: ‘The Devil is a good person but I don’t know where he lives.’
Marx had some idea of where the Devil lived because over the page, commenting on the state of miseducation and the abominable conditions in which these English young people were living, he wrote: “Late at night perhaps, Mr Glass Capital, primed with port wine, reels out of his club homeward bound, droning idiotically, ‘Britons never never shall be slaves’.”
By then, the Britons have decided that for themselves. Like the slaves in America, the wage-slaves set about to teach themselves how to read. There is a wonderful document called the ‘Bad Alphabet for the use of the Children of Female Reformers’. When I went to school I was taught ‘A’ is an apple and with the bite taken out, ‘A’ says ‘a’. These children were taught to say: “B is for Bible, Bishops and Bigotry …K is for King, Knaves and Kidnappery.” The power of capital was now up against the self-education of workers and the autodidacts who taught themselves to become champion a working-class movement and socialist groups.
Around the mid-nineteenth century, capitalists needed a more literate workforce. So they had to start educating more of their workers, which is a very dangerous thing to do, as the president of the Royal Society had warned.
After prime minister Benjamin Disraeli introduced the second Reform Act of 1867 to give one million working men the vote, a conservative member of parliament remarked “we must educate our masters”. He had no intention, and neither did Disraeli, of allowing these workers to become the masters. Compulsory education became a form of factory discipline, as Charles Dickens spells out in Hard Times. The cultural illiteracy that had horrified Marx continued and took new guises.
The political requirements of capital coincided with its commercial needs. Advertisers dealt with the surface of commodities, deflecting attention from the intrinsic properties. Glamour bathed every product from limos to packaged suet. Mass marketing installed a “culture of distraction”. If people were going to read, they had to be distracted from the causes of oppression in their working lives: sensationalism and crime in the police gazettes and, more recently, the promotion of people who don’t have personalities, like Paris Hilton. The media pictured Julian Assange in terms of his socks and backpack apart from the sex charges, and Bradley Manning in regards to his sexuality rather than on his motivation and the substance of the documents.
My favourite science-fiction writer George Turner in his 1987 novel The Sea and Summer refers to television as “the Triv”. To appreciate why that term is apt, we need to place television in the circumstances in which people live. The head of Channel 9 in 1970 was clear: “If people come home from work wrecked from a hard day what they want is to relax in front of the tele, and that’s quite right.” Well, it’s ‘quite right’ once we understand the exhaustion that modern work puts on people’s lives. But it’s not ‘quite right’ in terms of people’s understanding of why we are in that situation of time-poverty.
A further device for trivialisation from early in the 20th century was to reduce information to “the news”. Even if every item on “the news” were 100 percent accurate it would still be a lie because it would misrepresent the world as a blizzard of isolated items. If I’m interviewed and rub two footnoted facts together I’m accused of promoting a conspiracy theory. If you know two bits of information and you try to make sense of the world, this is a conspiracy theory.
So we have to ask ourselves, what is ‘the news’ telling us? If we listened to every news bulletin, every quarter of an hour, since we can have news around the clock, if we absorbed to every little bit, what would we understand about the causes of the current global economic catastrophe? If we stress ‘understand’, the answer is – Nothing! Our heads would be filled up with scraps which really couldn’t matter less. What we need are ways of understanding what is in the media, of contextualising what WikiLeaks reveals to us instead of boiling their substance down to fractured factoids.
Unless we understand the dynamics of capitalism, why it has got us into this mess, and why it could not do anything else, then all these bits of information are not going to be of much use to us in determining what we are going to do to fight back.
In conclusion, I want to take up a phrase that all of you, I’m sure, have heard, to wit, the difference between interpreting the world and changing it. Sometimes people put this pair up as if we could have one or the other. We can’t. In every aspect of life, whether in science or in politics, the two activities have to go together. The way we interpret the world is by changing it. We work on it, we do something to it, and through that experience we get a better sense of where we are going. And the obverse is true: to change the world, we need to be able to interpret it. Our task is to perform both, not one or the other.
A second and related point in conclusion is in regard to the Pentagon Papers and the comparisons with WikiLeaks. There can be no doubt that the release of the Pentagon Papers helped the peoples of Indochina to defeat the US invaders. Nothing can take away from the work that Daniel Ellsberg did.
But we need to remember that Ellsberg did what he did because the US was losing the war on the battlefield. That is what he had learned by going there as a true believer. He knew that the reality of defeat was documented in these official reports and felt he had to get this information out. The reality had changed, and so had his understanding of the war. The crucial factor in ending the war was not the publication of the Pentagon Papers, as useful as many of us found them, but the refusal of the Vietnamese to surrender.
That’s what ended the war, at the cost of two million Indochinese, and 60,000 Americans and other allied troops. It was that armed struggle that changed the world in Indochina, and indeed, in many ways, changed the entire world, because the Indo-Chinese showed that even the US, the greatest power on earth, could be broken and driven into the sea.
The combination of interpretation and change that the Vietnamese and their allies demonstrated is the vision that we can take from WikiLeaks and away from this meeting.
Yes, Virginia, there are conspiracies
(Text of speech at Canberra Friends of Wikileaks, Coombs Lecture Theatre, Australian National University, 27 June 2012.)
Once more, I have the honour of sharing a platform with Christine Assange. Since we were at the Sydney meeting in February, she has come through five tortuous months. Her calm yet loving commitment to keeping us up to date with the legal and extra-judicial proceedings inspires us all. In her situation, I would be tempted to seek a silent refuge to lick my wounds. Her concern for her son is buttressed by her sharing his determination to get the story out there. We can say the same for the willingness of David Hicks to carry forward the struggle that his father, Terry, pursued for him, another act of love which fired the campaigns that cornered Howard into cutting a deal for David’s return. In this connection, let us not forget how Mandu Habib refuses to be silent about betrayal by his government and torture at the hands of its partners in crime. The official mendacity surrounding their experiences is one reason why we are here tonight. We know how much we need Wikileaks at a time when billionaires treat newspapers as chips in their game of monopolising everything in sight. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that ‘money is speech’, they demonstrated why speech will never be free for as long as it is a business.
A backwash from the Sydney meeting gave me the clue for what to say this time. Back in Canberra a couple of weeks later, I was at a friend’s farewell party where I was introduced to a senior official in Federal ALP machine, someone from the party’s remnant Left, and so not Senator Ahbib. In the way that strangers do, we asked each other what we had been doing lately. I saw a chance to get in a spot of propaganda on Julian’s behalf and so talked about the roaring success of the Sydney meeting, about how many people had had to be turned away because, even after the organisers had infringed all the fire regulations by packing the aisles, there was no room. I was hoping to alert one cog in the ALP machine to how much outrage exists at the government’s complicity in the assault on Wikileaks and its founder. Hope springs eternal. I need not have bothered. Instead of taking note of the strength of feeling represented by that meeting, the Dalek had his response down pat: ‘Those people are all conspiracy theorists.’ Now it was my turn: ‘You mean we believe that Dick Pratt conspired to fix prices?’ No, that was not what the ALP Left thought of as a conspiracy. He turned to find someone more congenial.
So, let us take some time to think about conspiracies. The subject is of immediate significance for Wikileaks because its revelations have provided researchers with plenty of dots to join up to explain why governments and corporations behave as they have. A Congolese refugee in Sydney voiced his gratitude for details about how twelve millions have been murdered there for mining profits since 1960. In addition, there are the concerns that the governments of Australia, Sweden and the US of A are conspiring to deliver Julian Assange into the hands of US prosecutors.
The first problem we encounter in using the term ‘conspiracy’ is the ignorant cynicism that passes for wisdom among many journalists. No sooner does a researcher join up two dots than the interviewer snaps back ‘But that’s just a conspiracy theory’. Well, not necessarily. It might be a conspiracy fact.
Hence, we need to be clear about what’s in and what’s out when we point to conspiracies. If you want to tell me that the world has been run for centuries by the Knights Templar, by Jewish bankers, by the Vatican, the Illuminati or the Freemasons, my response is that of the ALP official. I turn away. Life is too short. There is not and never has been a conspiracy of that scale. The principal effect of claims about over-arching conspiracies is to discredit the evidence for conspiracies in the particular.
The denial of conspiracies is linked to the destruction of historical memory and to the erasure of short-term political responsibility. The response of public figures caught lying, or with their hands in the till is to bleat: ‘That’s ancient history’, ‘We’re moving on’, or ‘We’re putting that behind us’. This spin seeks to sever effect from cause. Here is a variant of the blame game in which no one is to blame because every liar and thief is instantaneously born again. If the past is a blank slate, why bother to find out who made any decision or how it was executed? Anyone who wants to find out must be a deluded conspiracy theorist.
Are there conspiracies? The answer depends on what you means by conspiracy.
First, what does the word mean? ‘To conspire’ derives from ‘con’ and ‘spire’, [Latin, spirare] meaning to breath/ whisper together. In itself, conspire is a neutral term though one that has acquired sinister connotations.
The substantial meaning of conspiracy is not to be found in dictionaries but through examining the operation of social power. What the authorities do is ‘law and order’, ‘national security’ and ‘good governance’. What we do against them is conspiracy. What corporations do against us is organisation and method carried out by Masters of Business Administration.
Ask yourself: can anything happen with people ‘breathing together’? Take this meeting. Those of us who had a hand in making it happen would say that we organised it. Some of our critics might accuse us of conspiring to support terrorism. What is certain is that none of us would be here now without lots of emails, phone calls, tweets and postering. Equally certain is that 300 people did not wake up this morning and think it was time to do something about Wikileaks and then decide that they might go along to the Coombs by 7 pm to see if anyone else had had the same thought. The idea did not come to us in a dream. That much is obvious. There is a conclusion to be drawn from this everyday experience. If an event as small as this meeting required twenty or more people ‘breathing together’, what chance is that that any government could do without breathing together with the force of a cyclone? How likely is it that financial institutions spontaneously cut off Wikileaks? I reckon it is about as likely as their executives deciding to do so after a visit from the Archangel Gabriel.
Journalists scorn the very existence of conspiracies in favour of everything being the product of stuff-ups. Lawmakers, on the other hand, are in no doubt that ‘conspiracies’ are ubiquitous. The police charge petty thieves with conspiring just as often as they throw in ‘resisting arrest’. Bradley Manning is to be charged with conspiring with ‘person or persons unknown’. Will one of those known unknowns will turn out to be Julian Assange?
The current law against conspiracy is a hangover from the anti-terrorism campaigns of the 1790s. They have been given a new lease of repression under the Patriot Act and their equivalents around the world. The criminal charge of ‘conspiracy’ is dangerous law which Reform Commissions have wanted to remove it. Calls for its abolition should be part of the Wikileaks campaign.
Lecturing on jurisprudence, Adam Smith told his Edinburgh students in the 1750s that
‘Laws and government may be considered in …. every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods’.
‘Combination’ is another word for ‘conspiracy’. A perfect example of Smith’s insight came with the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, when six agricultural labourers were transported from Dorset to the penal colonies of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales. They had banded together to resist a reduction in their wages from nine to six shillingsa week. That resistance was why they were persecuted but not on grounds on which they were arrested and convicted. They could not be charged with an illegal combination since trade unions had been legalised ten years earlier. This is like Australia today. It is legal to form a union but illegal to do almost anything once you have. Nor were they done merely for taking an illegal oath. In a typical twist, the law officers got the labourers for swearing to conceal the fact that they had taken that oath. In other words, for conspiring. As the Law Magazine pointed out at the time:
It is not with administering an oath not required or authorised by law, that the Dorsetshire Labourers stood charged …. But with administering an oath not to reveal a combination which administers such oaths.
The case of the Tolpuddle martyrs shows how the law against conspiracy is used to achieve political and economic ends. Of relevance to Wikileaks is the reminder of how in ferreting out offences, prosecutors perpetrate Injustice within the law, as Doc Evatt titled his 192 booklet on the Martyrs.
Local instances
This is not the occasion to detail any particular conspiracy. Nonetheless, I shall point to some thoroughly documented examples. One is from the world of the Australian politics and several from business.
If I suggest that there was a conspiracy to replace an Australian prime minister, I hope you won’t think I am thinking about the run up to the 2010 election. Far from it. I am talking about how the deputy Labor prime minister, Joe Lyons, was moved into the leadership of a new anti-Labor coalition in 1931. That switch was arranged by six Melburnians who styled themselves ‘the Group’. The conspirators were a Victorian back-bench MLA, R.G. Menzies; Staniforth Ricketson from the leading firm of stock-brokers, J. B. Were & Son; Sir John Higgins from the Wool Realisation Association; Ambrose Pratt, a journalist; an architect Kingsley Henderson; and the general-manager of National Mutual Life Association. What ‘the Group’ had in common, apart from their political outlook, were connections into the big end of town. Two contacts were crucial. The first was the chair of the National Union, (Sir) Robert Knox, which held the purse strings of the non-Labour parties between the wars; Knox was on multiple company boards and chaired the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce. The other was Keith Murdoch, managing-director of the Herald and Weekly Times newspapers, from Perth around to Brisbane. This conspiracy is documented in an ANU doctoral thesis by the conservative scholar Philip Hart. (For a short account see Hart’s article in Labour History, November 1969, number 17).
By their nature, conspiracies that replace a prime ministers can happen only every few years. By contrast, conspiracies among business people go on every hour of every day. In the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith, warned:
‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ reference
This history of Australian capitalism reads like a vast footnote to Smith’s remark. After a NSW Royal Commission found in 1911 that contractors had been ripping off the tax-payer, the Master Builders Association justified its members’ taking illegal commissions by pointing out that kick-backs were ‘universal and worldwide’. Eighty years later, the CEO of Leightons, Wal King, defended his company’s use of false invoices to conceal price-fixing as ‘the culture … and custom that had been long-standing in the industry that had been handed on for years.’ The 1991-2 NSW Royal Commission into the State’s construction sector led to mass resignation in the State’s MBA Executive which had been a clearing house for collusive tenders.
Repeat offenders dominate the international air freight business with one QANTAS executive recently gaoled in the United States for eight months in 2008 for price-fixing freight rates. Qantas has also been fined by the European Commission, the New Zealand authorities and $26m. early last year in the US of A.
Vendetta
Anyone who doubts the existence of conspiracies should read about the smearing of banker Edmond Safra by American Express is retold in Vendetta (1992) by Bryan Burrough, who had co-authored Barbarians at the Gate on the takeover and trashing of Nabisco. The proof that Amex engaged in this conspiracy came with the $8 million that the firm paid to four charities nominated by Safra. Amex executives had conspired against him because they feared that he was conspiring against them. In other words, they were drawing on their intimate knowledge of corporate behaviour to take what they wrongly, in this case, thought of as a preemptive strike. The smear was that Safra laundered drug money, a story which was easy to run because there is so much evidence of such behaviour by so many of the world’s biggest financial institutions. O think Iran-Contra. Secondly, Amex used legal threats and smears to block exposure in the Wall Street Journal. The paper withstood those pressures. Would it do so now that it is owned by Mass Murdoch? That question mark is one more reason why we need Wikileaks.
The story of the Tolpuddle martyrs did not end in 1834 with their transportation. In less than two years, their supporters had forced the government to grant them ‘free pardons’. That victory came out a campaign through the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. A comparable campaign in Australia ensured that David Hicks could be with us this evening and not in Guantanamo. Tonight, we are at the start of a movement to do for Julian and for Wikileaks what British radicals did in the 1830s for the labour movement. How should we to proceed? Other speakers will outline tactical actions. Let me spell out the strategic lesson from my comments about conspiracy facts. In the battles that we shall face, governments will continue to conspire, they will deploy anti-conspiracy laws and push their black propaganda. We can’t beat them at their game. We will win by following the example of the unionists in the 1830s by mounting the broadest campaign to organise, to educate and to agitate. Our success will come from the open conspiracy of mass participation that inspired Julian Assange to set up Wikileaks, land that brought us here tonight.