The term civil disobedience has taken on a multitude of meanings from university students staging a sit-in at the dean’s office, to protesting WTO summits in the streets, to more textbook examples of the philosophies of Ghandi and Martin Luther King.  I will be referring to the original coinage of the phrase by Henry David Thoreau and his 1848 essay Civil Disobedience, read it if you’ve got the time, you won’t regret it.

“When the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.”

The fact this landmark work was never introduced to me in any formal educational setting is no surprise, but having just read it the other day, this greatly upset me as it should be required reading for anyone who is consciously a member of society, functioning as a citizen of a government.  The central point of the essay and the reason not every single person has read it are one in the same, this consciously I emphasize.  Every individual has invisibly signed on the dotted line for membership under rule of a government that is then allowed to take form as an overarching concept beyond being a mere collection of individuals.  This large abstract machine is no longer bound by morality or fairness, even if it were composed by a majority of moral and fair individuals (which I’d like to believe it is).

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau frames this in the context of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, and it’s rather telling that you could simply fill in the blanks with modern examples and every single concept would still hold.  There are plenty who oppose the Iraq War, and while perhaps not a majority and with fewer public protests these days, anyone who pays their taxes is inherently complacent and is funding the fighting despite anything they say or do otherwise.  Of course you would likely be thrown in jail if you refused to pay your taxes for this reason (as Thoreau was), but if all 100 million Iraq war opponents did so simultaneously, the government would be as incapacitated and forced to respond as if there were an armed insurrection of equal magnitude.  Thoreau was delighted by the fact the tax collector was his next door neighbour so he could see his reaction in the context of being an agent of the machine, and naturally rub it in by telling the man he was free to take the course of action to resign his government position at any time out of protest as well.

A friend of Thoreau’s paid his tax for him and he was out of jail within a day, but before that the essay made numerous interesting observations worth mentioning.  Thoreau was an educator and professor, and say he remained in jail indefinitely, society would likely lose more in terms of the productivity and enlightenment of his students (or their collected tuition or classroom space) than it would gain if he eventually paid the paltry sum.  Earlier he already pointed out the distinction between what is right and what is law; the government would willingly cut off its nose to spite its face and never compromise even to its own benefit having written those as the rules of its own operation.  Furthermore, if Thoreau didn’t have the means to pay but desired to, in a modern context he could quite easily default on his government-backed mortgage to pay his tax bill, easily costing them 10 times what his tax bill was originally and have it be perfectly legal.

The problem is a lot of this is just an intellectual game and could likely only ever be executed by those already in an elevated social position.  The result is it turns into an exercise in boosting one’s self-esteem and sense of individualism more than advancing the original cause, which was one of the many critiques launched against Thoreau, and is obviously an excellent segue to discussing Julian Assange.

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WikiLeaks is probably the greatest act of civil disobedience ever orchestrated in the digital age and I feel it has tremendous benefit.  It shows the workings of the giant geopolitical machine and that they are controlled by the interactions and opinions of but a few individuals.  Most of the cables simply reiterate what most people would already suspect.  Saudi Arabia doesn’t like Iran?  The US is spying on everyone?  Power plants are a potential target for attack?  Shocking!

The interesting angle to me is everyday individuals whom it does not directly affect being outraged that it is an attack on the society they belong too, branding it terrorism.  This is spurred on by the conventional news media, and of course the politicians running the show.  The journalists are all upset that WikiLeaks let a bunch of cats out of the bag and got so much coverage doing the job they should have been without having to placate the Whitehouse agenda and be what they would call “responsible”, yet WikiLeaks makes no supposition on being journalistic, it’s just a bunch of information.

Your instruments of the machine itself like Sarah Palin or Joe Lieberman want to brand WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization” so they can a) shut down it servers, which is essentially impossible due to mirror sites around the globe and b) actively trace and monitor anyone who donates to it as a “terrorist”.  It would be counter to my entire point to even bother reading how the law defines a “terrorist organization” so it can enact its paper statutes.  If we step back to the dictionary, every single definition of the word “terrorism” I could find contains wording around the threat or act of violence.  WikiLeaks irrefutably has not done this.

What it really boils down to is the government not liking a thumb in the eye, upset individuals could somehow think themselves on the same privileged level.  I believe the threat of people starting to view the government as just an entity and something they can exert control over and monitor is their true fear.  The Saturday Night Live TMZ parody concept that this whole thing is like the National Enquirer catching the government with its pants down at a sleazy motel with a transvestite hooker is actually incredibly profound.  In theory WikiLeaks is protected by the First Amendment and there have been no charges yet, but the Attorney General has so much as admitted that they’re looking through all the files to see if they made an exemption or two to their own laws.

The ultimate hypocrisy is the State Department banning its employees from reading any of the WikiLeaks documents, and even advising students at Columbia University they won’t be hired for discussing it on facebook or Twitter.  The reasoning is simple, that it still views the documents as classified, and god dammit we have pieces of paper Richard Nixon signed saying so!  The fact that every member of Al Qaeda is free as a bird to read all 250,000 pages while US government employees are outright banned is apparently irrelevant, although grotesquely humorous.  Guess what guys, as soon as something becomes available to billions of people on the internet, it’s not classified anymore, it really doesn’t matter how the statutes read.  The parallels with the response of record companies to file sharing is terrifying.

Public Enemy #1

Through all of this, we have the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who just turned himself in to British authorities on unrelated charges.  Having read the man’s history, he is no doubt a smart fellow with a very strong need for his megalomaniacal tendencies to be fed to validate himself.  But you could say the exact same thing about the vast majority of politicians, except they have a much nastier tendency to do it for material personal gain than take it to the martyrdom extreme Assange has.  While I certainly don’t agree with a lot of the self importance he has ascribed to himself having not dug up any of the leaks, I must say I’m salivating in anticipation of further leaks where he can be separated from the message because this has certainly opened the floodgates to numerous copycat site attempts.  And what they’re providing is something we all want, that politicians and corporations always promise and never deliver, but strangely enough as usual the internet has…transparency.

I’ll even let Alec Baldwin have the last word.

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