Thanks.
I've been meaning to write this for a while... the WikiLeaks documentary (available for download and watchable on Youtube) is quite hard-hitting indeed. Travels have gotten in the way of personal writing, but with a little help from my friends, I think I should get by.
When I was in school, I subscribed to Us vs. Them (to read some more about Us vs. Them, please direct your attention to this marvellous piece I stumbled upon) and felt quite certain that tattling was not acceptable. I distinctly remember this one occasion of being confronted by a teacher and she was confident I knew about some tomfoolery that took place and who was responsible, and with good reason - I was the perpetrator's neighbour. All I said was, "I won't tell you." and that was that. I wasn't punished for my non-cooperation, but I mean, why would I be? That sort of attitude is quite dictatorial and dogmatic and I wasn't going to stand for that either. Of course these words meant less to me then, but the basic sentiment behind it felt honest, and real, and worth defending.
So I watched the documentary, which is curiously not to be found on Wikipedia and to be honest, this sentence "WikiLeaks is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation." on the top of the WikiLeaks page seems pretty unwikipedialike too. I urge you to watch the 50 minute long video. It's excellent and if anything, informative.
They needn't have included that rubbish about Julian Assange being accused of sexual misconduct, because whether it's true or not, it's irrelevant to the story of WikiLeaks in any case. But hey, spending an extra ten minutes in an already concise documentary seems fair, I suppose.
So let me tell the uninitiated a little bit about WikiLeaks. Or rather, let the main website do it for me:
"WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists. We publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices."
And it makes sense. Apparently, or rather, quite impudently, the world is largely intolerant to honesty. Or transparency. Or more so, an air of "Yeah, I'd like to know, please tell me but then we'll just keep it between us." I can imagine that statement being hurtled across every border, because people are inherently knowledge-hungry. To take the extra effort to substantiate knowledge (read: hearsay) is another story altogether. But at least this (WikiLeaks) seems like a noble enough adventure.
Which brings me to an interesting subject: sources of information. A friend was recently saying something on the lines of, "... well, Wikipedia is unreliable because its information is written by just about anyone." And I've heard this claim before and I find it quite ridiculous how these claimers fail to recognise that this is, in fact, the way you always gain information. Besides an ignorance to the stringent functioning and mechanisms of Wikipedia, you have to understand that this is how information works! Because someone tells you. You might read it, and that is the print version of someone telling you... but you are always receiving information from someone. And the stuff you create for yourself or make up is either wrong or genius, only one way or the other. If it's the latter, please go ahead and publish it quickly, so that someone else has privy to it and then boom, they have the information that someone (you) has told them.
P.S: To know whether any information is accurate or not comes under scientific and empirical testing, of course. Data is key. Ask any epistemologist.
Big shout out to Wikipedia here, because honestly, to put together everything that you (we) do and then to scrutinise and edit and take away bias and weight is a Herculean task. I've noticed many mistakes, especially with a lot of the Indian pages being faulty or flawed, what with remote towns being labelled the "best place in the world" by naïve or rather, ambitious Wikiers! Or for example the Indian Ocean (band) page with bold statements like, "Susmit has virtually invented a new style of playing the guitar, an uncannily Indian sound where purity of scale reigns, strong melodic lines woven around the drone of open strings." or later on in an eerily sentimental reference to Asheem's death "However, Asheem is intensely missed among all Indian Ocean fans who believe he is truly irreplaceable."
Outrageous, I know, but these anomalies only take place because not enough Wikipedia-minded people are online, reading these pages and keen to sit and edit them. Wikipedia-minded here, meaning anyone with half a brain who can tell opinions and rumours from statements that are less claims than anything else. "Objective" is a good but difficult word to use here, I think.
Choosing spectator, not active participant, I guess.
But back to the topic at hand. 'Collateral Murder' is the title given to this horrendously macabre footage of 2007 US airstrikes in Baghdad, where at least 18 people were killed in total. A short version (trailer, if you will) is included in the WikiLeaks documentary because it was really what catapulted them to the fame on which they stand today.
An excerpt from the radio transmitted dialogue I found particularly moving from that video goes something like this:
"Well it's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle."
-"That's right."
This was a means of consolation to the hardy soldiers that had opened fire and I get it, I truly do. How else do you live with yourself? People talk about being in the battlefield and how you can't understand it unless you're there... but what they really mean to do is create a context in which evil can be justified and I happen to think that there is hope in that very act. To think that they would like to justify their evil is a step in the direction of good. If they felt no remorse, they wouldn't even take the time to make statements like that. Even if it were only 10 seconds of their time.
Now WikiLeaks isn't perfect either. Perfection seems hard to conceive at the moment... but I'm quite supportive of any efforts toward honesty. OpenLeaks is the off-shoot, the spin-off, the avant-garde. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the founder and former deputy for WikiLeaks said that the intention was to be more transparent than WikiLeaks as "In these last months, the organisation has not been open any more. It lost its open-source promise." It planned to start in early 2011 and you can get to the soon-to-be released website here.
Whether it works or not is yet to be determined. All I can say is that I appreciate it and I know WikiLeaks probably does as well. It isn't a competition when a win on either side translates to achievement for both.
Shanti.
